STEPPING INTO NORTH KOREA

“If you choose to defect today to North Korea, I won’t be responsible for your actions,” said Private Mitchell, the U.S. Army soldier who met our tour group inside the Demilitarized Zone. He wasn’t kidding—in 1984, a Soviet tourist ran across the demarcation line separating North and South Korea, and the ensuing gun battle killed four people.

We exited the tour bus into the bright summer sunshine at Panmunjeom, the abandoned village that has served as the de facto dividing line between the two countries since 1953. Not more than a hundred yards away, a North Korean soldier stood observing us through binoculars. I raised my telephoto lens for a closer look. He was young and thin, his dark olive uniform cinched tight at the waist.

After a few minutes, we entered one of the bright blue conference buildings that straddle the border. A South Korean soldier, his fists clenched at his sides in a Tae Kwon Do stance, stood blocking the back door. Gingerly we stepped across the invisible line dividing the room in half, unsure what to do with our three minutes standing on North Korean soil.

Despite the palpable tension at Panmunjeom, the DMZ is an almost scenic snatch of land, at least on the southern side. Driving between the various checkpoints, we spotted pheasants taking flight among the ginseng fields. The North Korean side is another story: behind the concrete facades of a ghost town (pictured above), vast swaths of trees have been cut down to expose anyone trying to escape.

TRISTES TROPIQUES

“Hello, my friend, you need sarong? Taxi? Hashish? I give you good price!”

The offers, polite but aggressive, followed us everywhere we wandered around Bali last week, from the motorbike-choked streets of Kuta to the near-deserted sands of Gili Air to the overgrown interior of Lombok. We had come to Bali to escape the incessant noise of South Korea, searching for the much-touted beaches backed by rice terraces and birdsong.

And we found them...but so had hordes of Bintang-guzzling Australian surfers, their biceps the size of tree trunks, drawing the peddlers of Pringles and hash like ants to a picnic. It wasn’t until our last night, when we decided to splurge on a stay at one of the many immaculate resorts, that we realized the key to our peace and quiet was the walls keeping out the hawkers--and Bali along with them.

Perhaps appropriately, I was reading Tristes Tropiques, a book by the anthropologist and self-proclaimed travel hater Claude Levi-Strauss. In 1955 he wrote of his journeys, “Now that the Polynesian islands have been smothered in concrete and turned into aircraft carriers solidly anchored in the southern seas, when the whole of Asia is beginning to look like a dingy suburb, when shanty-towns are spreading across Africa...what else can the so-called escapism of travelling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history?”