Out of Eden Walk: Walking the DMZ

Kim Jong Un’s destruction of roads and rail links to South Korea this week illustrated the ongoing tensions on the Korean Peninsula. But as National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek discovered while walking there, the demilitarized zone that has divided North from South for 71 years can be a quiet, peaceful stretch of land — and water. He shares his observations with Host Carolyn Beeler.

The World

This week, North Korea’s government lauded the destruction of some of the last physical links between North and South Korea. Two road and railway routes connecting the two countries, were blown up on Tuesday, South Korean officials reported.

North Korea confirmed Thursday that its recently revised constitution defines South Korea as “a hostile state” for the first time, the Associated Press reported.

The two countries are still technically at war, even after an armistice was reached 71 years ago, and what remains is a demilitarized zone (DMZ) dividing the two Koreas. 

National Geographic Explorer Paul Salopek walked part of the DMZ this summer. He’s on a 24,000-mile walk, retracing the first human migration out of Africa and documenting along the way in a project known as Out of Eden Walk. Salopek joined The World’s Host Carolyn Beeler to discuss his trek.

Carolyn Beeler: So, Paul, I did not realize that part of the DMZ is actually a waterway, the Han River, which you walked along for three days this summer. What struck you during that part of the walk along the river?
Paul Salopek: Well, like you, I wasn’t aware of it until I started doing a little research. I thought it was all a land border. But, the Han River is one of the major rivers in Korea. It leads upstream to the South Korean capital of Seoul. So, it’s always been very strategic. And where we kind of met it, on foot, it’s up to two kilometers wide (1.2 miles) with the hills of North Korea kind of shining green on the north side. So, we followed this waterway for about 40 miles.
Fenced nature. The DMZ, or demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, has seen little human development over the past 71 years. Gone wild, it forms a de facto conservation area. Paul Salopek/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
And you write that it was strikingly pristine because no humans had been there for many years.
Yeah, a lot has been written about how the DMZ has been kind of rewilded for 70-plus years. Since it came into being back in 1953, people are generally not allowed to go there. So, it’s kind of gone back to nature. It’s become a very strange kind of war zone, ecological preserve. And scientists say that it harbors up to 6,000 species of wildlife, including 100 endangered species. There are cranes in there. There are bears in there. There are martens. There are eagles. In our walk along the watery part of it, we saw black-faced spoonbills, an endangered waterbird. We saw water deer. We saw flocks of seabirds. It was quite amazing.
The name of the zone itself is a bit ironic — the demilitarized zone — but well over a million troops are stationed along the border. How much did you feel that intense military presence as you walked along the DMZ?
You know, Carolyn, to be honest, I was expecting more people. From what I had read and seen in movies, I thought there’d be a lot of military personnel kind of peering at each other with binoculars or what have you. But it wasn’t the case. At least on this stretch that we walked. In the course of two and a half to three days of walking, we passed one truck with some young South Korean recruits in it. And then we went through one checkpoint where there were some young soldiers with weapons, and that was it. Otherwise, it was pretty quiet. Again, almost like walking on a nature trail, albeit next to bunkers and tank traps.
Walking partner Lee Junseok and local organizers of a peace trail stroll through a checkpoint in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between South and North Korea — which is anything but demilitarized.Paul Salopek/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
You also wrote, just as a quick aside in your post, that there are buttons on the fences on the South Korean side that North Korean defectors can push to summon help, I assume, if they’ve crossed the “no man’s land” and are about to enter South Korea. Can you tell me any more about how those work?
Yeah, I was surprised. So, we’re walking along this kind of embankment, and there are these signs in Korean. And I said, “What do they say?” They’re facing the North side. They’re not facing our side. And my walking partners read them and said, “Well, these are kind of welcome signs to any defectors who have the strength and the wherewithal to swim this river.” We’re talking a little over a mile, pretty stiff current. And it’s a big river. If they make it up onto the South Korean embankment, they presumably walk to where these signs are. There’s a big button there that they can mash, and it sets off some sort of notice so that South Korean military officials can come and open a door and welcome them with water and food.
Wow. Do you know how many defectors cross that border every year?
Not many because, in recent years, the North has really cracked down on security. Although, in South Korea right now, I’m told there are about 30,000 or so North Korean defectors living.
One of the big points of your Out of Eden walk that has you walking along the journey of human migration is that you get to stop and talk to the people you meet along the way. You wrote about an 85-year-old woman, a retired farmer, who lived within sight of the DMZ. How did she feel about living so close to, you know, a nuclear-armed enemy?
You know, I’d never been to South Korea before this walk. So, I had the typical kind of vague associations and stereotypes, like K-Pop culture, the lights of Seoul city. You know, a very successful, booming economy, very innovative people. And on this tiny little hamlet adjacent to the DMZ, again along the river, there was this octogenarian woman crouched under a crab apple tree, handwashing her laundry, using well water. It was like stepping back in time. Most of her hamlet was depopulated because there has been the same rural-to-urban migration, the exodus from the countryside to the capital that I saw in China. We asked her, “Well, how is it, you know, living next to here?” And she kind of looked over her shoulder and said, “I don’t know. I never think about it anymore. I’ve been here most of my life, and I’m just kind of a farmer.” Yeah. She was not fazed at all.
Song Yoon-Yeo, 85, a resident of a village near the DMZ, recalls the harsh years of of life in postwar South Korea: cooking with scrounged wood, walking kilometers to find food and no government services.Paul Salopek/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
Do people talk at all about reunification anymore? Is that something in the South Korean mind?
This is something that also was a bit new to me. So, I always had this kind of imagining that there are these sister countries who are kind of like circling each other, daggers drawn, one of them nuclear-armed — the North — and desperate at some point to kind of get back together to become a whole Korea again. But I quickly discovered, Carolyn, and it was a surprise to me, especially among the younger generation, when I would ask them about these geopolitical issues, about your neighbor to the north … people just shrugged. Younger people had other things on their minds. They tried to make a living. You know, it’s a very hyper-competitive economy. [It was] almost like they had to stop and think, “North Korea, yeah, that country over there.” They did not think of it as part of the former Unified Korea. I think too much time has passed, is what my Korean friends have told me. And fewer and fewer people believe in reunification.
Walking partner Lee Junseok inches past a memorial to soldiers on the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea. Sundered by a bloody war in the 1950s and by fading hopes of reunification, the two Koreas drift apart to their separate fates. Paul Salopek/National Geographic, Out of Eden Walk
What about the potential for renewed violence between the two countries? There are flare-ups, like Kim Jong-un blowing up the roads and railway links to the South this week. That was just the latest example.
You know, the potential is there, but the sense that I got is that not too many South Koreans that I met had that kind of lingering at the forefront of their mind these days. It seemed almost like foreigners were more concerned about it than the South Koreans themselves that I met.

Parts of this interview have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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