Myohyang: When it comes to untrampled corners of the world, few options are left for getting off the beaten track. Cuba? Not what it once was. Burma? Basically open. Syria? Well, that’s out for now.
But for travellers with an Indiana Jones streak, the one place often considered impossible is becoming increasingly possible: North Korea.
A growing number of Western tourists — called “Europeans” in North Korea, even though they more and more often include Americans — is coming here to see whether this last remnant of the Cold War really is as bad as it’s made out to be.
“I wanted a new experience and wanted to see this place with my own eyes and to form my own views,” said Victor Malychev, a Russian-born telecommunications expert who has lived in Washington for 13 years.
“And I guess I wanted to have a kind of check mark next to it, too,” he conceded while on a tour organised by Young Pioneers, one of the newer travel companies operating in North Korea.
Array of experiences
The handful of tour operators here are offering an increasingly diverse array of experiences — including skiing, cycling and golf. But tourists should be prepared not only to have government minders at their sides continually, but to traipse around monuments to the Kims and their communist dynasty.
Take Mount Myohyang, a beautiful hiking spot about a two-hour drive north of Pyongyang. The main attraction here, a regular stop on the tourist trail, is the International Friendship Exhibition — a six-storey marble-floored building constructed specifically to house the 100,000-odd gifts given to North Korea founder Kim Il-sung, who remains its “eternal president” even two decades after his death.
It’s a real rogues’ gallery: Stalin, Mao, Assad, Gadhafi, Castro and Tito, and the tchotchkes they gave Kim. All of them show how much the world adores Kim and his heirs, or so the official tour guides say.
Many more people could soon be marching through these long, pristine halls, their shoes encased in special covers so they don’t come into contact with the hallowed floors.
Under a new policy, North Korea has set a goal of luring one million tourists to the country, although it has not set a time frame for doing so.
But even those working with North Korea’s tourist industry say this number is “aspirational,” estimating that the country has 100,000 outside visitors a year. The vast majority of them are from neighbouring China, which has the advantage of being not only geographically close but also not far removed from communist ways.
Furthermore, tour operators report that the number of Americans visiting the country has dropped noticeably since two American tourists, Jeffrey Fowle and Matthew Miller, were detained in April. Both have been charged with “hostile acts” and Miller is set to go to trial on Sunday.
But even if North Korea does not achieve its goal of one million, it certainly is receiving many more tourists than it was even a few years ago.
Official figures are not available, but Chosun Sinbo, a pro-North Korea newspaper in Japan, reported that there had been a 20 per cent increase in foreign tourism in North Korea in the first half of 2014 compared with the previous year, although it did not give numbers.
Simon Cockerell, the British general manager of Beijing-based Koryo Tours, one of the first Western travel companies to start tours to North Korea, estimates that 5,000 to 6,000 “Europeans” a year are now visiting North Korea.
Tourist numbers for Young Pioneer have been doubling every year, and the company now brings almost 1,000 people annually into North Korea.
“A lot of people don’t know they can even come here, and then when they get here they say it’s not what they were expecting,” said Rowan Beard, 27, an Australian who runs Young Pioneers. “They think it’s going to be all doom and gloom and death and sad faces.”
Indeed, for all the new places that tourists have been allowed to go in recent years, many others remain off-limits. Tourists are never going to see labour camps where as many as 120,000 political prisoners toil, or the villages where children don’t get enough food because it has been diverted to the military.
“I think I’ve seen part of North Korea,” said Felicity Bloom, 26, of Madison, Wisconsin, who was on the tour with Malychev. “I think the idea that we have in the States is that everyone you interact with will be an actor, but it’s not true. We travelled six stops on the metro, and we interacted with school children who were just as curious about us as we were about them.”
Such experiences were long not available to Americans, but it is now becoming easier for citizens of the “imperialist aggressor” to visit North Korea. About a quarter of Koryo’s tourists come from the United States, Cockerell said.
Tourism is something of a risky proposition for North Korea. The regime has survived over decades by shutting off the country from the outside world, strictly controlling the information its citizens receive so that it could uphold the notion that North Korea was paradise on Earth.
But it also brings in much-needed revenue for the state. Although North Korea is one of the poorest countries, tours here don’t come cheap. An eight-day cycling trip organised by Uri Tours this month costs $2,850 (Dh10,468).
Critics of tourism say that such trips help prop up the regime, which can use the money to further its nuclear programme.
— Washington Post
