Driving the Ssangyong Rexton to the North Korean border

The DMZ is the strip of no man’s land that separates North and South Korea. A mildly propagandist video later tells us that the DMZ is the home of wildlife that flourishes unthreatened by man. Tourism is a major activity along this part of
 the DMZ. You can joke about being nuked on the Big Dipper, but the possibility is real. We get to within 170 metres of North Korea, in a dank tunnel dynamited from granite. This is Tunnel 3, one of four discovered by South Korea in 1974, 1977, 1978 and 1990, each running beneath the border and capable of allowing 30,000 soldiers to pass through per hour. North Korea reluctantly admitted to digging the tunnels, but smeared them with lies about coal mining, which is a geological impossibility in the area. 

The apparent severity of the threat is lessened by the tourist coaches and the souvenir shop selling lengths
 of DMZ barbed wire and DMZ chocolates, while a museum contains guns and ammo from the Korean war and scale models of border buildings. But the most intriguing display is a huge photograph of North Korea a few hundred metres from us. 

Visible is a huge mast jamming South Korean radio and TV signals, stopping North Koreans from seeing what life on the other side is like, and fake villages that look better than the shabby reality for most of Kim Jong-un’s abused citizens. There’s a huge flagpole, too, the result of a ludicrous ‘mine’s bigger than yours’ face-off between the two nations. The North Korean flag allegedly weighs 275kg. 

There’s amusing lunacy here, but a visit to Dorasan railway station and a bit of imagination can get your disquiet dialled up again.
 This modern ghost of a station was built in 2002 in the hope that, one day, it would teem with the trains and travellers of a reunified Korea. You can walk along a platform populated only by knots of tourists, and stare towards the forbidden land beside rails whose top surfaces rust unburnished by rolling stock. 

In the nearby countryside, we find a rather tame set of tracks intended to demonstrate the Rexton’s off-road skills. A steepish, rutted hill tests it slightly – without the need for four-wheel drive – and reveals a couple
 of things. First, that the ride keeps jostling, and second, that this car feels tough. What this little trip also reveals is the Han River, which flows from North Korea. We use it as a photographic backdrop and enjoy its calming quiet. But the reason for the pristine river banks and the lack of people, we’re told, is the threatening proximity of the DMZ. 

We leave for Seoul, whose bustling civilisation makes it easier to forget the tunnels and gun emplacements, if not the rhetoric of a pair of world leaders that would be comical were it not so chilling. Mentioning the Rexton seems trite in this context, but let’s hope it isn’t needed for post-apocalypse duties.