The Demilitarized Zone, South Korea: 37° 47' 20" N, 126° 29' 19" E
The colossal no-man’s-land dividing South Korea from North Korea can be described with the following particulars:
The world’s last Cold War frontier turned 71 this year, having hardened into existence in 1953 when both Seoul and Pyongyang accepted that the Korean conflict, which killed 2.5 million people, had settled into a stalemate. (The two countries remain officially at war.) The DMZ, as the vast buffer zone is called, unscrolls through 248 kilometers of mountains, valleys, abandoned villages, and farms, separating the two enemy armies across four desolate kilometers. Roughly 1.2 million visitors visit the heavily fortified boundary every year. There, a landmine apiece awaits each tourist: More than a million hidden explosives infest both sides of the DMZ to deter invasion. (Over the years, roughly 800 troops—North Korean and South Korean mostly, but also U.S. soldiers allied with South Korea—have died in skirmishes at the DMZ.) In 1996, after tricky negotiations, a team of South Korean veterinarians rescued a North Korean cow stranded on a river island within the no-go area.
This last incident highlights an obscure fact about the DMZ: Some of it is water.
Fenced nature: The DMZ, or demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, has seen little human development over the past 71 years. Gone wild, it forms a de facto conservation area.
Paul Salopek
For 67 kilometers, from a concrete flood embankment north of Seoul to the shore of the Yellow Sea, the two nations face off across the Han River, whose broad, silty currents flood a sprawling estuary before pouring into salty waves. Since humans are banned from the DMZ, the Han River may nurture one of the most pristine deltas in the world. No docks or industrial sites mar its banks. Not a single ferryboat, navigational buoy, or fishing smack bobs in the Han’s frontline waters. Instead, a legacy of mass violence has frozen an entire river ecosystem in time. Endangered black-faced spoonbills hunt mullets on tidal flats untouched by a gumboot for decades. Water deer teem in the shaggy reeds. This muddy paradise can be admired from behind rows of riverside guard towers, electrified chain-link fences, minefields, and coiled razor wire.
My Korean walking partners and I strolled this oddly silent wetland for three blistering days in the summer. It was like inching through a world trapped under a bell jar—a humid museum diorama.
“I’m one of the last ones left,” said Song Yoon-Yeo, 85, a retired farmer from a derelict hamlet on Ganghwa Island, at the mouth of the Han River. “Everyone’s moved to Seoul.”
Song squatted under a crabapple tree, hand-washing her laundry at a well. She wasn’t in the least fazed by living within sight of North Korea, a nuclear-armed enemy ruled by a dictator rumored to have poisoned his own family. Her complaints were workaday. Rural services were fading as the Korean countryside hollowed out from urban migration. On the plus side, a new coffee shop had opened nearby. “We didn’t even know what coffee was until a few years ago.”
At another riverside village called Cho-Gang Ri, locals maintained that living next to the most heavily militarized and surveilled border on the planet was actually the safest place to be.
“People say, Oh, what happens if war breaks out again?—but nobody here believes that will happen,” said Jang Youngchul, a local rice trader. “And guess what happens if it does? The two countries will shoot rockets at their capitals. This village is so small, it will be ignored.”
Like many South Korean farm communities, Cho-Gang Ri seemed half empty. But Jang dreamed of a coming golden age sparked by the reunification of the Koreas. He envisioned the Han River becoming a corridor for trade. In the meantime, he added, the paddies along the DMZ offered perfect second-home sites for stressed-out urbanites from Seoul. A “peace trail” hugging the DMZ provided recreation.
The DMZ: Where nature sings.
Out of Eden Walk
In terrific heat, we plodded that trail for days. We never spotted another walker.
What we did see was a psychic gash slicing across the Korean Peninsula where 1,220,000 troops remain squared off across a rewilding landscape. The camouflaged army blockhouses facing the Han River were faded and dusty. Uniformed mannequins, also blanched by the sun, stared out from guard towers. It was hard not to imagine a similar inertia gripping the North Korean side of the river, where silent green hills shimmered in the heat. Flocks of egrets flitted over the river like confetti.
“Walk down any city block in Seoul and ask anyone under 40 if they think much about North Korea or the DMZ,” said Lee Junseok, an educational magazine publisher and my lanky South Korean walking partner. “Too much time has passed. Nobody believes in reunification anymore.”
Which isn’t to say that old missing limbs don’t feel phantom pain.
Song Yoon-Yeo, 85, a resident of a village near the DMZ, recalls the harsh years of life in postwar South Korea—cooking with scrounged wood, walking kilometers to find food, and no government services.
Paul Salopek
We followed dirt paths shaded by high bamboo along the Han River. We marched atop searing concrete sidewalks guarded by South Korean boys armed with M-4 carbines. Signs hung on the riverbank fences instructed North Korean defectors to press a button to summon help—food, water, an unlocked door. At a DMZ overlook near Gimpo, a shopkeeper told us the story of one melancholic defector. He’d swum the river to freedom but changed his mind after living years in South Korea. He then returned one night to squeeze under the fence and paddle back north. The river was nearly two kilometers wide at that place. He was reported to have made it. But the world hasn’t heard from him since.
