Detour #266: Driving from Seoul to the DMZ, South Korea
Ben Barry drives as far north as Kim Jon Un will allow.
Half of South Korea’s 52 million inhabitants live in the greater Seoul area, and most seem to be on the road if you try slipping away during the morning rush.
Escape the capital, though, and the other 50 per cent are dispersed over a nation three quarters the size of England, and a landscape frequently laced with fantastic driving roads and epic mountain scenery.
Today that’s exactly what I’m exploring, with a route that heads north until I’m forced to turn back by the border that’s divided North and South Korea since 1953.
I collect an all-electric Hyundai Ioniq 6 from the Lotte World Tower, at 123 floors and 1,823ft the tallest building in the country, then grind down Seoul’s wide urban freeways through the morning rush. Finally I get up to speed as Highway 60 leaves Seoul’s eastern city limits.
The Ioniq is in its element here. Partly it’s the cushy suspension and absence of an internal combustion engine, but it’s also the Ioniq’s wind-cheating shape which was inspired by ‘streamliner’ cars of the 1930s such as the Stout Scarab, one-off Phantom Corsair and later Saab, designs themselves influenced by earlier leaps in aeroplane aerodynamics.
Traffic thins dramatically as I climb into the hillsides, the highway cutting through long tunnels like thread through fabric, before I head north near Chuncheon.
I stop for a lunch of sticky chicken and a bit too much pickle at the Lee Sang Won Museum in Chuncheon-si, an apparently circular building that showcases the work of the eponymous Korean artist. Perched on the hillside, it looks like it’ll roll away if you lean on it (I don’t, just in case). The modernist tranquility makes quite a contrast to the scene just a few miles away, where labourers crouch among crops or shade themselves from 24-degree heat in ramshackle shelters.
I push on north, into the mountainous territory that made the Korean War so challenging in the early ’50s – and makes driving here so enjoyable today with a mix of tight coils and high-speed sweepers. The Ioniq 6 fares surprisingly well, flowing deftly with the road and energetically powering out of tighter corners thanks to the instant whump of its 321bhp all-electric performance. I get quite the shift on.
Hints that the conflict continues to be unresolved edge into my journey. A sign at a beauty spot commemorates Korean soldiers beating back the Chinese Communist Army in June 1951 at Mount Daeseongsan. Heavy artillery fire from military drills rings out in the distance.
In border-town Cheorwon, the locals are disarmingly open and generous with help decoding Hangul, the Korean alphabet, but a little further on concrete cubes are stacked either side of the road, ready to be detonated with explosives to block the road should the North invade.
Soon after, a series of yellow-and-black barricades force us to slow down until a couple of bemused armed soldiers approach and politely ask us to turn around. The Demilitarised Zone (or DMZ) lies a little beyond, a 2.5-mile strip of wilderness that loosely traces the 38th parallel and splits the Korean Peninsula in two. Last year, US serviceman Travis King made a surprise dash north from the joint security area somewhere in the middle.
That’s a detour too far for Detour. So as dusk falls and the sun burns red, I jump back on the highway, heading south to a capital that sparkles from blackness like a primary schooler’s glitter-glue painting.
This has not been a typical road trip, but then that’s all the more reason to explore this incredible country.
Words Ben Barry Twitter/X | Instagram
Photography Alex Tapley