Barbed Wire and Beaches

Asian giant Hyundai has big plans for its new luxury Azera. Peter Garrison tries out the car on its home turf

"Our country is pain!" At least that's what I think the man said. Koreans are friendly and uninhibited people, and they approached me everywhere to try out their conversational English. In this case, we were standing at the edge of the DMZ, the two-and-a-half-mile-wide no-man's-land that has separated starving North Korea from splurging South Korea since 1953. The name is misleading: The DMZ is in fact the most militarized place in all of Korea. It is stripped of trees, festooned with barbed wire, patrolled by soldiers, sown with mines, and, as was first discovered in the 1970s, tunneled here and there by North Korean sappers preparing broad underground avenues for some future invasion. Except for a few carefully monitored tours, however, no civilian is allowed inside it. The resulting dehumanization has been a bonanza for wildlife, which thrives in the DMZ unmolested. Bird-watchers monitor its edges as earnestly as soldiers do. Birds and badgers might argue for preserving the DMZ, but few South Koreans would. The division of their country is an unhealed wound; if my companion indeed intended to say pain, that must be what he meant. People flock to the Unification Observatory, at the northern point of the east coast, to peer through binoculars at the dim outlines of distant mountains and to pray for national reconciliation, by huge north-facing figures of the Buddha and the Virgin Mary. Support for reunification does not, however, preclude occasional sallies of competitive spirit. One anecdote has northern propagandists carving the message we have a paradise into the foliage on a south-facing hillside. The laconic reply, on a southern hillside, came back WE HAVE CARS.

Day One: Seoul to Seoraksan National Park
I'm in an Azera, Hyundai's new top-of-the-line vehicle. It turns a lot of car-conscious heads on the boulevards of the capital. Seoul—gigantic, neon-lit, bustling—is impossible to find your way around. The good news is that the Azera has GPS; the bad news is that the system speaks only Korean. Fortunately, someone has programmed it with two destinations: my first stop, the Sorak Park Hotel, in the northeast's Seoraksan National Park, and Seoul's Hotel Ibis, to which I hope eventually to return.

It is a gray dawn as I instruct the Azera to guide me to the Sorak Park. It seems to take forever to leave behind the wide avenues of tall stone-and-glass buildings and the mammoth and unsettlingly uniform apartment blocks. From time to time, the voice of Ms. Nav offers unintelligible warnings. At first, I think of her as a Berlitz teacher and figure that I will soon know the Korean words for right and left. Trouble is, she talks excitedly even when no turn is imminent. Eventually, I realize that what concerns her are the robot traffic cameras that dot the highways in both expected and out-of-the-way places. They photograph speeding cars, and then a ticket (together with a snapshot) is mailed to the driver. For the sake of marital harmony, the passenger seat and its occupant, if any, are blacked out. It seems comical, and very free market, that the state has set up a system for enforcing speed limits while the automotive industry is marketing Ms. Nav as a means to outsmart it.