All abandoned: Chernobyl / Pripyat, Nara Dreamland, Anti-Zombie Fortress, Japanese Sex Museum – and many, many more! Plus: North Korea Special – 2 trips, 16 days / 14 nights! As seen on CNN…
No matter what you think of marriage in general – weddings in Japan tend to take it to a whole new level, in many regards…
I actually don’t even know where to begin. Maybe I should just shut up, describe the building and get out of here before I write things I might regret later. To be honest with you, I am not exactly the most qualified person to write about weddings as I am not married myself and had to turn down most invitations in both Germany and Japan as I was coincidentally in the other country when they happened. But damn, Japanese weddings are weird!
First of all – getting legally married in Japan is the most unspectacular thing ever. It just takes a few minutes and involves the almighty seals (hanko) of both partners, but not necessarily their presence; one is enough as long as you have the correct documents to stamp. The way more important and spectacular part is the religious ceremony and the party afterwards; or rather parties – three or four (in a row!) are considered rather common.
At a time that Christian nuts are taking over the States and Muslim nuts are taking over the Middle East, the Japanese are very relaxed when it comes to religion. 85% are considered Buddhists, 90% are considered Shintoists, and 1% are considered Christians. “But… Florian, that doesn’t add up properly!” you might say – and you’d be correct! But that’s just part of the craziness, because according to statistics, 53% of Japanese couples marry in a Christian ceremony, 32% in a Shintoist ceremony and less than 1% in a Buddhist ceremony – the rest choose to marry in a secular or other way. Most men couldn’t care less, but Japanese women are basically like: “They nailed that Jesus guy to a cross? Funny, that’s what we did in Japan with Christians for most of the 17th, 18th and 19th century… But whatever! I want that white dress and I am getting that white dress!” (That’s actually not true. Most people in Japan aren’t even aware that their government persecuted Christians for centuries. But it’s only logical when the leader of the country legitimizes his power via their own religion, Shinto.) Most marriages end in ignorance and selfishness, why shouldn’t they start with it?
In Germany you still have to jump through quite a few hoops before being able to getting married in a church – like having several meetings with the local priest, convincing him that you are a dedicated Christian; and of course you better be a registered member and pay church tax! None of that in Japan, of course… most Japanese Christian weddings don’t even take place in real churches!
Since most Japanese live in tiny apartments not suitable for huge parties, most weddings take place at big hotels or specialized places; like the Ibaraki Wedding Palace. There they have decorated rooms for the most common ceremonies; like a love hotel has rooms for whatever turns you on… Comparatively small rooms, as only close family and a few best friends are attending those “religious” ceremonies, then everybody else joins for a rather big party; instead of choosing a considerate gift you pay an “entrance fee” that’s usually between 8000 and 10000 Yen – the couple will let you know in advance… Since Japanese weddings cost about 4 million Yen in average (though common ones are rather half that price!), that first party can be huge. 80 to 100 people are nothing, I’ve heard of friends inviting up to 250 people. And I’ve been invited to weddings of people I barely knew, in one case I actually never met the wife before! With all the fakeness surrounding Japanese weddings one can only hope that the couple’s love is real…
Anyway, the Ibaraki Wedding Palace… was one of those specialized wedding places – but unlike the *shangri-la* it didn’t come with hotel rooms and a pool, it was just a wedding and party venue. In the early 2000s it must have been quite a sight, with tons of tableware and items like fake plastic wedding cakes left behind. Since then it became a victim of arson and several clean-up operations, so when Y. told J. and I that this would be our next location after visiting the gorgeous *Japanese Vintage Pornographer’s House* I couldn’t believe what I heard. That piece of crap? After one of the most gorgeous locations in all of Kanto? Of course I didn’t say anything as I didn’t want to be impolite – and I am glad that I didn’t, because despite the Heian Wedding Palace being a rundown, burned down pile of garbage, it also offered an amazing amount of details; textures, to be more specific. Bent metal beams, charred window frames, tacky colored glass panes, cheap plastic chandeliers. Hardly anything that would deserve the label “beautiful”, but interesting enough to keep me busy for half an hour – then we continued to the third and last location of the day…
In Japan you can barely throw a stone without hitting an abandoned hotel. Most of them are miserable, moldy and completely uninteresting places, but some are worth visiting for special elements – like rooms full of rotting arcade machines!
The Arcade Machine Hotel was actually the second abandoned hotel I explored on *Hachijojima*, an island some 300 kilometers south of Tokyo. It looked huge on Google Maps and it actually took me two visits to fully explore it – during the first one I kind of ran out of time as I wanted to climb Hachijo-Fuji that day, too, so I returned two days later and approached from a different direction to see the missing parts; but first things first.
Upon arrival at the Arcade Machine Hotel I explored the immediate surroundings, only to find out that there was a still inhabited house rather close-by… and that a party was going on at an adjacent field, with cars parked almost up to the hotel. Even from the lobby I was able to hear people laugh and talk, so I had to choose my steps very carefully – luckily everybody was gone by the time that I started taking some video material (of which I published more than 23 minutes with this article). The ground floor of the hotel was pretty interesting, though quite vandalized given that it was abandoned just 10 year ago. The bar still had a soft ice-cream machine and a coffee grinder, the lobby a table video game and old tourism posters, the dining hall some chairs… and the office a lot of chaos. Quite spooky was a room connecting the dining hall with the lobby and the waterfront area. The room itself had some rather interesting soda machines rusting away, but you could also hear water dripping… probably in the dark restrooms – I wasn’t eager to find out.
Instead I was eager to get out and have a look at a really strange concrete annex building, just a short walk away from the main hotel, separated by the complex’s tennis courts. Maybe the living quarters of some employees, for sure home of the hotel’s diving school – there were quite a few posters left behind as well as equipment (like waterproof cases for cameras) and medicine (like the pseudoephedrine hydrochloride a.k.a. Sudafed – “Relieves nasal and sinus congestions due to colds or hay fever”).
Back at the main building I headed towards the waterfront through a greenhouse hallway with mostly dead plants. To the right I saw a small room with a Space Invaders cabinet, followed by a large hall, partly collapsed, with a hotchpotch of arcade machines, freezers and vending machines – I grew up with some of those machines, so it was a really sad sight to see them like that…
Shortly after the hallway split and I went left as I was too lazy to crawl under a roller door, open only one quarter. The floor all of a sudden became quite soft, so I had to watch my steps, and then I reached the waterfront area, a series of vandalized and partly collapsed tatami party rooms as well as the gender separated public baths with a view – you know, the stuff pretty much every abandoned Japanese hotel has. So I hurried back to the main hotel building for a video walkthrough, which turned out to be quite creepy for such a sunny day.
At that point it was a lot later than I hoped it would be, so I left the Arcade Machine Hotel for Mount Hachijo-Fuji… and came back two days later, when I was hiking along the coast. It turned out that the hotel was approachable from there without climbing under nasty, rusty, rotten gates on soft, brittle floors and I finally found what should give this article its name – the hotel’s arcade! The previously mentioned storage hall actually held only maybe half of the machines left behind, most likely less. Corroding away and already beyond repair were a Star Wars pinball machine (!), several Astro City cabinets, Flash Beats by Sega, Namco’s Wani Wani Panic, a Sega air hockey, Dance Dance Revolution Bass Mix (for two players!) and many more… a fully stocked arcade literally vanishing into thin air thanks to the salty humid breeze coming in from the sea, just a stone’s throw away!
You would think that after eight years in Japan surprises and weird situations should become rather rare, yet Hachijojima was full of them – good and bad…
In early 2014 a bunch of interesting looking abandoned hotels popped up on Japanese urbex blogs, with one thing in common: they all were located on an island I hadn’t even heard of before, Hachijojima. Turns out that it is right next to Aogashima, a hard to reach volcanic island that is often part of those “the most remote places in the world” lists that are so popular on Facebook and other social media sites. When you are living in Kansai, basically one big city of 22 million people (plus 0.7 million spread across the countryside), “the most remote place in the world” sounds wonderful, at least to me – so I decided to do a combined Hachijojima / Aogashima trip during the first half of Golden Week. Long story short: I was able to locate three gigantic abandoned hotels on Hachijojima, but I failed to organize the side trip to Aogashima due to unpredictable weather, high risk of boats getting cancelled and the season I was travelling in; *Golden Week can be a real pain* as even the biggest Japanese couch potatoes think that they should travel, because everybody else is. So I stayed on Hachijojima for 3.5 days – part relaxing vacation, part urbex trip.
For the first night I booked a small minshuku on the east coast, just five minutes away from one of the abandoned hotels. Sadly the place turned out to be in a very remote area with hardly anything around… and even worse, it was terribly overpriced due to Golden Week. So instead of extending my stay, I took a taxi to the local tourist information the next morning – and the super friendly staff managed to get me a cute little hut at a local lodge with breakfast, bathroom and internet for the same price as the basic tatami room with shared bath / toilet and without food or internet, a.k.a. the night before. They even drove to my new accommodation to introduce me to the owners of the family business as they barely spoke any English – a pleasant surprise after the cold reception at a local sushi restaurant the previous night; upon entering the chef, smoking outside, was asking his wife who just came in… and she answered “a foreigner”, using the slightly derogative term “gaijin”. Thanks a lot for the warm welcome! Luckily my new hosts were the exact opposite, some of the friendliest and nicest people I ever had the pleasure to meet. Should you ever go to Hachijojima and don’t mind a little bit of a language barrier, try the *pension Daikichimaru*!
I continued Day 2 by exploring the second big hotel on the island before climbing the most famous local mountain, Mount Nishi (literally “West Mountain” – guess where it is located…), better known as Hachijo-Fuji, thanks to its resemblance to Japan’s most famous mountain. 854 meters tall and of volcanic origin, Hachijo-Fuji turned out to be quite an exhausting and steep climb, especially on the last few hundred meters – but the view up there was amazing; one of the most rewarding hikes I ever did. (You can actually see the hiking trail on the first photo I took from the plane during landing approach.) If you are free from giddiness you can even walk along a sometimes just foot-wide path along the crater, but from where I started it looked like a rather risky walk, so I opted to descent to the green hell of Mount Nishi’s caldera; 400 meters wide and 50 meters deep it is home to lavish vegetation and even a shrine!
On the way down from Hachijo-Fuji I made a quick stop at the Hachijo-Fuji Fureai-Farm, a dairy products selling petting farm, which offers a great view at the plain between Hachijojima’s two mountain ranges. Upon arrival at the base of the mountain, near the airport, I came across a local guy and his dog. Despite being on a leash, the pooch ran towards me at full speed, barking like a mad dog (not a spaniel!) without any Englishmen; stopped by the slightly mental grinning owner maybe 20 centimeters from my ankles. Luckily it was one of those field goal dogs and not a German Shepherd or a British Bulldog, so I wasn’t too worried, but still… what a weirdo!
Almost as weird as my visit to a local supermarket the night before. After the sushi snack I had (made from local varieties like flying fish), I thought it would be nice to get some local products, so I entered a mom-and-pop store, the owner at the cash register talking to a customer. I grabbed a couple of things and when I was about to pay I saw the other customer leaving – and the owner told me that the shop was closed. So I asked if I could pay for the items I already grabbed. No! So I put the stuff back, which probably took longer than paying for it, and left empty handed… literally. Really strange 24 hours!
Day 3 was a lot more unspectacular. I took a bus to the southern part of Hachijojima and explored the third gigantic abandoned hotel after passing a police car basically in sight of it. Then I continued by bus to the Nankoku Onsen Hotel – which turned out to be a vandalized, boarded up piece of garbage with a neighboring house just 10 meters across the street. So instead of wasting any time I enjoyed a soak at a really, really nice onsen (without a hotel).
My last day on the island I spent mostly walking – to the Kurosuna sand hill and then along the coast back to the second abandoned hotel and then to the pension, from where I got a free ride to the airport.
Spending a couple of days on Hachijojima was one of the best things I did in all of 2014 – it’s just such a surreal and yet neat place! The main roads on the island for example look brand-new and very expensive. Given the massive drop in tourist numbers one wonders how a place like that can survive financially. Sure, three planes and a ferry per day bring quite a few tourists, but at the same time the three biggest hotels on the island and a few smaller ones are abandoned. Back in the 1950s and 60s Hachijojima was known as “Japan’s Hawaii” as it is much closer to Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya and Osaka than Okinawa, but those days are long gone and I doubt that fishing and some local farm products can pay to keep the island as neat as it is today.
Some of the islanders were just plain weird… and others were quite the opposite, the most helpful and welcoming people you could dream up. While mainland Japan became somewhat predictable to me over the years, Hachijojima gave me that “first visit feeling” back, where you just roll with the punches and expect the unexpected at all times. The nature on Hachijojima was absolutely stunning, the food was amazing (especially at the *izakaya Daikichimaru*, same owners as the pension; the best sushi I ever had!) and I even enjoyed the onsen visit… though usually I don’t like onsen at all – but the entrance fee was part of the bus ticket, so I gave it another try and liked it tremendously. *Facebook followers of Abandoned Kansai* might remember two photos I posted to the “Brand-new and Facebook exclusive!” album in late April this year – those will show up in future articles as I will start the Hachijojima series with the most unspectacular of the three hotels on Thursday, two days from now; though unspectacular is relative, especially if you are into abandoned arcade machines…
Last week Lost, this week The A-Team – TV weeks on Abandoned Kansai! When I first arrived at the Hototogisu Hotel with my buddy *Enric* in February of 2010 (yes, this is the oldest unpublished location of mine I could find!), I was a tiny bit worried that we would get ambushed by those soldiers of fortune, considering the BA Baracus like fortifications of both access routes, but then I remembered that they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn even if their noses would touch the wood!
Back in 2010 the Hototogisu Hotel was one of the hottest urbex spots in all of Kansai, probably because people visiting faced a couple of challenges. First of all was entering the premises. Being located on “the other side“ of a typical onsen town river you could have either headed to the entrance via at least two bridges, one of them a then already collapsed suspension bridge – or you could have crossed a bridge suitable for cars and go to the back entrance via a parking lot. Sadly both ways were blocked by said fortifications that reminded me of that iconic 80s TV show. Or Mad Max. Or any post-apocalyptic movie ever made. Luckily Enric and I found a weak spot in one of the wood and iron made blockades, so we could face phase two: Entering the building. Unlike a lot of other places in Japan the Hototogisu Hotel’s lowest floor was completely bolted shut from the inside and the outside (as you can see in the pictures they nailed and screwed massive wooden boards from the inside to pretty much all doors and windows). So we had to climb an outside staircase, secured by lots of rusty barbed wire, wooden planks and other nasty constructions to keep unwanted visitors out. Doors were locked and nailed shut, so we had to climb through a narrow opening in the spikey wire fence, risking to fall two or three floors to at least serious injuries.
Sceptical at first I was able to follow the more adventurous Enric to explore one of my first abandoned hotel. Back then I still was a very inexperienced photographer without a tripod and only one lense, facing horrible lighting conditions with some corridors being completely pitch black… so sorry, the next couple of sets will be much more interesting!
I also still was a rather inexperienced explorer, so I didn’t fully realize what a rundown and vandalized place the Hototogisu Hotel was. Pretty much every room was trashed, pretty much every window broken, pretty much every item damaged, including a dozen dirty and partly „dismantled“ TVs. Back then I didn’t know about the *La Rainbow Hotel*, the *Nakagusuku Hotel* or the *Wakayama Beach Hotel*, so Enric and I felt like we hit the jackpot. „Look, there is even stuff left behind in the kitchen!“ Darn, we were easy to entertain! 🙂
But leaving the Hototogisu Hotel turned out to be a final challenge. We made it to the external staircase when we realized that a neighbor or something like that had spotted us and was waiting in front of the parking lot barricade – where we came in. Trying to avoid trouble, Enric and I decided to look for another way to leave. The other barricade was not an option, so we headed upstream… and discovered a second big building we didn’t even know about! Not in the mood for another exploration we took a dozen of quick shots and continued deeper into the premises, only to find out that it was cut off by train tracks! Luckily there was a way down to the river, and the river wasn’t very deep in that area. After figuring out a route from the top we headed down, crossed the river and climbed a quite overgrown and steep slope to the main road. Dirty and exhausted we returned to the train station, always worried that said neighbor was looking for us instead of waiting in front of barricade.
What about that second building you ask? Well, I returned a year later with another friend. But that’s a story for another time…
I love maps! I always loved *maps*. When I was a little kid, my grandma taught me the names of every capital in Europe, and my desk pad was a world map. To me, GoogleMaps is the best thing since sliced bread. Whether I need a quick two-minute break or have to kill a rainy day on the weekends, GM is one of my favorite websites of all time, especially since I picked up urban exploration as a hobby. Sometimes I just browse through Japan via the satellite view… and actually find abandoned places, like an abandoned ropeway station I yet have to write about, or the *Abandoned Poultry Farm* I mistook for the *Red Factory*. About two years ago I saw a red roofed building in almost Y shape that caught my eyes – and on Street View the entrance looked abandoned, yet in decent condition…
Well, it turned out that my first exploration in Yamanashi prefecture was a total dud and that the entrance was pretty much the only thing about the Sun Park Hotel Naito that was in decent condition. When my buddy Dan opened the door to the hotel’s bar (the front entrance consisted of massive automatic glass doors that wouldn’t move a millimeter…), I instantly knew that we were up for a disappointment – the smell of rotting carpets, wallpapers and all kinds of other materials was heavy in the air. While the abandoned bar still had a certain 1980s TV show retro charme, the rest of the hotel kept me wondering what the heck I was doing there.
We reached the reception area through a small hallway and went on a short walkthrough of the ground floor (or first floor, as it is called in Japan) – restaurant, kitchen, employee rooms / toilets, offices. The smell was bad and the air probably wasn’t healthy, but it got worse after climbing the sketchy main staircase to the second and third floors. The hallways were completely trashed, everything was rotting, except for the ripped-out yellow insulation that smelled like urine. What a disgusting, miserable place; and the rain outside didn’t help to lighten up the atmosphere. Since the third floor was less vandalized at least some of the rooms were accessible, though none of them contained anything out of the ordinary. The really kitschy telephones were kind of interesting, but that’s pretty much it. My favorite item though was a pillow in the hallway, rotting, partly overgrown by moss. It reminded me of the fading stack of tatami mats at the *Bio Center* in Hokkaido, still one of my favorite photos.
Well, not all abandoned places can be surprise super hits – and the Sun Park Hotel Naito definitely wasn’t a hit. It was just another abandoned countryside hotel, and those are a dime a dozen all over Japan. Luckily every once in a while a few of those mystery hotels turn out to be great finds, so you can look forward to some amazingly unique abandoned hotels on Abandoned Kansai in the future; and… well… some crappy ones, too…
Finding abandoned places is 95% hard work in the form of long hours doing research – and 5% luck; unless you count the limitless amount of dilapidated and rather uninteresting shacks you pass by driving around the Japanese countryside. Then the ratio is probably more like 50/50…
The Wakayama Beach Hotel was one of those 5% lucky finds. An amazing find actually, and it became my favorite abandoned hotel instantly. In spring of 2012 I was on a day trip with a friend of mine from Germany, Dom, when we saw this rather big hotel somewhere along the nearly endless coast of Wakayama prefecture. Abandoned or not? That’s always the exciting question after discoveries like that. The front of the hotel looked like it was just closed for lunch break, but something was strange about the building; for example the fact that hotels usually don’t close for lunch. They are either open or not. So I decided to have a closer look at the back of the hotel, where we ran into a woman walking her dog – since all of us were still on public ground, more or less, we exchanged greetings and went separate ways. From the back Dom and I were able to have a look at the heating room through an open window and at a small greenhouse-like garden over a wall – both looked like they had been abandoned years ago. A pristine, but shut down hotel building on the one hand, an unkempt garden on the other. This was a strange case. At the back of the hotel was also a scary spiral staircase, not really up to modern security standards. Luckily it was Dom’s first urbex experience, as noobs tend to be braver – or they are scared to pieces, but it turned out that Dom belonged to the first group. Before I could even think about it, he went to the closest emergency exit door, grabbed the handle, turned it and… opened the door! I wasn’t surprised that emergency doors were unlocked, I just didn’t expect that they could be opened from the outside…
Seconds later Dom and I were inside the Wakayama Beach Hotel, bright light shining through windows to the left, a rather dark hallway with guest rooms to the right. Since I didn’t have a flashlight with me, the choice was easy: we headed left first. Another turn to the left and I knew we hit the jackpot as we entered an entertainment room with dried out plants – as well as two billiard tables, a table tennis plate, some toy vending machines and half a dozen video game arcade machines. This was so awesome and I was 99% sure that the place was abandoned, until… I heard a strange BANG! A friggin cat outside was hitting her damn tail against the window, almost giving me a heart attack.
From the entertainment room I headed over to the public baths. Both the male as well as the female versions were in almost spotless condition – sweep through and replace the dried out plants with fresh ones and you would be good to go. Same with the rooms along the dark hallway. A couple of minutes of dusting and voila, you’d be able to welcome guests again. Since I didn’t bring a flashlight I was unable to take photos in most of the rooms as it was too dark for my camera to focus – and the videos turned out to be dark and grainy and a bit blurry, too; sorry for that, but it might help you understand how I felt wandering through this spooky, unknown territory. As exciting as it is to make an original find, it’s also nerve-wrecking as you don’t know anything about the place – the layout, the security status, the biohazard lab in the basement… And the next shock followed soon, when I realized that the red emergency light near the fire hydrant in the hallway was still burning! One element of a building being abandoned is that nobody feels responsible for paying the electricity bill – and when nobody pays the electricity bill, usually the power gets cut. But according to several calendars in the kitchen and other places, the hotel wasn’t used anymore for at least three years… yet there was still power, at least for the HAL-like lights.
That in mind Dom and I went downstairs to the ground floor, with its lobby, a bar stuck in the 70s and a gift shop – and an irregular sound in the background, as if two pieces of wood were hit against each other. It was spooky, especially when I saw a cat running across the room and down the small staircase to the basement. I totally fell in love with the bar area, so I took a couple of photos there, but that clicking wooden sound started to drive me nuts!
When Dom and I finally left the Wakayama Beach Hotel we had spent more than two hours there, constantly changing our minds whether this place was really abandoned or just closed – which didn’t really matter in the end, as urban exploration is one big grey area in that regard anyway; the hotel was definitely out of use for several years. (*Nara Dreamland* and tons of famous “abandoned” places all over the world still have security, which makes them “not abandoned” by definition; if they were, nobody would pay for security…)
Over the past four and a half years I’ve been to several abandoned hotels in really good condition, but what made the Wakayama Beach Hotel so special was its amazing 70s style lobby, the beautiful shared baths and of course the entertainment room with the arcade machines – the whole hotel had this exciting vibe of several past decades, but in almost new condition, as if it was time-warped to 2012; with its own power source for the HAL lights…
“What kind of place did I just leave that entering China feels like gaining freedom?!”
That’s what I was thinking upon leaving North Korea for the second time – because leaving the second time definitely felt different.
When I crossed the border at Dandong a few months prior I felt a bit wistful. Something was dragging me back instantly, I was mesmerized by my experiences. Dandong felt very surreal, like a completely different world. And although I wasn’t 100% serious that I would visit the DPRK again when I promised to do so to my Pyongyang guides, I somehow had a feeling that it wasn’t totally out of question.
When I was leaving North Korea for the second time I was actually glad to get out of there. The trip had been way too interesting to be considered a bad one, but this time was much more intense, I witnessed and found out things that would take me much longer to process than the lifetime worth of experiences I made in Pyongyang.
After Pyongyang I started writing right away. I went there ignorant on purpose, I wanted to enjoy the show and embrace the deception – which is so not me as I hate being lied to, but I figured it would be easier to go with the flow when visiting North Korea. (It’s definitely tough going against it when living in Japan…)
After the Northeastern Adventure I took a lot more time, hoping that I would be able to use it to process and structure my thoughts – to make sense of what I saw, heard, tasted, smelled, felt. In hindsight probably not a good idea as I don’t think it helped much, but I started to forget details. Details that weren’t essential, but details nonetheless. At least it gave me the confidence to write everything as I remembered it, because after my return to Japan (and seeing how messed up in its own way this country here is) it took me less than a week until the urge to go back rose. I wasn’t lying awake night after night trying to find a way to “go back to the island”, but North Korea is a decent size country that is opening up to tourism more and more, which is great for the half dozen travel agencies offering trips, because they can lure customers back easily. “You’ve been to Pyongyang, Kaesong, North Hamgyong and Rason, but… XYZ is open now – and you can be part of the first tourist group to get there!” And that is one of the selling points of North Korea, to boldly go where hardly any man has gone before.
Do I want to go back to North Korea? Heck yeah! I’m a sucker for remote and unusual places that offer photo opportunities, that’s what this blog is all about! Of course I would love to go back to North Korea, despite the fact that I was really angry (and happy to leave!) last time.
Will I go back to North Korea? Most likely not. Not under the current regime.
Why? Because I have the ability to remember. I remember Robocop and how he treated that boy at the market in Rason, I remember how I felt being ratted out by that old woman in Rason, I remember looking at GoogleMaps, realizing how close we came to some of the death camps – which hopefully will be remembered as a stain on the history of humankind once this ridiculous regime dissolves and all Koreans enjoy (relative) freedom.
There are some voices out there on the internet who are convinced that North Korea can be opened little by little if more and more tourists visit the country – sadly most of those voices are actually either fooled Pyongyang tourists or western tour guides to the DPRK. And I am not sure what to think of the idea. North Korea is so full of contradictions, yet the system survived for so long – can a couple of thousand tourists driven around in busses with tinted windows really make a difference? After thousands of tourists before didn’t make a difference?
When visiting Pyongyang you kind of get the image that the DPRK is a misunderstood country which is struggling to survive and doesn’t want no harm to nobody in the world; but that’s the microcosm Pyongyang, where only the elite is allowed to live and where resources from all over the country get concentrated. In North Hamgyong and even in the comparatively rich Rason I felt transported 20 or 30 years back in time – and I started to wonder why North Korea even allows those tourist tours, because like so many things in the country, the tours don’t really make sense. I don’t think it’s about the money, because there are not nearly enough tourists to the DPRK to justify the effort. In Pyongyang I can see it being about changing foreigners’ minds. The regime will never win over the western media, but they can create positive word of mouth. But why allowing western tourists to North Hamgyong and Rason? Korean is not the most common language in the world, but there are always one or two people in each group who are able to speak it – and if not, people know people who know the language. Sure, while at the clothing factory in Rason I didn’t know that one of the slogans on a pillar said “Ideology First”, but it didn’t matter, because I knew a few days later, so congratulations to the factory management, you fooled me for a couple of days! But that didn’t keep me from telling a couple of thousand readers that, while you seem to treat your workers well, you also bombard them with propaganda music and propaganda slogans – and that you use “Made in China” labels. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg as you know, since I mentioned all the little things in the previous eight articles.
So why is North Korea allowing foreign tourists in the country, when it fails to deceive them and continues to indoctrinate its citizens. When things like the electric fence are continuously brought up (or maybe even revealed) by tourists? Why allowing small scale foreign aid that doesn’t get mass media attention, when Juche, Korea’s autarky, is the state’s ideology and most important goal?
The answer is: I don’t know. North Korea is full of contradictions, almost everything there is tied to a contradiction. The more you know about North Korea, the less it makes sense. And I’ve spend a lot of time in 2013 talking about North Korea and actually being there…
That being said I am very glad that I did those two trips. I made a lifetime worth of experiences, good and bad, met some extraordinary people (also good and bad…), saw and did things I wouldn’t have thought of in my wildest dreams. First I went there during the political crisis of 2013 and then again just weeks before Merrill Newman was arrested and Kim Jong-un had his uncle executed – and in-between I could understand very well why some friends and my whole family were worried about my security.
If you are interested in visiting North Korea, I hope my two travel reports were helpful to you. If you are just interesting in North Korea, I hope I was able to show you a different, a neutral side of what it is like to be a tourist there. And if you are mostly interested in urban exploration, I hope you enjoyed both series nonetheless – thanks for sticking with Abandoned Kansai, I promise I will make it up to you on Tuesday with a mind-blowingly amazing deserted hotel! (There will be two or three more articles about North Korea in the future, but none of them will put my urbex articles on hold for weeks…)
Since I came back from my second trip I’ve been asked a lot of times where I will go next, by both friends and strangers. Where can I go next after I went to North Korea? For a while I didn’t have an answer, I was considering Siberia or Alaska, but now I can tell you what the main event this year will be: I will go back home to Germany for almost three weeks (a.k.a. annual leave) to celebrate the wedding of one of my best friends – and I can’t wait to do so!
My last day in North Korea started with another unpleasant experience. Since I was early at the bus in front of the Pipha Hotel, I used the waiting time to walk 30 meters down the driveway and take a picture of the carved in stone hotel sign. I kept in sight of both the hotel and the bus, yet Robocop was slightly upset when I came back three minutes later. What I was taking pictures of, he asked me. So I told him and offered to show him the pictures. “No, it’s okay.” Thank you so much, Sir, how generous!
When everybody was ready, we drove down to that snack shop looking building at the beach and walked across a bridge to Pipha Island – or Pipa / P´ip´a / Pípá / Bipa Island, depending on the sign. Fun fact: The Chinese characters the Koreans used on signs were 琵琶, as in Lake Biwa (琵琶湖), Japan’s largest freshwater lake, just across the mountains from Kyoto and home to many abandoned places, like the *Biwako Tower & Igosu 108* – all the places and hotels are named after the same item, a lute. After about 20 minutes of easy hiking we reached the Pipha Island Hotel (which reminded me a little bit of a pink painted *Nakagusku Hotel*) and some landing piers for boats. The most interesting thing there was a large container painted in silver – and when you walked around it, you could see that the back wasn’t painted over and still showed the logo of its original owner, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, part of the Mitsui Group and one of Japan’s largest companies…
But we weren’t going to Pipha Island to discover more about the crazy relationship between North and East Korea, we were there to have a look at the island itself (our guides talked about it for two and a half days!) and to go on a boat ride. Just north off the coast was North Korea’s only nature reservation site… for seals! Of course they charged us an additional 100 RMB per person, but how many people can claim they went on a boat ride in North Korea? Although the question should probably be “How many people want to claim that?” as the landing stage was an equally rusty and brittle construction of metal tubes and planks. The boat itself didn’t look too trustworthy either, but hey… no risk, no fun! So we headed out to seals, followed by a swarm of seagulls, Robocop being happy like a child. (Well, happy like a happy child, not like the child he yelled at the day before!)
Speaking of seals: Out dear guideguards kept referring to the Russian tourists visiting Rason as “seals” – mainly because, according to them, they are fat and lie at the beach all day; which is kind of funny and hilariously unprofessional at the same time. I guess you don’t need to know much about the world to be a racist…
After spending almost three days in Rajin we finally drove to Sonbong, the second name-giving part of Rason. There, at the Sonbong Revolutionary Site, I should make my scariest run-in with the local authorities.
Sonbong (a.k.a. Unggi) is famous for being the harbor Kim Jong-il landed at upon his return from Russian exile at age 4. Now there is a nicely gardened revolutionary site at the city center, including the former house of a Japanese businessman. While Mr. Kim was talking I had a look around and went to the backside of the house, taking a couple of photos out of sight of the rest of the group. When I returned to the group I saw a local senior citizen talking to Robocop and I knew I was in trouble. After finishing the conversation Robocop came straight at me, demanding to see my photos. Not “Can I please have a look at the last photos you took?” – no, “Show me your photos!”. I didn’t have a guilty conscience, so I happily showed him the last dozen photos I took, but it was nevertheless a friggin scary moment! Getting denunciated by a North Korean woman in North Korea… Wow, that was so weird. But it also shows how deeply rooted their obedience is, and this culture of ratting out other people. Rason is a Special Economic Zone for about 20 years, there are foreigners (Russians) around for much longer. Western tourist groups are becoming more of a regular sight in Rason, some foreigners running joint ventures are living there – yet that old lady felt the urge to run to the authorities right away (even when she saw the big group of tourists accompanied by three Korean officials in suits!) and report that one foreigner, who was taking photos when nobody was around. It’s actually quite sad and one of the countless hardly visible difficulties Korea will face if the country ever gets reunited. But of course I didn’t take any problematic photos (in Sonbong), so Robocop got off my case with a simple “It’s okay.” after he went through my photos – no explanation, no apology.
At that point I was actually happy to finally leave the country. Between the delusional guides in North Hamgyong and the paranoid-lying bunch in Rason I was so tired of all those crazy characters you had to experience yourself to believe that they were real. (My fellow travelers were lovely though. I usually don’t like bigger groups, or smaller groups, but hanging out with this gang 24/7 never felt like a burden.)
After lunch at a restaurant with a small Christmas tree we left Sonbong for the countryside. With that it was clear that Mr. Kim lied to me for the past two days and we were not going to another local store. Most people spent their remaining local currency on water and other drinks at the restaurant, but I had too much left, which I wasn’t happy about. It was completely out of the question to give it to the guides as an additional tip, so I was contemplating what to do with it. Leave it somewhere? Flush it down a toilet? Burn it?
Luckily I didn’t do the latter! After I got back from the trip I read all kinds of articles about Yanji, Rason and North Hamgyong. One was about a journalist in Yanji interviewing refugees. In 2009 North Korea undertook a currency reform, replacing old won with new won. There was an exchange limit of 500.000 won, but even poorer people were worried that having too much cash might raise questions, so they got rid of it. One interviewee reported that one guy burned a couple of bills and got caught. Shortly after he was executed – because he burnt the image of Kim Il-sung… So aside from not being practicable, it’s generally not a good idea to burn local money in North Korea!
I ended up handing the remaining won to Mr. Kim, along with a huge stack of RMB and 15 postcards – as I mentioned before, postage was 2.5 EUR per card, and he promised to take care of them as we never made it to a post-office or shop. “It is my honor and my duty!” were his words when I thanked him. The cards were supposed to arrive after six to eight weeks, two weeks longer than from Pyongyang in spring. Guess what! Four months later not a single one of them has arrived; not mine, not those of my fellow travelers! (I wrote them an e-mail last week to find out about it…) I don’t know if Mr. Kim took our money and never posted the cards, if the person he gave them to just threw them away, or if the postal operators in Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, the States and New Zealand all failed – but I am absolutely not happy about it!
Last tourist destination of the trip was the Three Border Viewpoint in the far northeast corner of North Korea, where the DPRK borders China and Russia. Landmarks were a watchtower in China and the railroad bridge across the river Tumen between North Korea and Russia. On the Korean side it was the Sungjondae, a memorial in honor of Yi Sun-sin, who invented the turtle ship and repeatedly defeated the Japanese invaders in sea battles at the end of the 16th century.
After a 90 minute drive to the Chinese border at Wonjong / Wonchong (passing smaller towns like *Tumangang*, which I secretly filmed), we went through what was supposed to be the most nerve-wrecking luggage check. On the way in we had nothing to lose, but on the way out each and every one of us had tons of photos, videos, books, magazines and other things. To my surprise this border check was complete mayhem. They collected all the foreign books and electronics again, but it was so chaotic that they missed people and weren’t very thorough with the rest of us – dozens of Russians and Chinese just added to the turmoil. The suitcases were x-rayed, but without much attention. In the end the check was a lot less thorough than eight days prior. Then we boarded a really crowded bus with a lot of cross-border commuters and off we went. The 600 meter ride took about 15 minutes as first there was some struggle over the bus fee and then somebody took photos on the bus, much to the dislike of some officials. Entering China was a piece of cake and after eight days on horrible roads it was so nice to drive for two hours straight without bouncing in your seat like a bobblehead.
Upon arrival at the Ryugyong / Liujing Hotel in Yanji we watched one final North Korean performance (without being dragged into it!) while having dinner together, before one after another said goodbye to the group. Most of them were flying to Beijing early next morning, but I had to stay another night in Yanji since there were no flights by Korean Air to Seoul on Tuesdays – a blessing in disguise as I was able to explore the *amazing half-abandoned amusement park in Yanji’s city center*.
Rason being surrounded by mountains and me being an avid hiker, I asked Mr. Kim (not comrade Kim, we were not in North Hamgyong anymore!) on Saturday if hiking was a popular hobby in the DPRK – he said no, and his answer wasn’t a surprise. When you have to walk everywhere because hardly anybody has a car and only a few more have bikes, the one thing you don’t want to do in your rare spare time is walking… up a mountain. At least in that regard 99.9999% of humans are the same, because when you look at the history of mountaineering, it’s basically just 200 years old; and it weren’t the poorest of the poor who started it.
Interestingly enough sightseeing on Day 7 started in front of a gigantic hiking map. Mount Sahyan is overlooking Rajin and promised to offer stunning views. Surprisingly North Koreans and Japanese are quite similar when it comes to mountain climbing, and so our dear hosts built a road to the top of the damn thing – much like Mount Ibuki, one of Japan’s 100 Famous Mountains. Luckily Mr. Kim remembered my question from the day before, so he stopped the bus and we walked the last few hundred meters, the mountain still partly cloaked in clouds. I loved it!
The view from the observation platform was stunning and thanks to the additional height I was finally able to make use of my 200mm zoom. Not that there was something secret to take pictures of… at least not looking down the mountain. Maybe up there? It seems like somebody was living right under the platform (clothes drying in the sun, a photo I had to take secretly), and two of my fellow travelers spotted an electric fence in the middle of some scrubs – and close to the mountain top was some shell construction going on. Of course nobody mentioned anything, so we left without bringing up tricky questions.
Rason’s pride and joy clearly is its harbor – not the more or less abandoned one in Sonbong, but the one in Rajin, especially the Russian pier. At the time of our visit the place was one big chaotic construction site, but that didn’t keep our hosts from showing us all the modernizations – mostly done by Russians with Japanese equipment. A dredger was deepening the harbor basin and a dozen new cranes were prepared for their tasks. After finally reconstructing the train line between Rason and Russia, the harbor’s tracks were modernized, too – and unlike in spring nobody kept us from taking photos of those trains, which were about 1/20 as old as the ones I saw between Pyongyang and the Chinese border.
One pier east of the Russian one we made another stop to take some photos. The most interesting motif there was a really old ship towards pier #1. Upon closer look you could see four different names, some of them overlapping. A Japanese one, a Chinese one, a Korean one, then a layer of white paint and the current Chinese one written in black letters. Not really a surprise to see such a vessel in North Korea (I think I’ve seen more barely swimming ships than decent ones in the DPRK), nevertheless a nice find.
Right before lunch we stopped by at the Foreign Language Bookshop in Rajin, which was nothing like the one in Pyongyang or the stamp shop in Kaesong. No propaganda postcards, just relatively dull photo postcards of Mount Chilbo. No English books, or hardly any. A couple of out of date maps and quite a decent collection of DVDs (music and movies) as well as Korean comics – since those turned out to have at least some insight value (western characters were clearly unflattering caricatures) I got half a dozen of those and a set of postcards to send home. The reunification postcard I sent to myself from Pyongyang is still one of my favorite souvenirs ever, which left 14 for family and friends. Of course capitalism is strong in Rason and so it wasn’t really a surprise that postage was 2.5 EUR per postcard! I don’t remember 100%, but I am pretty sure that I paid one EUR per card half a year prior in Pyongyang… let alone that the nominal value of the stamps were 155 North Korean won, less than 2 cent! (31 times the price of *a subway ride in Pyongyang*, but at the same time more than 125 times of what they actually charge tourists.)
After lunch we visited the Hae’an Park in Rajin’s city center (not to be confused with the significantly more famous Heian Park in Kyoto!). But of course it wouldn’t have been North Korea if things wouldn’t have been twisted there, too. First of all: Hae’an Park wasn’t free, although it looked like any generic public park anywhere else in the world; except for the big screen showing a North Korean movie. Locals as well as foreigners had to pay a fee at the gate, of course at a special rate for foreigners. Since it was included in the tour fee it shouldn’t matter to me, but stuff like that annoys me quite a bit under certain circumstances. Special rates for foreigners – postage, entrance fee, everything. Sure, I’m from a rather rich country and I don’t consider myself a stinted person… I basically don’t mind paying a markup in poorer countries, although I don’t get a discount when I travel in richer ones. It actually only really pisses me off when lying or cheating is involved. Like at that one park in Beijing, where the entrance fee was 2 RMB; I gave 10 and received 7 back. I honestly don’t care if the entrance fee is 2 RMB, 3 RMB, 5 RMB or 10 RMB, especially when on vacation. But don’t cheat me out of 50%! But who would argue over 1 friggin yuan when you don’t know Chinese? I didn’t, but I will forever remember Beijing as a city of liars and cheaters! (It wasn’t the only “incident”. The Beijing leg of my *spring trip to North Korea* was one big nightmare… Whereas people in Yanji were rather lovely.)
Anyway, Hae’an Park charging an entrance fee. How ironic. Of all the countries in the world, I expected parks in North Korea to be free of charge…
Guess whom we met just minutes later! Tomas The Brewer. The brewpub he was responsible for was (and still is) located in Hae’an Park, so we did a little detour and had a closer look. Brand-new building close to the beach, two containers with equipment just a stone’s throw away. Everything imported from the Czech Republic, down to the hop and malt, in a joint venture between the Rason government and Zvu Potez. Tomas was there for about half a year to supervise the construction / installation and to teach a couple of locals how to brew beer. (Another similarity between North Korea and Japan! When the latter opened to the west in the 19th century, it hired experts from all over the world to import knowledge – among them were German brewers at what is now known as Kirin.)
Back at the main area of the Hae’an Park I ran into more acquaintances: two of the three girls I talked to at the Foreign Language School the day before were roller skating! They obviously had no idea that we would be at the park, you could clearly see it on their faces when they saw us – and they always kept their distance. Makes me wonder how good their English really was. When we stayed on-topic it was pretty good, way better than mine at age 13 actually, but they succeeded at not risking the good impression they made 24 hours earlier.
Mind-blowing highlight of the day was visiting the market in Rajin, the only market in North Korea open to foreigners. Most of the time our Korean guardguides were calm and collected, but all of a sudden they became tense – no camera, no cell phone, no bag, no nothing! Wallet and jacket, that’s it, everything else we had to leave back at the bus. People always tell me that my photos of North Korea look so empty. It’s because usually we were not allowed to take photos in more crowded areas. And that market was crowded! We were basically pushed and shoved through the halls and along the paths between the outdoor stalls. Split into sections, the market offered basically everything you can imagine – from clothing to office supplies, from electronics to food. While people all over country (except for the political elite) were eating kimchi or corn for half of the year, the food section at the market in Rason was stocked like a Japanese supermarket, including some fruits I had never seen before in my life. The whole experience was like a rollercoaster ride, everything rushed by in no time. Sadly the following story, too, so I report it to the best of my memory:
You have probably heard about North Korean street children. Every once in a while short sequences of shaky low quality video pop up, taken by undercover aid agencies. There are orphanages in North Korea, but I am not familiar enough with the social structure of the country or how interested the state really is in picking up additional eaters it has to take care of. Maybe it’s easier to have them living in the streets – or maybe everything just South Korean propaganda (I doubt that though!). Anyway, I was so distracted by all the chaos of the market, that I didn’t pay attention whether there were children or not. Our “big” group (of 12 at this point… plus guides) split into two or three smaller groups, reunited, split, reunited. Some of us westerners spent remaining local currency on small purchases, like cigarettes, sweets, fruits and vegetables – even with rather little money we got rather big amounts of chestnuts, roasted peanuts, banana chips and other things. We were already on the way out when I saw how someone from our group gave a huge handful of chestnuts to a young boy, maybe six or seven years old, not exactly well-dressed; the first kid I consciously saw there at the market. Then everything happened even faster. One of our guardguides must have observed that act of kindness, bawled at the group member and at the same time slapped the chestnuts out of the kid’s hand. He then started yelling at the boy, who ran away. Everything happened so fast that I am still not 100% sure if everything really happened that way, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. You have to deal with a lot of bullshit when visiting North Korea, I think I have been pretty clear about it here, and most of it I accepted as part of the experience. But there is absolutely no reason, under no circumstances, for a highly privileged party member (who could buy whatever he wanted at the market, just from the tips he was about to receive the next day from a dozen western tourists!) to slap food out of the hand of a skinny boy with a dirty face. Behavior like that disgusts me beyond believe – and what made it even worse was when the same guardguide fed pieces of steamed buns to seagulls the next day with childish joy on his face!
(Since I still had local money when leaving the market I asked Mr. Kim twice that day, if we could visit the same or another mixed goods store again, so I could spend those won – he said yes, but didn’t follow through.)
After visiting the market our whole group was kind of deflated. We drove to the Rajin Hotel, years ago the prime tourist accommodation in the area, for a cup of coffee. What once might have been the pride of Rajin was just a shadow of its former glory. I’ve actually been to abandoned hotels in Japan that were in better condition. Most windows were cracked and some walls were moldy, even in the area we sat in. More than an hour we wasted this way before we continued to…
… another accommodation we didn’t stay at. This time the (in)famous Emperor Hotel & Casino, Rason’s only 5 star hotel, built and run by the Hong Kong based Emperor Group. Opened in 2000 after an investment of 64 million USD, the hotel targets rich Chinese businessmen and tourists who are able to afford one of the more than 100 rooms at a rate between 780 and 1680 RMB (between 128 and 276 USD). According to our guides most guests actually don’t leave the hotel much and instead spend their time gambling at the casino – which kind of explains the condition of the beach behind the hotel and the path leading there.
I was bored in the hotel lobby within seconds, so I asked Mr. Kim if we were allowed to have a look outside. He said yes and I bolted instantly without even having a look at the casino. (Especially since we had to buy chips to get in – of course we could return them without playing, but why the hassle? There are casinos everywhere in the world.) Outside I took a few photos up the mountain where our hotel was and then I went to the seaside to have a look at the back of the Emperor Hotel. Within a couple of minutes Robocop showed up. “What are you doing out here alone”, he asked me, sounding like a Russian mobster who was going to whack me. “You shouldn’t do that!” So I dug as deep as I could and told him how much I enjoy nature in the DPRK and that I couldn’t stand to spend more time inside of that building. Robocop bought it and we actually had a nice conversation – the only nice conversation, as our stiff third guardguide usually wasn’t much of a talker… unless he yelled at poor children. I’m actually pretty sure that the girls at the Foreign Language School spoke better English than him. Anyway, while we were outside pretending to have a natural conversation, Robocop talked on his cell phone two or three times – and even within knowing any Korean it wasn’t really a surprise when five minutes later the rest of the group showed up. Felt like being back in Japan, you are nothing without your group…
As a group we finally made it to the beach, which clearly hadn’t seen any cleaning or other kind of maintenance in quite a long time, despite it being a really nice beach with crystal clear water. Since most people were making small talk, one of our more investigative members went on a walk along the beach towards a small building, probably a snack shop. After a while Robocop’s spider senses must have tingled, because he was bolting after the fleeing “sheep” – who sped up when realizing what was happening. It was actually quite funny to watch and gave a couple of other people the opportunity to have a closer look around. Not that there was much to see, but it was always nice when Robocop was distracted. Five minutes later guard and guarded came back, “having a nice conversation”. A busy day for minder #3…
The day’s entertainment program ended at the Pipha Folk Hotel. Before dinner we had a little workshop about how to make kimchi, after dinner (sometimes with electricity, sometimes without) I took the opportunity to write the postcards I bought earlier that day. When we were about to leave, the waitresses “insisted” on performing for us in a separate karaoke room with the nastiest laser show I’ve ever seen – the kind where you are in constant fear of going blind, which isn’t exactly unlikely given the close relationship between North Korea and China. Of course the performance turned into a join-in party and I was just glad when we finally made it back to the Pipha Hotel…
Alone at that beach on a rough coast, the sun rising, an ice-cold wind blowing – Day 4 of the Northeastern Adventure was off to a perfect start!
At first it didn’t look like it though. I am not an early riser, yet my third night in North Korea ended 10 minutes prior, when our host brought hot water to our room at around 6.20 in the morning. At the same time a dog started to bark and all of a sudden I knew that I wouldn’t go back to sleep, so I jumped into my clothes instead. Still a little bit sleepy and not yet used to the cold (in Osaka it was still around 30°C!) I stumbled down the dirt road for a few dozen meters until I reached the beach, slightly irritated by the patches of frost on the grass ground – you see that about two days a year in Osaka… which means that Osakans start to wear North Face jackets when the temperature falls below 10°C; at night! I was looking up then, the sun still scratching the horizon, when happiness about my decision not to stay at the room and to head outside instead rose within me. There is something about the combination of nipping air, solitary and beautiful raw nature that puts a smile on my face.
It turned out that Day 4 was actually all about the stunning nature of Mount Chilbo, so we headed out to the Hadok Falls and several viewing points within the Inner Chilbo area. Some we drove up to, but sometimes we hiked for a while (up to a kilometer or two) to reach our destinations. Again a beautiful autumn day at gorgeous locations! Irritating and amusing at the same time were the explanations of our guideguards, when they continued to telling us stories about pretty much every rock in sight. “This we call XYZ, because it looks as if ABC is doing DEF with GHI!” – and of course in most cases there were just rocks with no resemblance or relation to whatever we were told happened there. But Mr. Li came up with one mythological story after another. Stories he really seemed to believe in…
Quite a rare sight was the Kaesim Temple! North Korea isn’t exactly a religious country, so most “sacred” buildings surviving the Japanese occupation and the Korean War were destroyed afterwards. Not so this temple, founded in 826. Restored in 1377 and equipped with a bronze bell from 1764, the temple is an important depository for scriptures, sculptures and paintings.
An unexpected sight was a huge portrait of Kim Jong-il and three other guys halfway up a hill, depicting the group in the Mount Chilbo area. It seemed terribly out of place, but I guess with an increased amount of tourists in the future you have to remind people who was the boss and who started to develop the area for comrades on vacation. It was never mentioned specifically during the tour, but it seems like Kim Il-sung never visited Mount Chilbo as it was too rural and undeveloped during his days.
After a rather late lunch at the Outer Chilbo Hotel (with a group of exile North Koreans living in Japan on the next table – probably pachinko people…) we spent almost two hours on the bus on our way to Kyongsong. We arrived at the Yombun Revolutionary Site during dusk, with just enough light left to take a couple of photos before heading to the Kyongsong Local Hot Spa House (part of the Kim Jong-suk Sanatorium), where some of us took a hot bath. After seven years in Japan still not a fan of the onsen culture there, two other guys and I headed for the Kyongsong Guest House, the local and really basic accommodation – no blackouts, but again neither hot nor running water.
(Funny story: At least one of my fellow travelers took their camera with them into the spa house, but for obvious reasons not into the bath. Later that evening they were told by our western guide that the Korean guides recommended to delete some of their photos! Nothing like privacy, eh?)
The night at the Kyongsong Guest House was not only our last evening with our first set of guides, it was also the 40th birthday of Mr. So, who did a good job keeping us on schedule and ironing out any problems in the background, while Mr. Li kept us entertained and within limits. Dinner was even bigger than usual and after a rather melodramatic speech by Mr. So the celebrations began – including lots of alcohol and songs. Even our third guide, Mr. Sin, loosened up and wouldn’t stop singing, dancing and drinking…
(Speaking of third guides: A third guide is only present if Americans are part of the group! The western tour guides were always vague about it and kind of made it sound as if it was coincidence whether or not a third guide would be with a group, but according to more experienced fellow travelers it really depends on the presence of Americans…)
My twelfth day in North Korea across both trips was probably my favorite one overall. I love spending time in the countryside and this day had it all. A wonderful sunrise at a gorgeous beach, light hiking at a stunning mountain range and a beautiful sunset at the wild cliffs of a revolutionary site – in addition to that good food and interesting conversations. An almost perfect day…
Abandoned Kansai 