THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

But ultimately people will put up with war only so long. And the DMZ is the prime marker of a war that has been waiting 60 years for a resolution. And souvenir by souvenir, the Korean people seem to be making their own peace.

With the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union gone, tourists now flock to both sides of the DMZ, the world's most heavily armed border, established 60 years ago. But what they see is more likely to be tacky than terrifying.

On the south side, souvenir shops sell DMZ T-shirts, DMZ-branded chocolates, DMZ baseball caps and pieces of "authentic" DMZ barbed wire mounted on ceramic tiles. Others sell dusty bottles of North Korean alcohol and miniature combat uniforms.

"The middle-aged tourists that come here like buying the clothes for their kids," Cho Hyang Hwa, an ethnic Korean Chinese citizen working at the shop, told Reuters.

Not far from barbed wire fences and rifle-wielding soldiers, children scream in delight while riding in a huge ship that swings back and forth on a giant pendulum.

The ride is named, with no apparent sense of place, the Super Viking. It serves as the flagship of Peace Land, a small and surreal theme park that looks onto rolling North Korean mountain ranges.

The loud pop music that accompanies the Super Viking is drowned out only by the occasional U.S. military helicopter that buzzes overhead before disappearing behind the tree tops.

Nearby, workers were erecting a giant statue of a ginseng plant woven from hemp for a festival devoted to the popular root. The DMZ's soil is said to yield Korea's finest ginseng.

"I'm surprised to see how different the atmosphere is from what I expected," said Park Kyung-doo, a South Korean schoolgirl. "It's good for the tourists but, as a person who came to see and learn about North Korea, I don't really feel satisfied."

Tourism also exists on the DMZ's north side but is more muted. One attraction is Peace Village, a Potemkin-like place of empty buildings nicknamed Propaganda Village in the south.

Its major landmark is a 160-metre (175-yard) flagpole that deliberately tops the one in Freedom Village, a small town on the South Korean side of the zone.

Kim Jong Pudge may be slower than his southern colleagues in providing the necessary tourist tschotkes and the guns may be locked and loaded but the winds of change are blowing slowly among the garlic eaters.