“Line up two by two, no photographs, keep your jackets on and don’t wave at the soldiers.”

Hell, we all felt like kids at kindergarten or, alternatively, animals going into Noah’s Ark two by two...But no. We our group was variously aged from the 20s to close to 60 (me) and beyond. We were no kindergarten kids. And this was no kindergarten or Ark, even if it did resemble a zoo at times.

This was the infamous Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ, pronounced DM-Zee in American language) straddling the 38th parallel, the artificial border created after the Korean War between South Korea, a vibrant, wealthy democracy and North Korea, a very un-vibrant, notoriously backward and paranoid communist state from the dark ages run by a crazy dictator with eclectic tastes in hairdos and clothes plus built up shoes by the name of Kim Jong-il.

This was the Joint Security Area, or JSA, where an armistice was signed on July 27, 1953 that ended the fighting in the three-year Korean War. But, to date, the war has not officially ended hence the DMZ and all the bizarre things that go with it.

Today, fear, mistrust, suspicion, paranoia and billions of dollars help maintain what seems a pointless exercise but to the North and South Koreans, the United States and the rest of the world, is a deadly serious game of cat and mouse which, if allowed to get out of hand could have catastrophic results.

You have to experience it to believe how weird this whole DMZ thing is.First you have the South Koreans.

On this day in October our tour bus trip left the Seoul hotel after a breakfast that included a horde of somewhat large and hungry Japanese sumo wrestlers, in something resembling dressing gowns, hovering up most of the buffet breakfast. It got crazier.

On the bus Joy, our South Korean guide, was indeed, a joy, if a somewhat cunning low key propagandist for the South against the North, but that is understandable given that Kim Jongil, the crazy North Korean dictator who is in charge up north starves his people to death, keeps threatening civilisation as we know it with nuclear meltdown between bouts of expensive brandy, watching Hollywood movies and giving a succession of American presidents the nervous Nellie’s.

Whatever! We arrived at the DMZ zone after only 40 minutes in the appalling Seoul traffic (Pyongyang the North Korean showpiece capital is a safer 200km away from the border).

That border is called the 38th Parallel, which is the official line dividing the Korean peninsula after the Americans, United Nations and South Koreans finished beating back an invasion of the peninsula by Chinese backed North Koreans that lasted must over three years from June 1950 to July 1953.

Names matter here. The South Korean building directly opposite the North Korean Visitor’s Centre is called Freedom House. It was built to help reconciliation between long lost relatives separated by the Korean War, but has never been used for that purpose.

Yet, more 56 years later, North and South Korean negotiators still meet (the American guide could not tell us, for security reasons, how often) in a non-descript building painted in a neutral, but slightly offensive, blue colour, to stare and one-up each other from time to time. The meetings take three hours on average, the longest being 11 hours. No wonder it has taken 56 years and still no treat or reconciliation.

We were taken into this building, two by two (some of the Korean tourists in another party actually held hands, which was rather sweet) But there is nothing sweet about the JSA.

Inside is the simple, wooden Armistice Table with three (24 hours a day, live) microphones on it plumb in the middle of the 38th parallel dividing line between North and South, running right through the middle of the building.

This is where the United Nations, Chinese and North Koreans signed the armistice, thus dividing the Korean Peninsula it seems, forever.

Also in the room are two South Korean military police soldiers who stand rigid, not moving a muscle in a taekwondo stance, legs akimbo and fists clenched at the waist.

“Mess with me and you go home in a wheelchair,” these silent sentinels, each with a black belt in taekwondo, seem to be saying.

Speaking of military, our guide around the JSA was a very pleasant young man from Washington, DC, called Enlisted Man Andrew Pollard. Mr. Pollard wore a pistol on his hip.

Apparently, despite all the cost and military input into the DMZ, the only weapons carried by either side today are pistols. No rifles, machine guns, bazookas, slingshots, tanks or nuclear weapons allowed (yet!)

The reason is simple. In the 56 years that it has existed, the DMZ has only experienced two incidents resulting in fatalities, one the result of the naughty participants having proper guns that can kill heaps of people with the pull of a trigger. This first incident was in 1974 when a pesky Russian tourist tried to flee North Korea to seek asylum. The result was a four minute fire fight between the North and South soldiers which resulted in the death of one American soldier, since deified at the DMZ by having a rest and recreation centre named after him. A Korean soldier who died has a plaque. A statue and small park commemorate this clash of the giants.

The second in 1976 was the Axe Murder Incident, Hatchet Incident or Poplar Tree Incident, take your pick. North and South Korean soldiers and two Americans clashed over the trimming of a poplar tree that was inhibiting the line of sight. The resulting 20 second incident resulted in one American soldier, Captain Bonifas, being killed by an axe and the other one being dragged away and also killed with an axe. The JSA camp is now known as Camp Bonifas.

But back to the tour. We were firmly told not to take photographs until permission was given (the North Koreans may see them on the internet and know what is going on. As one European journalist wryly observed, the North Koreans probably had a fair idea what is going on the South Korean side, but who were we to question the collective wisdom of the Pentagon?)

Passports were duly checked at two checkpoints and we passed through a Checkpoint Charlie (same as the checkpoint on the Berlin wall between West and East Germany) then we drove through some quite lovely, you might say incongruous, forested country side before we came upon the first evidence of just how nutty the North Koreans are.

In the distance we saw what looked like a sizeable town on the Northern side. Nope. All fake. Known, appropriately enough, as “Propaganda Village’, it is just like a Hollywood movie set— nothing behind the facade. The North Koreans used to blast out propaganda to the South at vast decibels for a number of years but have given that up (thank goodness).

This was particularly good news to the 214 inhabitants of a nearby South Korean village called—wait for it— ‘Freedom Village’. The people of this village have certain privileges to make up for living under the fear of an imminent North Korean invasion (the men, for example, don’t have to enter the South Korean military). The trouble is that the denizens of “Freedom Village” have to return to the village every day and be locked up with a hot cup of cocoa, the cat out and doors and windows locked by midnight every day, or face banishment to become a traffic warden on the clogged streets of Seoul, a fate worse than living on the 38th Parallel, it appears. Some freedom, it cannot be all bad, though. Our Mr. Pollard was dating one of the local maidens.

Back at the armistice building one of the taekwondo chappies was posted outside to keep an eye on the naughty north, who were positioned outside their Stalinist building a few metres away. A staring match ensued. The South Korean soldier, however, was a lot more cunning than his Northern counterpart, who stood in full view of the world, albeit with a pair of binoculars in his hand which he used to keep an eye on the untrustworthy and subversive members of the media in our party (good policy).

The South Korean guy stood behind the edge of his building so only half his body was visible. This is obviously a dastardly plan to ensure he is less of a target should the North decide to bomb the hell out of the south and send the world’s fifth largest army rampaging through the DMZ.

The other slightly disturbing feature of visiting the DMZ is that when outside the armistice building, in full view of the Democratic (sic) People’s Republic of Korea (that’s what the north is known as in a strange spin on the word “democratic”) you should not throw your arms around in any way for fear of starting World War Three.

Relieved that we had survived this, after much arm waving, etc by Enlisted Man Pollard to stop waving your arms, we quickly boarded the bus and hurtled back through the rather nice Korean countryside to our hotel. A great day, much learned and, thank goodness, the Japanese sumo wrestlers were nowhere in sight. I bet the North Koreans wouldn’t treat them with the disrespect they showed us. I can just imagine a North Korean solder whipping out his pistol and shooting a sumo wrestler not for throwing his arms around but because he took is dressing gown off and showed off his body. (By Alastair Carthew in Seoul/ Contributor/Asia News Network)

(Alastair Carthew, a public relations consultant based in Phuket, Thailand, attended the 10th annual Asia-European Editor’s Forum in Seoul, South Korea in October 2009 and visited the DMZ with a group of editors. His report is a tongue-in-cheek look at a very serious part of the world.)