City: South Korea
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Things to do in South Korea, South Korea: The Best Military Bases & Facilities
Coordinates: 36°N 128°E / 36°N 128°E / 36; 128
Restaurants in South Korea
1. Camp Bonifas
Overall Ratings
4.5 based on 70 reviews
The American base at the demilitarized zone.
Reviewed By H75travel - Epsom, United Kingdom
This is the main place on interest for most people wanting to take a DMZ tour - the opportunity to experience first hand the tension between the two Korean forces. It is bizarre and exhillarating at the same time. On arrival you met your serving military guide on the bus (we had an America soldier) and are directed to a large room to be given a safety briefing where you sign a disclaimer recognising that this is a war zone. After having the life scared out of you, you return to the bus to head into the JSA and the famous blue buildings. On the bus you pass through a couple of kilometres of the DMZ, seeing farms and people who live there going about their business. Entering into the South Korean administration building you emerge facing the blue UN buildings which traverse the border. You are reminded only to look forward and to only take photos in the forward direction between two distinct points. It is all very tense. You can photograph the blue buildings and the North Korean buildings. After a photo stop and a few stories of North Korean soldier's antics (which happens while the tour group ahead of you is inside) you are then taken into the blue building itself. Half of the room is soldiered by South Koreans, the other by North Koreans. The N Korean soldiers don't look real, rather they look like wax work models. However, look closer (don't get too close as you will regret it) and you can see them breathing. You can walk over to the North Korean side and officially be in North Korean terroritory right in the middle of the DMZ. A fascinating and slighty unnerving experience, and the closest most people will come to the North. Back on the bus you can breathe a sigh of relief that you survived and back at the main camp buy a few souveniers to mark the occasion.
2. Gwangseongbo Fortress
3. Typhoon Observatory
Overall Ratings
4.5 based on 6 reviews
4. Panmunjom
Overall Ratings
4.5 based on 361 reviews
Reviewed By WilliamWillieWilson - Nashville, United States
If you've done your research, then hopefully you've found one of the few tour groups that will actually take you all the way to the buildings of Panmunjom, while the other tours have concluded miles away. And by the time your bus has reached the exterior of Camp Bonifas, you've already been tantalized by a distant North Korean landscape looming on the horizon as viewed from the Dora Observatory. You've probably come from the Third Tunnel, where you saw absolutely nothing of North Korea. After a brief wait, anxious with anticipation, you are finally driven slowly past a sizeable fence into the Demilitarized Zone as you enter the military encampment. After a brief presentation on what not to do, this is the moment you've been waiting for! Tourists are driven out of camp down a narrow road, past, watch towers, barb-wire fences, and minefields. This is the last of South Korea, where a handful of farmers remain, owning land only through inheritance. Otherwise, this is a place strictly off limits to most of the world. Within minutes, you are dropped off in front of a large, unadorned gray complex through which you are escorted. It's a facility fit for presidents and diplomats, yet purely functional and completely undecorated. As you walk through the building in two single-file lines and ride up an escalator, you're suddenly there. Without fanfare, you've exit the upper floor of the structure where those tiny blue huts you've seen photographed and filmed hundreds of times stand right before your very eyes. But your gaze cannot be broken from the North Korean building directly in front of you and the very doors from which Kim Jong-Un occasionally emerges to attend meetings. After brief explanation inside the main blue hut, you step past a table marking the border between the two countries and you're now standing in North Korea. The experience is brief, a whirlwind event to be sure. But the memory of standing in the most mysterious country in the world will stay with you forever.
5. Altteureu Airfield
Overall Ratings
4.5 based on 2 reviews
Mainland China is Japan, during Japanese occupation, as guarded the Japanese mainland for a base and launch base for attacks. From 1926 to the mid 1930s, the Japanese military built a naval airfield and hangar facility covering about 660,000m2. Songaksan Mountain, Dansan Mountain, Mosulbong Peak (187m), and Sanbangsan Mountain (395m) are called Alter Airfield.
6. Gomosanseong
7. Jukju Sanseong
Overall Ratings
4.0 based on 2 reviews
8. Tongjeyeong
Overall Ratings
4.5 based on 2 reviews
9. Iseong Sanseong
Overall Ratings
3.0 based on 1 reviews
