CJ's Trip to North Korea

While in Seoul I decided to sign up for a DMZ day trip. Yes, they offer those. And it was only $30 on TripAdvisor. Amazing value.

The DMZ is only a 40 minute or so drive from downtown Seoul. As we passed this river our guide, Erica, mentioned that the wintertime is peak season for North Korean soldiers to defect, as they can run across the frozen surface to the South. I asked how often this actually happens. She said the last one was in late December 2025. That's when I knew this was going to be a great tour. North Korea is the most mind-boggling country on the planet. 

Our first stop was a visitor center / museum of sorts. They had North Korean money and propaganda on display.

I learned about the routes that most North Korean defectors take to escape.

And then came the first highlight of the tour - a talk given by a North Korean defector, now human rights activist. In case you can't tell, she is the old Korean lady in the front. She talked about how she came into contact with Chinese smugglers and received funding from the underground church in China. She escaped with her family, traveling only at night. They crossed the Yalu River into China and then were handed off to a different smuggler. Apparently North Korea and China coordinate and put out bounties on defectors, so she had to sneak through China all the way into Myanmar and then through Southeast Asia to get back to South Korea. Insane story.

Our next stop was an observatory full of binoculars to look across the DMZ into North Korea. There was something very dystopian about stepping up to some high powered binoculars and watching citizens of an oppressive regime walking around as if they were some kind of exotic wildlife.

We weren't allowed to take any photos from the observation deck, but we could from the ground level.

The DMZ is not just one fence, but a patch of land separating the two countries. Across the wooded area, full of landmines, lays a North Korean propaganda town constructed in the 1950s after the Korean War. Apparently the buildings are empty, but the town was meant to project a false image of prosperity to entice defection to North Korea. And yes that is the North Korean flag.

I learned so much on this tour and was pretty much dumbfounded the entire time. One overarching takeaway I had was that the DMZ is far less stable than I thought. In October 2024, North Korean forces blew up sections of a border road near the DMZ. They did so without any advance warning. Erica (tour guide) was actually at this same observation point when it happened and had to shelter in place with her group for an hour while South Korean forces figured out what was going on. That orange mound of discolored land is the scar in the earth left from the explosion.

Next up, Erica explained that starting in 2004, in an effort to ease tensions, South Korean companies built and operated factories in the area just north of the DMZ. However, these were shut down in 2016 in response to North Korean missile testing. In 2020, North Korea demolished one of the buildings in a public explosion. While hard to see, the concrete remains are circled in the picture below.

The third stop, and yet another highlight, was the "3rd Infiltration Tunnel." What does that mean? I had never heard of this before, but apparently there are four tunnels that have been discovered running from North Korea under the DMZ towards South Korea with the presumed goal of transporting troops and equipment for a surprise invasion of South Korea. That is insane.

My favorite part of the whole absurd situation is that when accused, North Korea claimed the tunnels were old coal mining routes. The only issue? The entire region is full of granite and zero coal. However, to try to solidify their case, and this is 100% true, they covered the tunnel in fake coal residue. Prime North Korea.

The staged black charcoal dust is still there on the walls.

We weren't allowed to take our phones into the tunnel, but I found this photo online. It's a somewhat cramped, five to six foot tall tunnel 240 feet underground. You have to hunch over and walk a few hundred feet until you get to a blockage that looks like this. And there is a small window and through the window there is an empty 25 foot-long patch that has somehow grown ferns and other mangled weeds and then there is another wall indicating the North Korean side of the tunnel. Very eerie.

We finished off the day with some DMZ rice wine.

And perhaps the most exciting highlight of them all, there was a shop at the DMZ selling genuine North Korean money brought out of the country by Chinese smugglers. This is now the prime piece in my foreign currency collection!

The DMZ trip was fascinating. I'll be honest, prior to this tour I had not given North Korea much thought. Turns out that country is much stranger and scarier than I had imagined. Some other tidbits I learned - for years South Korean activists have sent balloons full of information from the outside world into North Korea. In 2024, North Korea responded with balloons full of cigarette butts and manure. The two countries have also dueled using loudspeakers. South Korea amplifies news broadcasts and K-Pop for kilometers into North Korea, and North Korea retaliates with sirens and other annoying noises.

Erica also shared a story about her own family. Her grandmother was a North Korean defector whose first child died during the passage. While her family is reunited, there are still an estimated 50 to 60 thousand families who are separated between the two nations as a result of the mass displacement from the Korean War. While North Korea is laughable at times, the reality of the division of the Korean peninsula is quite sad.

One slightly brighter thing I learned is that the South Korean government grants citizenship to all citizens of the Korean Peninsula. So, if you escape North Korea and make it to the South, you are put into temporary housing while you are immunized and whatnot and then granted citizenship. I thought that was cool.