Who would have thought it would begin so early? We haven't left Seoul, our little bus trundling northwards, and the barbed wire is already appearing. Watchtowers are cropping up at tighter intervals; soldiers are smoking, cradling their rifles with chilly fingers. Huge concrete slabs, our guide tells us, stand ready to be dynamited should truant tanks venture south. A helicopter belches into view, swooping low over the mined Imjin River, a kind of industrial vulture.
Another 40 minutes and we'll be in Korea's Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), final flashpoint of the Cold War and a place former US President Bill Clinton calls "the scariest on earth". Ours is not a DIY trip. "There's nowhere else in South Korea where you can get quite so close to North Korea without being shot," the Lonely Planet warns. We must dress smartly. No T-shirts, jeans, shorts, miniskirts or "items of military clothing not worn as an integral part of a prescribed uniform". We must remain in a group at all times. We cannot touch any equipment belonging to the communist side. Sloth will not be tolerated, "the tension is palpable".
Tension, it transpires, is an aptly chosen word. Kim Jong-Il and Kim Dae-Jung - North and South Korean leaders respectively - may have held hands, dispensed with protocol and "talked freely" at their historic summit last June, but nobody's getting excited. Abandoning such a treasured self-reliance policy as "juche" is an enormous step for a communist nation: few expect them to rush. "We've seen a kinder, gentler North Korea so far this year," US Lieut Col Stephen M. Tharp, assistant secretary of the UN Command, told the LA Times last year. "But they'll need to keep that nice behaviour up for a while before I'll believe it."
And so our passports are checked no less than four times in a two kilometres radius. Slowing to a snail's pace, we watch landmine warnings go by on either side. Tanks and electric fences mark the perimeter; bunkers occupy every nook and cranny. The helicopters are deafening - eerie given that in their absence, you hear birds. Four kilometres wide and 256 kilometres long, the DMZ may be home to a million troops, but it is also a site of uncanny natural irony. A unique flock of Manchurian Cranes make the lush foliage their home. White-tailed sea eagles cruise, wild pigs and black bears roam, rare species of plants, insects and fish proliferate. Environmentalists hope that, if and when North and South Korea marry, the joint security area will be protected as a nature reserve.
The wildlife might remain in blissful ignorance, but visitors cannot. Young South Korean soldiers stand guard at close intervals, stern-faced. They are armed to the teeth for a reason. Since 1953, 75 UN soldiers have been killed along the DMZ In 1976, two UN soldiers were hacked to death by North Korean soldiers, after attempting to fell a tree which was obscuring their view of the northern line. A South Korean was last killed here in 1995, a North Korean shortly afterwards. We are shown pictures of his emaciated corpse in the Anti-Communist Hall, UN soldiers standing over it, proudly.
Trust is evidently in short supply. "The path to more normal relations has not been smooth," said then US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, visiting North Korea in October, "and we are still much closer to its beginning than the end. But every step in the right direction is a step towards lasting peace in this region."
Kim Jong-Il may profess a willingness to "open up to the outside world" - but is he doing so only in the context of a crashing economy? Grain, coal, petroleum, fertiliser and electricity are all failing commodities in the North. A growing refugee problem mounts on the Chinese border. The fatherland is dependent on foreign aid to survive.
Can the North be taken at its word? Simply put, nobody knows. "As outlined in its short-term blitzkrieg strategy," the South Korean Defence Ministry's White Paper 2000 states, "North Korea continues its force improvement and has deployed more than 55 per cent of its key forces near the front line". Seeing "no fundamental changes" in the key policy of communising the South, surprise attack remains a distinct possibility. Without moving a single piece of artillery, Gen Thomas A. Schwartz told US Congress last year, the North "could keep up a barrage of 500,000 artillery rounds an hour aimed at Seoul for several hours".
Circumspection by default then, and for good reason. In 1974, a South Korean patrol walking here spotted vapour rising from the ground.
Digging to investigate, they were fired upon by North Korean snipers. Subsequently, an infiltration tunnel extending 1.2 kilometres into the South was unearthed. Further tunnels were discovered in 1975 and, following the defection of a North Korean engineer, in 1978.
"Today, the North Koreans continue to dig tunnels beneath the DMZ", a plaque in the UN-administered truce village of P'anmunjom admonishes. UN tunnel-detection teams, we are told, continue to "drill around the clock".
"They're still digging," a South Korean soldier tells me at Dora Observatory, less than 1.5 kilometres from the North. Feeding the viewfinder 500 Won, I discover a 20m golden effigy of the Dear Leader, luminescent in Kaesong's smog. Notices posted on nearby walls forbid expansive gestures, pointing, photographs. "We estimate anything from 16 to 18 tunnels are still undetected." I find the figure amazing. Surely, given the technology available to the South, anomalies in the soil should be obvious as an apple? "Not really," he says. "The DMZ is a rocky place." The tunnels lie anything up to 300 ft below ground, ensconced in geology. The only way to police them is to dig boreholes, a foot or two in diameter. Needles in the proverbial haystack.
Two civilian villages are also visible from here - Taesong-dong to the South and Kijong-dong to the North. Nests of propaganda, both.
In return for a military curfew and the threat of imminent assassination, villagers in the South harvest prosperous agricultural land and are exempt from taxes. The Northern village is uninhabited. "We don't see any people," our soldier points out.
"Lights in the apartment blocks are turned on and off at the same time every day."
To Western eyes, the war of images may seem absurd. When South Korea erected a flagpole in Taesong-dong, higher than its counterpart in Kijong-dong, we learn, North Korea responded with the tallest in the world. At its zenith, a 600lb flag lazily billows. On both sides, hillside slogans flash competing ideologies. "Follow the Path of the Leading Star (Kim Jong-Il)," says one of the North's. "We Serve Only Three Years in the Army," the South replies (North Koreans are conscripted for a minimum of nine). Agitprop blares from Northern loudspeakers for up to six hours a night.
Of course, from a distance such as our own it is easy to make light of North Korea, to regard it as something of a political goldfish bowl. Kim Jong-Il, with his dark glasses, bouffant hairstyle and Mao jacket, effortlessly embodies the comic dictator stereotype - and the Western media has largely sought to discredit him. He likes his wine, they say. He owns a personal collection of 15,000 Hollywood movies. Since 1984, official records state, he has travelled abroad just once, to Beijing. "Why should I need to court bigger countries?" Kim sings. "If I sit here in Pyongyang, many from powerful nations come to me."
He should be taken more seriously. For the insouciance is show - this is a man at the tip of whose index finger lies the 5th largest army in the world. This is a man who, as recently as August, 1998, fired a Taepodong 1 long-range missile over Japan. A man who, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's annual report, published last September, has accelerated development of long-range missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads. A man who, no matter how swift the UN response, could deliver 5,000 metric tons of chemical weapons on Seoul, levelling it within three days.
Therein lies the rub. For despite the fact that the US has an interest in creating a soft landing for North Korea, a real improvement in North-South relations would hole its forthcoming national missile defence program below the waterline. President Bush would need a new threat, a new "rogue nation", to justify its continuance. Beijing and Moscow are more aware of this than most.
Vladimir Putin, who visited North Korea last July, found Kim "an absolutely modern man". By ushering North Korea into the realms of international respect, Russia and China hope to curtail the US, to avoid becoming supporting players on the nuclear stage.
Entering Unification Hall in P'anmunjon, however, the border-strategic and post-reunification scenarios appear exactly as they are - mere hypothesis. A US soldier lowers his gun, instructing us not to "speak with, make any gesture towards or in any way approach or respond to personnel from the other side". A negotiating table straddles the border, dead centre. This is Ground Zero.
A simple line, and yet the difference in mindset it represents is stark to the point of perversion. We all know the Western story. On June 25th, 1950, dashing the precarious scaffolding erected at the Yalta Conference, North Korea invaded. The DPRK has other ideas. The "Fatherland Liberation War", it maintains, sparked when the US "frantically pounced" upon the Korean people. "However," according to one pamphlet, An Earthly Paradise for the People, the "American Imperialists" were covered all over with wounds and surrendered to the heroic Korean people. As a result, the Korean people and their young People's Army held a military parade in honour of their victory in the presence of President Kim Il-sung, the ever victorious and iron-willed brilliant commander." The South Korean forces are systematically referred to as "running dogs" and "puppet stooges".
And the bizarre thing is that this history, however you choose to read it, happened right here, under our touristic feet. Military guides pilot us from the Third Infiltration Tunnel to various displays of captured weapons, on the very soil. It's hard to convey how sad that feels, how frightening. Some 50 kilometres south of here, at Inch'on, Gen Douglas MacArthur's hastily convened UN army landed behind enemy lines; 300 kilometres north, Mao Zedong's "volunteers" buffered Kim's army, crying stalemate at the 38th parallel. Three years here left two million people dead.
In a sense, we shouldn't be here. Nobody intended the DMZ to be a permanent fixture. Ushered into being by a 1953 peace treaty signed by Pyongyang, the UN and Beijing (Seoul refused to sign because America "had not finished the job") it should have been replaced within months. Technically, however, the two countries remain at war.
South Korea spends more than $9 billion a year on defence, maintaining an armed force of 690,000; 37,000 US troops are also stationed here. When I take my camera out, in the heart of Seoul or on the hills of Kyongju, everybody thinks I am a GI.
And hope? Well, depending on what you read, both countries profess to desire reunification. The South, however, whose living standards are 10 times that of the North, fears having to shoulder the cost - an estimated $1 trillion - especially in a time of economic crisis.
The North, despite its recent diplomatic flirtations, remains secretive to the point of obsession (Oxfam pulled out last year, unable to verify where their assistance was going). "We will not be able to resolve all at once the bitterness that has accumulated over the past half century," as Southern President and Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Kim Dae-Jung, puts it. "But well begun is half done."
"I hope unification will come soon because our country is divided into two," Byon Hyun, a South Korean 12-year-old, said prior to last June's summit. "My friends say they are not afraid of North Koreans, but I am scared because they have guns and bayonets." But hope is a curious thing. And hope floats as our little bus motors over Unification Bridge, away from this fearsome, 3-D political museum.
Back in Seoul, subway posters may urge us to report suspected spies, but at the heart of the DMZ a rail line linking the city with Pyongyang is under repair. Hundreds of thousands of families remain separated, but hundreds met for the first time last year.
Diplomatically, the two Kim's may be walking on eggshells, but at least they are walking.
Step by step, I suppose. Call me naive, but my own hope is that next time I visit here, it will be for the sake of those white-tailed eagles, those Manchurian Cranes.