Dave's in Korea!

So, after about 17 hours of flying and travel I found myself in South Korea. I am staying on a tiny Korean base called Camp 1987 about 3 hours south of Soul near a town called Jeyong Peyong.

We don't really have beds or rooms but it is sure a lot better than sleeping in tents especially when we wake up to several inches of snow like we did the other night.

The nice thing is that everything has melted and even though it isn't as warm as it is in Utah right now the weather hasn't been too bad. It rains about every other day but the sun comes out to dry up all the rain!

On the 19th about 40 of us piled on to a bus at 5 am and headed north for a tour of the DMZ between North and South Korea. It was a pretty cool trip.

Our first stop on the tour was a small joint military base about 2 kilometers from the DMZ called Camp Bonifas. There we had a little slide show on the history of Korea and the wars that led to the separation of the north and south.

The next stop was the Joint Security Area. On this stop there are several buildings built right on the MDL (Military Demarcation Line) which is the actual boarder between the two countries. As you can see in this picture there are a couple of South Korean guards keeping watch from this side of the line. The cement curb that goes between the centers of the blue buildings is the actual boarder.

If you look close at these pictures you can see a North Korean guard on the top of the stairs of the big building in the back. You can see him in this close up; he was watching us with binoculars most of the time.

We went into the blue building on left, one of the buildings used to hold conferences between the two nations. The Korean guards enter the building first to secure it from inside to prevent any North Korean guards access while the tour is going.

In this pic you can see the cement marker showing the MDL, the gravel side is South Korea and the other is North Korea... I took the picture from Communist North Korea... scary! The South Korean guards where the dark glasses and stand in a modified jujitsu pose to intimidate the North Koreans... looks pretty intimidating don't you think!?

There are only two cities that were allowed to remain inhabited within the DMZ, one on the north and one on the south. Taeseong-dong is on the south and has a population of a bit over 200 and they are all direct descendents of those that lived in the village before the Korean War. Kijŏng-dong is the village on the North and seems to be uninhabited though the buildings are maintained. This picture shows the tallest flagpole in the world standing at 525 feet high flying a 600 pound flag of Kijŏng-dong. This flagpole was built to "one-up" the South Korean flagpole of Taeseong-dong standing at 300 feet.

Here is the Bridge of No Return. It was used for prisoner exchanges at the end of the Korean War in 1953. The name originates from the fact that prisoners were given the choice to remain in the country of their captivity or cross over to the other country. But if they chose to cross the bridge, they would never be allowed to return.

The tour ended with a visit to one of many tunnels discovered built by the North Koreans in attempts to invade South Korea by underground routes. The Third Tunnel of Aggression was discovered in October 1978. It runs about 240 feet underground. We couldn't take photos inside the tunnel.

All in all it was a very interesting tour. Next Saturday I hope to make it to the Seoul Temple for a session! That would be very cool.