PETER HITCHENS: I too felt the mad urge to dash across the world’s eeriest border between North and South Korea!

When I first visited the mad Panmunjom border between North and South Korea, I felt a strong, irrational urge to dash across it.

I believe some people have similar impulses on cliff tops and high buildings. But for me, it is frontiers that do it.

Fortunately, so far, I have been able to keep this urge under control. So I — sort of — understand the crazy behaviour of the American soldier Travis King, who on Tuesday scuttled across the Korean demarcation line, allegedly cackling as he did so. I have been there twice, and have seen it from both sides — events separated by decades because of the extreme difficulty of getting into North Korea if you are known to be a journalist.

My determination to approach it from the north was born on the day in 1986 when, in the press party following Margaret Thatcher around the Far East, I was taken to the oddest place in the world — the southern side of the border.

In those days you approached it through lots of U.S. Army posts and emplacements, plastered with boastful slogans. In this case the words ‘In front of them all!’ were emblazoned all over the place. Because of a treaty limit on the carrying of weapons by either side, unarmed South Korean troops trained in martial arts stood near the yellow-painted borderline in tense, menacing postures.

When Peter Hitchens (pictured) first visited the Panmunjom border between North and South Korea, he felt a strong, irrational urge to dash across it

The tension was quite justified. A few years before, in a dispute about cutting down a tree on the frontier, North Koreans, wielding axes, had murdered two U.S. Army officers.

You could never tell what might happen in such a place. That is probably why Ronald Reagan decided not to make the trip when he visited Seoul in 1983.

But the Iron Lady was made of tougher stuff than the Teflon President. The whole place was more or less insane. Both sides had built rather ludicrous viewing pavilions overlooking the small paved area where the Communist and Capitalist worlds (in those days) began and ended.

Baby blue sheds, for discussions about details of the armistice, straddled the demarcation line. You could enter them, if the North Koreans were not occupying them, and cross a few yards into North Korea. Mrs Thatcher did this, and we went with her, while North Korean guards glared at her through the windows.

But if you tried to do that outside the sheds, in the open air, heaven knows what might happen to you. It looked so easy, just as it used to in Berlin, where the hideous Wall briefly flattened out just in front of the Brandenburg Gate, the other end of the Evil Empire.

This was what was so disturbing. On this painted line began thousands of miles of what was, in those days, a different planet in which utterly different ideas about good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust, applied.

South Korean soldiers stand guard at the Joint Security Area (JSA) on the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the border village

South Korean army soldiers pass by a military guard post at the Imjingak Pavilion in Paju, South Korea, near the border with North Korea

All around were forested hills, a paradise for wildlife as few humans went there. For among the thick trees, lethal fences — full of tripwires, booby traps and minefields — lay hidden. And they still do.

Yet it was crazier than that. Just south of the death zone, South Korea maintains a village, Daeseong-Dong (I think our guides in 1986 may have referred to it as ‘Freedom Village’) where a few rather privileged citizens dwell. From it flies an enormous South Korean flag. Easily visible to the north lies its (sort of) northern twin, Kijong-Dong, which our guides definitely dismissed as ‘Propaganda Village’.

This sinister, creepy sight is supposedly inhabited by 200 people. The fields around it are tilled. But close surveillance over many years has shown no sign of any real inhabitants, and, although lights come on after dark, its smart buildings are believed to be no more than an elaborate ghost town, a concrete stage-set, supposed to demonstrate the prosperity of the North Korean economy and people.

In 1986, I remember plinky-plonky happy music drifting from its loudspeakers towards the south, one of the most haunting and upsetting sounds I have ever heard. Like its southern equivalent, it flies a gigantic national flag. A contest between the two ended when the North built a flagpole more than 500ft high, so dwarfing the southern mast, a mere 327ft high.

Both sides deployed monstrous flags, the North’s at one point weighing a quarter of a ton. But the contest has grown harder to maintain, as such huge standards are ripped to pieces in the high winds at these altitudes.

It took me 21 years to reach Panmunjom from the north. The final stage in the visa process involved dancing with the beautiful and charming female staff of the North Korean consulate in Shenyang in China.

Then there was a worrying trip in a Soviet aircraft dating from the Khrushchev era, regarded by the Chinese as so dangerous they wouldn’t let it near their airport buildings. And then at last, I was belting down the deserted highway to the border from Pyongyang the North Korean capital, a wonderfully green city thanks to its almost total absence of traffic and strictly rationed electricity.

If you want to know what Net Zero will be like, North Korea is the place to go. But I am not sure Private King, the runaway soldier, will be enjoying it much. As far as I could tell during my brief visit, North Korea only survives as a state because its people are allowed to get hopelessly drunk on rice spirit, for a lot of the time.

As on the other side, we approached the line through elaborate fortifications including tunnels designed to be collapsed by pre-positioned explosives.

And as on the other side, we were given lengthy briefings on the evils of the rival Korea.

And then, all of a sudden there it was again, the blue huts, the paved zone, the lurking soldiers, the rival pavilions (the southern one much bigger than before), and the wild desire to sprint across, because it looked as if I could. I nearly did. But I didn’t.