Since the announcement of the first-ever summit next week between North and South Korea, there has been a big increase in the number of tour buses arriving at the "Reunification Observatory" at Odusan, where the Imjin River forms the border between the two parts of the divided peninsula. Many South Koreans are obsessively curious about the North, which has been closed to the world since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. At Odusan they come to look at a strip of hilly land and a few houses, and to view slides in slot machines of the northern capital Pyongyang. "I wonder what kind of lives people live over there," mused a teenager who gave her name as Ms Choi, peering through binoculars on the roof of the observatory one misty morning this week. "I think they live like South Koreans did in the 1960s," said her friend.
In the nearby village of Sung Dong, separated by razor wire from the river bank, the peasants do not think these days about the dangers of living beside the last Cold War frontier. "I'm not worried about North Korea attacking us any more, but I am worried about the South being taken advantage of by the North," said an old woman crossly as she sorted baby onions outside her house. "All the food aid we sent them did not make them change."
The inhabitants are unhappy at speculators coming to the border to set up restaurants and souvenir shops, forcing up the price of land and encouraging young people to sell up and leave. They are also fed up with the non-stop propaganda music from giant loudspeakers on both sides. "It gets on my nerves, sometimes it goes on all night," said a white-haired grandmother as a martial song echoed across the rice paddies.
Sitting cross-legged in his farmhouse, Kim Jungchul (64) said he believed conditions in the North were "about 15 years behind" but were getting better all the time in the South. In recent years the soldiers had taken away much of the barbed wire which made their land inaccessible, and had stopped making them wear ID cards, though Mr Kim put his on proudly when posing for a photograph with his wife Ju Young Ok. Things had eased, no doubt about that, but that was as far as it went, he said. "I'd like to see North Korea one day, but there is no chance of that."
Kim Gun-il also believes nothing will change overnight, but he fervently hopes for reunification. In a plaid shirt and wearing a tiny silver mobile phone round his neck, he styles himself like a typical South Korean 21-year-old. But he is rather undersized, weighing just 53 kilos, and still hasn't quite mastered the walk. "The problem is the posture," he explains when I met him in Seoul, an hour's drive south of the border. "We North Koreans have no self-respect, no self-confidence and our eyes dart around everywhere when we move around. But I've almost got over that."
Mr Kim is a defector from North Korea, where the population of 23 million is facing starvation, and for whom the border is not a tourist attraction but a barrier to freedom, and he knew even less about the South before he came than the tourists at Odusan did about the North. He recalled the culture shock of suddenly finding himself two years ago in the prosperous capital of South Korea. "I was always told South Korea was full of poor people," he said. "I saw some kids who had cut their jeans and I thought they were beggars. It is unthinkable in North Korea that when people are starving they would cut their trousers.
"Also, there is so much sex here. You can sleep with anyone. Southern girls are very fancy. When I first saw South Korean girls walking down the street exposing half their breasts I thought they had plastic surgery. I didn't like it, but I'm quite openminded now."
What Kim Gun-il finds hard to take is the indifference of many young South Koreans to the North, treating it as a curiosity to be peered at through binoculars. "In the North everyone wants reunification but here people don't care, they don't want it; I think it is because they are rich," he said. "When I first saw so many wealthy people I hated them. Many people laughed at me because I didn't understand some of the English words they use in Korean."
He has a scholarship to study theology and has found God, but sometimes is overcome with homesickness. "I often feel alone here," he said. "I don't even have a picture of my father, who starved to death. A North Korean circus came to Seoul this week and I watched them on television on my own. The last time I saw them was in the North. I cried as I watched."
Ryu Chi-sung is also North Korean, but had no interest in seeing the circus. "In North Korea there is only one type of culture and that is associated with the taste of Kim Jong Il, and I am fed up with that sort of culture," he said scathingly, referring to the North Korean leader. He defected in March 1998 and has taken a new name and avoids being photographed in a recognisable way, in case North Korean police treat the family members he left behind as "hostile".
Mr Ryu, who worked in a party department raising foreign currency, described the risks and hardships involved in getting to South Korea. He took the only route available, swimming the River Tumen on the northern border with China. He was caught by Chinese police and sent back to North Korea where he was placed in a cell with several political prisoners and some professors who had said North Korea had no future.