What are your thoughts?
When visiting the demilitarised zone between the Koreas, there is the option to have your own North Korean defector as a tour guide. Tasteless? Or a good way to find employment for those who struggle to settle into South Korean society?
It might make you wonder why people want to visit.
And when I say people, I put myself in that category. I’ve looked over the Golan Heights from the Jordan border. I’ve walked the decks of a decommissioned warship and visited US Indo-Pacific Command.
Apparently there are enough of us out there that some countries, including India, are looking at promoting their “defence tourism” – visiting the sorts of places in the world where the news of war or dislocation doesn’t feel quite so remote.
So what’s the appeal?
First, there’s the sense of being at a place where the border really matters. This is something that one doesn’t often get in Australia, apart from during Covid times. There are places where life is genuinely different depending which side of a line you end up on. This is very clear in the DMZ, where life for North Koreans and South Koreans is poles apart, famously illustrated by a photo of the peninsula at night. The World Food Program estimates that 40 per cent of North Koreans are malnourished. It’s like a controlled experiment on a massive scale.
I’ve had the same feeling seeing plaques marking the wall that enclosed the Warsaw Ghetto and visiting a checkpoint on what used to be the Berlin Wall. What I think we’re responding to is the massive contrast focused on what is, in the end, a human-created line. A counterpoint to this is travelling to a place where there aren’t borders as such – for me, Antarctica. It makes you realise how arbitrary territorial lines are.
The daily Beating Retreat ceremony at the India Pakistan Wagah border post, some 35 kilometres from Amritsar (Narinder Nanu/AFP via Getty Images)
Second, there’s the frisson of experiencing a place that marks a turning point in history and reminds that things could easily have turned out differently. The Korean War could have resulted in a single communist Korea (as it looked in August 1950), a single Western Korea (as it looked in September 1950), or the stalemate that occurred.
Why do we travel to unsettling places? | Lowy Institute
Whether the DMZ or sites of historic atrocities, place carries a connection to remind us of the precariousness of life.
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