Riding the Baekdudaegan
How a Group of New Zealander Bikers Planned a Road Trip Across Korea’s DMZ
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Joanne Morgan: Gareth as a diplomat is actually quite funny. Gareth says exactly what he thinks, and I definitely wouldn’t put him into any diplomatic role.
Gareth Morgan: With this trip, the real point [for us] was just to understand the Korean people. What spins their wheels? What’s their sense of identity? How are they handling this 68-year interruption to their 5,000-year history?
Joanne: In the 80s, when I was standing in the DMZ on the south side looking across to the north, I saw a group of old men standing there gazing north and crying. It was very emotional and I couldn’t quite understand it. That’s always stayed with me, that huge longing that they had to reunite their families.What are your thoughts on the North Korean government?
Gareth: [The West] doesn’t like the North Korean regime—but there are a lot of systems around the world that we don’t like, yet nations have normalized relationships with one another. Even though they’ve got totally different regimes than we have in New Zealand, we have pretty normalized relationships with China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia—a whole lot of regimes that do not value human liberty and individual rights anywhere near as much as we do in a liberal democracy. North Korea fits into that camp. The interests of the state override the interests of any individuals. There’s no freedom of speech, there’s no freedom of association, and no freedom of representation. Those are all things that we, from the liberal democracies in the West, value hugely and would never give up.
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Joanne: All the young people of South Korea [we’ve met] say, “We want to travel the whole Baekdudaegan as well; we want to travel the whole length of Korea.” And you could see that, apart from all the other issues with North Korea, they’re desperate to travel it.
Gareth: They were quite disturbed about the fact that we’d been able to do this. And one of the projects that we’re looking at going forward is to actually get some motorcycles from Seoul and ride through the DMZ, up to Pyongyang, and back—with South Koreans with us. That’ll be a big breakthrough.How strict were the North Korean officials about letting you explore the mountains and seaside? Did they allow you to deviate from the predetermined path?
Gareth: We chose the route we would ride, [but] we obviously had to agree on a route with the North Koreans many months in advance. We chose one that would follow the Baekdudaegan; that’s the part that binds [both] Koreas, and it was pretty symbolic to follow it. Once we were on the road, we were escorted the whole way by a ginormous motorcade with security vehicles in front of and behind our five bikes. We’ve been through China with the same sort of [escorts]. So we’re old hands—a standard tactic for us is for the last motorcycle to go quite slow so the sweeping vehicles behind them have to stay behind it… That would open up a big gap in which the motorcyclists in the middle could stop and take photos. They woke up to that after a few days. They were generally quite tolerant, but there was no way we would’ve been able to turn off the road and go down on our own… The rationale they would give for that was [North Koreans] are not used to vehicles coming down the road, particularly big motorcycles and foreign vehicles. You’d come around a corner and there’d be animals or whatever on the road, and that was true—that’s a fair rationale.
Joanne: Also, the children were fearful. They said to us that the children will see you and they will be fearful because they’ve never seen a foreigner before. Some of the areas we went to had huge crowds in the streets, and we’d slow down and wave to a kiddie or to a mother and child and some of them would be absolutely delighted and others would just be terrified.
Gareth: This society has become, over 68 years, pretty self-sufficient, agrarian, and traditional. There’s not much machinery around at all because of the sanctions and so on. So there’s sort of a serene peace to the society in terms of the way they go about their daily tasks. It’s actually quite lovely. It’s like going to a medieval village. So I can sort of understand the issues there in terms of the disturbance we caused.More about North Korea:The VICE Guide to North KoreaNorth Korean Labor CampsNorth Korean Film Madness