In these last few moments, I have eaten an apple for dinner and have sat down in my studio apartment near Seoul to begin to type on my plush MacBook while peripherally peering down upon on all manner of neon in the street bellow. How is this relevant to visiting North Korea? That these choices are available to me is a stark polemic to a land where time remains paused at some point in the 1950s. I choose to eat the solitary apple knowing full well I could go down to the neon and eat more wholly. I choose to type on a transient laptop reminiscent of a kitchen appliance knowing full well that buying a regular laptop containing the Microsoft plague probably would have seen me less concerned with aesthetics, leaving me free to be manlier.
 

 

I write this to you from an environment that has embraced modernity, an environment where options are so frequent they become transient. I have even been able to choose to step onto a tourist bus and cross the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) for a relatively modest fee. I wonder whether the only bus a regular North Korean is catching is to a gulag because they’ve made a choice not rooted in the collective will of state survival. Ironically for those Northerners heading for gulags, it is the survival of their state that has prompted permission for a daily motorcade of several buses containing people contaminated with filthy capitalism to cross the most heavily armed border in the World.
 

As the Kumgangsan tours had been operating successfully, the idea for a tour for foreigners to Kaesong did not seem unreasonable to the North Korean Workers Party. So in December of 2007, foreigners, including South Koreans, have been able to cross the demilitarized zone to the ancient Korean capital of Kaesong for a day trip costing approximately $200AU.

However, these mutual economic efforts towards unification on the Korean Peninsula could have come to a frosty halt just recently, when early morning on the 11th of July, a South Korean tourist to Kumgangsan named Park Wang-ja happened to stroll outside of the zone cordoned off for tourists and onto a beach where she met a North Korean soldier. What is known is that Jang-wa was shot three times through the back ending her life at fifty-three years of age. Still not known are accurate details of the sudden events that led to her death. Immediately, the South suspended the Kumgangsan tours indefinitely pending on a thorough investigation. The North has refused Southern investigators access to the beach at Kumgangsan and offers several flimsy explanations, but no apology. 

The tours were already in a precarious position as the conservative Lee Myung-bak, who has held the South Korean presidency since late February, has distanced himself from previous unification policy with rhetoric indicating a tougher stance towards delusional communists. Additionally, there were calls by the South Korean opposition for the Kaesong tours to be suspended as it has become publically apparent that neither South Korea nor Hyundai- Asan can guarantee the safety of tourists. However it is in neither countries interest to allow a further incident to halt developing relations, with Lee Myung-bak saying immediately after the shooting that “South and North should resume the inter-Korean dialogue under any circumstances.” 
 

So on the 29th of July, I boarded a bus in the middle of Seoul at 5:30am bound for Kaesong with just enough trepidation to keep myself awake. Would I become the next international incident for taking a photo when I was not told I could take a photo? Would I say something facetious about Kim Jong-il and spend the next several years being re-educated to be a good communist? Would I wander off a vague path and suffer the same fate as Park Wang-ja?
 

My unease was put to rest as several physically supreme South Korean men got onto the bus. They were dressed as guides in happy sky blue polo shirts, but could speak no English or Japanese and were armed with walkie-talkies. The women who were also dressed as guides could speak either some English or some Japanese, but had no walkie-talkies and unlike their male counterparts, did not have distant, pre-occupied gazes. Presumably the women were actually guides, but who can be sure of anything when one is about to cross a dormant, yet unstable war-zone?
 

Upon clearing South Korean immigration, our motorcade inched forward to crossing the border. I looked at my liberal compadres, those representing our Western ideals to those in the land of Kim Jong-il. My bus contained some elderly Japanese tourists and ten or so Americans around my own age. Six of whom were high-flying MBA students from New York’s Columbia University. They were not doing the Ivy League standard any great credit with ignorant comments like “Do they even have DSL here?”, “Where can I get a sandwich?” and “Oh my god, what is that guy? A spy?!” At first I thought they were being facetious, but after a while I discovered they were not and decided to treat their presence as a part of the surreal nature of the tour.
 

After some time waiting at the border, we eventually made our way across the Bridge of Unification, bus by bus, and then proceeded through an ominous tunnel together before slowly passing through a large vomit-green gate followed by rows of barbed wire fences. We were finally in North Korea.