Drawing back the curtain: A Trip to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

For close to a decade now, North Korea has served as a punchline or as a substitute for describing something as crazy, insane or just plain odd. For the last few years I’ve been very interested (I was going to say obsessed, but that’s somewhere short of the mark) in what many describe as the most closed society in the world.

But a trip to the DPRK seemed impossible. I mean, as an American, travelling to the most anti-US society in the world seemed to be an unlikely goal, so I continued to make references to the Dear Leader, watch movies (including Team America) and believe that I would never make it to the DPRK.

Living in Shanghai, you tend to meet people who have traveled a bit. Amongst my friends, a handful have actually been to the DPRK – all of them having gone with the Beijing-based Koryo Group. Koryo Group has often run marketing activities here in Shanghai including sponsoring the ROK/DPRK World Cup Qualifying match and having documentary film nights in various cafes.

Based on their recommendations and wanting to peak behind the curtain, I jumped in and traveled with Koryo on their early August tour to the Hermit Kingdom.

Briefing began on the Monday before we left at the Koryo tour headquarters, just a half block from Sanlitun Village in Beijing. The group included a mix of independent tourists and those traveling with our group. Our tour leader would be Nancy, an American from New York making her 13th trip to the DPRK.

The briefing covered what you would think would be for travel to the DPRK. Follow the guides directions, show respect to the Kims, don’t take photos without permission, don’t take photos of people in the military. But then they also told stories about The Pyongyang Times and folding it on the airplane (don’t do it! some travelers read it, folded it into the seatback pocket and were later required to write letters of apology!)

The next morning, we departed from the Koryo Tours office for the Beijing Airport. After a last meal at Starbuck’s it was onto the Air Koryo flight to Pyongyang – a new-ish Tupolev TU-204.

So rather than bore the 3 readers I do have with a point by point listing of what we saw, let me talk about a few highlights of the trip.

Statuary

I have a slight obsession with revolutionary statues. From Russia to Vietnam to, heh, China, I’ve been taking photos of statues of the revolution for decades. Anyways I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re all pale imitations and fall way short of the standard of the DPRK.

Look! The guy on the left is firing the machine guy with his mouth, while the guy on the right is crawling forward with a grenade in his mouth!

This statue of Kim Il Sung on Mansudae is immense. The photo doesn’t do the scale justice. It really was awesome (in the real sense of the word).

Mass Games

Simply put, the Mass Games were the most amazing, awesome (in the original sense of the word), and thrilling cultural event I’ve ever seen in person. 10,000 gymnasts and dancers and acrobats and performers in almost perfect unison on the floor of the biggest stadium in the world, with 10,000 more junior high school kids running the best card stunts the world has ever, or will ever see. Word. . . heck pictures can’t do it justice, but here are some photos from that night. Completely insane and unbelievable, definitely a highlight, not just of the trip, but of any traveling I have ever done anywhere.

The DMZ

Strange place. With the South Korea tourists right across the way. The staring and tense soldiers all the way around, the interestingly more relaxed attitudes of the DPRK soldiers (maybe the cigarette bribes worked!).

Other stuff

One of the first (and most common) questions I got when first emailing my photos around was “Where are all the people?” – at first my reaction was “What are you talking about – Pyongyang isn’t China, but its certainly not short of people!” – but then I realized, the majority of the people I saw were from the bus – when we weren’t allowed to take photos. But there were plenty of people around Pyongyang. Including Pyongyang Traffic Girls. There were huge crowds of people everywhere walking to and from work.

When traveling to the DPRK, you really need to make sure you’re filtering everything through the lens of “this is the public face that the DPRK wants to present to foreigners,” otherwise you’re going to be left with the idea that everything is hunky-dory there. Even with that caveat, over the course of the week, you begin to notice things. Those fields that look really full at first glance, well, you start to notice the browning leaves and dry riverbeds and creekbeds as you look closer. The clean streets? Maybe its because there’s nothing to buy and the people commute to work by walking. Buses were infrequent, and trams even more so. And the public transportation (aside from the absolutely beautiful subway) seemed to be falling apart, as chunks of the tram were missing from each and every tram I saw in Pyongyang.

The Guides and the People

Let me first say for that prior to arriving in North Korea, I had this vision of the people there being, well, drab “Kim Il Sung is the Sun of our Hearts” robots quoting anti-American Imperialism and “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a Juche State of Invincible Might!” at every turn.

I didn’t find that at all. While knowing that we were being controlled in our meetings, and that our guides were amongst the most politically reliable people in the country, I overwhelmingly found them to be warm, kind, nice . . . and funny people.

And even the very few people we were able to interact with were curious and pleasant, and the three schoolgirls who came up to our group on the street were able to ask some questions about the tour group. No one was aggressive about our obviously Western tour group – I suspect the consequences would be grave for anyone who was.

The Food

It was ok. Nancy had originally said it was like South Korean food, except for missing something. While that was true, I found it more to be the like the differences between South Vietnamese food and Northern Vietnamese, where the food in the North tends to be plainer, while in the South there is a little bit more flair to it. I will mention that several of the meals we had in the DPRK were excellent – including the barbecue duck we had on the final night at the final meal – we only had 4 plates at our table, but we could easily have finished off 10 or more. That good.

Should you go?

It’s an interesting question, and the decision to go was not quite as easily arrived at as you would think. The DPRK is a society built on and around a war that ended 57 years ago and the government continues to instill the fear that the next attack is just around the corner.

Spending your tourist money in a state, which even on its best days, can be seen as rogue and dangerous and the list only goes down from there is a personal decision. For me, the opportunity to really try to see what is going on (even in a controlled environment) outweighed any moral qualms I had about adding my 1200 Euros to Kim Jong Il’s Hennessy budget. Your milage may vary.

I would add, that during a trip to the DPRK you will have to do and sit through things that are the very least uncomfortable and depending on your point of view distasteful. As they said in the Koryo Group briefing meeting just sit through it, and get over it – that is if you want to go. First among them, is the pretty constant anti-American propaganda. You’re told so many things which are just wrong about the Korea War (or, Victorious Fatherland Liberation War) so often, that you start to doubt your own memories and knowledge. That I really didn’t have too big an issue with, especially as it echoes quite a bit from earlier trips to Vietnam. I was uncomfortable during the tour of the USS Pueblo, as its a still-in-commission captured US Naval ship, as well as during various discussions of “just what is wrong with the United States,” but in the end I thought the trade-off to see what few people have been able to see was worth it.