It's hard to start describing what my trip to North Korea was like. I really want to say that it was one of the most interesting places I've visited to date, but I suppose each country is interesting in its own way.

All aboard the Pyongyang express

This time around, I was travelling for the first time with my little sister Tash. A friend of mine had just come back from the Pyongyang marathon, and I'd just finished re-reading Stasiland by Anna Funder, and I thought -- jeez, how cool must it have been to see a place like East Germany during the Cold War? Better yet, what's the closest thing I can get to experiencing such a closed-off country now? Several countries fit that description to varying degrees: Eritrea, Turkmenistan, Cuba, etc. But nothing comes close in notoriety to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. After doing some quick online searches, I asked around for some friends to accompany on the trip. However, with unavailabilities left, right, and centre, I texted my little sister and gave her one night to decide if she'd like to come along with me. After doing her due diligence, we were a go.




We signed up to a tour that saw us enter Korea from Beijing, via a series of sleeper trains. These are always a good experience (see my last trip from Bangkok to Chiang Mai), but in the Chinese versions, you get the added bonuses of squat toilets and smokers. The track to the border town of Dandong on the Chinese side and Sinuiju on the Korean side is littered with these empty Chinese cities that you hear about in the news so much. Just hollow apartment blocks rising like giant graveyards into the sky. Otherwise the other interesting thing about the train trip was just how loud some people snore. The guy on the bunk next to me was going at it like a rusty four-stroke engine being revved, and Tash, of course, slept through it all ...






The customs inspection at Sinuiju was the start of all the Korean weirdness. It was emphasised that no photos were to be taken at the station, nor of any of the guards or the military anywhere in Korea. You'd think this meant that they would be pretty strict sort of people (as to be expected). But when the border guards came on, they actually forced our Western guides to 'disco'. By 'disco', they wanted them to dance to North Korean music like they were show monkeys for the guard's entertainment (on the return trip, they forced Tash to go through this rigmarole too, except it was more pervy that time around). They then went through each of our luggage for more than an hour altogether, and marking down what phone brands we had. I don't know how this was relevant to anything, as they didn't even go through the contents of our phone. But they seemed to be subtly impressed when a phone was a Samsung or an LG.







North Korea itself is such an insane place. But also insanely average, and insanely boring, and insanely normal. For context, Otto Warmbier had just been returned to America in a coma after his detention in the country, and on the day we arrived, the news was all ablaze with videos of the intercontinental ballistic missile that had just been fired. Everyone I told about my upcoming trip told me to 'stay safe', but in the 6 days I was there I did not feel like my safety was threatened at all. This doesn't stop the fact that there are secret labour camps in existence full of Koreans, or that the citizens are under state surveillance for any deviation from what they're supposed to do (in one of our meals, there was a Korean lady just peeking out at us over the course of the entire meal behind curtains). Still, the moment we walked around and accepted the fact that we were finally inside one of the most loathed and enigmatic countries in the world, I was just taken aback by how uninteresting everything was.







You can compare it to any underdeveloped Asian country, with hardly any traffic on the streets, but lots of people going about their daily lives, going to shops and cycling along the wide avenues and queuing for the tram. If anything, it was much cleaner and a lot less hectic that other Asian cities. Just old Uzbek trams trundling along and no-brand cars idling by. On the streets, there was no sense of exaggeration (the museums and the monuments were a different matter) nor a sense of poverty, but rather a sense of simpleness. The moment you walk out of Pyongyang, you're surrounded by farmland, where the simplicity is even more pronounced. When I look upon the green paddies and the mountains, I was reminded very much of rural Vietnam (especially with all the crappy potholed roads in the countryside and the anti-American mood). Even at night, I thought that all the lights would black out, but that wasn't the case at all (although random blackouts that lasted a few minutes during the day were not uncommon).


It was also more open in terms of speech than I thought too. When we met our bubbly Korean guide in Pyongyang, the first thing she said on the microphone onboard our coach to the hotel was to tell our Western guide to 'shut the fuck up'. She then went on to complain about Australians being 'boozy bogans' before using every swear word in her arsenal for the next fifteen minutes. By the end of the trip, we weren't even afraid to make jokes about the country to each other anymore (although they still had to be uttered in sly whispers at times). They would also make some very racist and dirty jokes in public, and of course jokes about George Bush. When an American sympathiser in our group started asking very pointed and provocative questions, our Korean guide turned to us and said, 'Who the fuck does he think he is?'



The food wasn't half bad, but seemed to revolve a lot around cucumber, tomato, fish and duck. We got to try out their versions of Korean BBQ, bibimbap, kimchi, the works. Again, they weren't too dissimilar from the Korean food I've been used to, but certainly a lot less fancy. Every meal, I walked away with a full belly. Every night, I went to bed with shots of soju.

Obviously, the propaganda was one of the most pronounced things we had to deal with. Most times it was tolerable and accepted as just part of the experience. At other times though, it would get a bit too much, especially at the War Museum. It seemed like the strongest insult they can throw around was to call someone a 'gangster' or an 'imperialist'. They really seem to believe what they hear about their leaders and about America, which is understandable enough when you've grown up with these things embedded at such an early age and with no access whatsoever to the internet. I already felt like I was lagging behind in current affairs with 5 days of no internet--imagine what it would be like with a lifetime without.



An interesting thing is that street advertisements were completely absent in the country. In the place of billboards, there were large murals of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Un. The only exception to this in all of the country was a single ad for a locally made car. And I think it's only a matter of time before more and more, the monotony breaks down. Already, the country is slowly opening up to joint venture enterprises from Egypt, Malaysia, Singapore. The country is also far ahead compared to other more 'developed' countries. For example, they acknowledge the impacts of climate change, and their principle of housing and jobs for everyone (even if the job in question is joining the military) is to be commended.




The march to progress is slow, and it will be two-sided. For many of those who enjoy the simple life, the idyll will begin to change. And the simplicity definitely comes at a price. For all their bluntness and seeming ability to speak their minds, a lot of their responses to more edgy questions are coy. A lot of the nice new buildings they have parading out on the main streets of Pyongyang are useless, as a lot of the shops on the first floor are empty and the buildings are obviously poorly made. They seem to be proud of their record construction times, not knowing that concrete needs time to cure. A lot of the apartment blocks look like they've been made by slapping mud onto bricks, waiting for it to set, and then splashing some cheerful pastel colour onto it. Just like these buildings, everything is just a facade, and just like these buildings, they are facades waiting to crumble. It is only a question of time.
As a final note, I got some really cool propaganda souvenirs and books with ridiculously long titles. Korea also sent me away with some really bad diarrhoea that I'll have to deal with as I go back into the commotion, the traffic, and the loud noises of life in China ...