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North Korea Revisited: Epilog

Posted in Airport, Amusement Park, Animals, Asia, Beijing, China, Chongjin, Dandong, DPRK, Food, Hiking, Hoeryong, Hotel / Ryokan, Japan, Kaesong, Korea, Kyongsong, Map, Military, Monument, Mount Chilbo, Museum, Nampo, Night, Non-Urbex, North Hamgyong, North Korea, Photography, Pyongyang, Rason, Restaurant, Russia, School, Store, Transportation, Travel, Video, Visited in 2013, Yanji, Zombies on 2014/02/21| 6 Comments »

“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!

(Please *click here to get to Abandoned Kansai’s North Korea Special* and *here for a map about the tour at GoogleMaps*. *Like Abandoned Kansai on Facebook* if you don’t want to miss the latest articles and exclusive content – and subscribe to the *video channel on Youtube* to receive a message right after a new video is online…)

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North Korea Revisited: Day 5 – Kyongsong, Chongjin, Rason

Posted in Asia, Chongjin, DPRK, Food, Kindergarten / Nursery, Korea, Kyongsong, Map, Military, Monument, Non-Urbex, North Hamgyong, North Korea, Photography, Rason, Restaurant, Travel, Video, Visited in 2013 on 2014/02/06| 11 Comments »

Why staying at Kyongsong? Because if the town was good enough for Kim Il-sung, his wife and his son, it is damn good enough for any western tourist! And of course there were more things to see, like the house the most famous Kims stayed at while giving guidance on location, now part of the Kyongsong Revolutionary Museum. There we listened to some “fascinating” stories about the Kim family, for example about how Kim Jong-il was really smart at a very young age. When he asked his mother Kim Jong-suk why most animals drink with the help of their tongues, but not chickens, his mother told him to observe the feathered fellas and come to a conclusion by himself. So he watched the chickens for seven days straight and then told his mom the correct answer at age 5!

Just out of town we visited the Jipsam Revolutionary Site, where three generals met during the Japanese occupation to defeat the invaders. Luckily our guides kept the story short; either because they were still hung over or because they slightly panicked when they saw planes practicing starting and landing at the nearby Kyongsong-Chuul Airport a.k.a. Kyongsong-Chuul Military Airfield. We got permission to take photos freely, except of the airplanes. Which was kind of hard to do, because the machines were coming down every other minute right over the scenic fishermen’s village. Luckily the planes were so tiny in the distance that nobody really cared – yet Mr. Li yelled another “No take photos!” at me when I took one of a boat on the shore. So we were allowed to take photos of everything – except for the unmentioned things they didn’t want us to take photos of. Sometimes I really had the impression that our guideguards had no clue what they were doing… So I paid even more attention to keep out of their sight without losing contact completely, because nothing is worse than an unaccounted tourist! And by chance it happened that I “accidentally” caught some of the planes on video when filming the coastline. I have no idea what kind of planes were starting and landing there, but the whole thing felt like a WW2 airshow. If that was a representative example of the DPRK’s airforce, those poor pilots better stay on the ground and hide somewhere in case of another war!

Next on the itinerary was a stop at a kindergarten in Chongjin – and we all know what that means, right? Singing and dancing children! Yay!
Luckily this kindergarten had so much more to offer, involuntarily!
For example the playground in the yard. Sure, it was a bit rundown, but it had a new layer of paint recently. And the rides were awesome, amongst them a rough merry-go-round with rockets and even a small Ferris wheel. I think children all over the world would have loved those playground attractions. The problem was: I am sure none of them had been used in the past couple of months, since branches of nearby trees blocked their movement! At first I was like “Hey, cool, those are awesome!” before the “Wait a minute…” moment kicked in. Kind of sad to maintain those rides and then make no use of them.
But that’s not all, because we also got a tour of the building. Well, part of the building. We witnessed an art class, saw the room for the kids’ afternoon nap, even had a look at the indoctrination rooms where the little ones were taught about the lives of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. The hallways and staircases were decorated with Hello Kitty and nature motifs (like a partly sculptured tree), all beautifully executed. The children’s performance was on the third floor, so when we went from the first to the third through a staircase, we were kind of rushed as the kids were waiting. Nevertheless I was able to walk down a hallway on the second floor for a few of meters, where I took a picture of a painting I am sure we were not supposed to see. It showed some armed children attacking a couple of snowmen. Even without being able to read what was written on them I knew that I struck gold – later I found out that the snowmen were labelled “American Bastard” and “Jui Myung Bak”, a play on words meaning “rat-like Lee Myung Bak”; Lee being the 10th President of South Korea. Lovely, just lovely!
But to be honest with you, it’s actually this kind of photos I was hoping for before the tour started – you can see quite a few pictures of Chongjin and Mount Chilbo on the internet; little gems like the snowman propaganda painting I’ve never seen anywhere before. At the same time experiences like that are the main reason why this series of articles is so much more negative than the first one – they make it so much harder to believe the show you get presented in Pyongyang. Everything in North Korea is full of contradictions all the time!

Well, lunch was at the Chongjin Seamen’s Club and I mainly mention it for the “hot se(a)men” jokes somebody has to make sooner or later; and now let us continue to pretend that the fourth season of Arrested Development doesn’t exist. The Seamen‘s Club is actually one of the few places in North Korea where foreigners and locals can mingle, though it seems like in the end everybody sticks with their own kind – and of course we were seated in a separate room, though we were allowed to roam the gated area freely. It was there that I bought my first souvenir of the trip, a hardcover copy of Kim Jong-il’s “On the Art of cinema” for 2 EUR! I almost felt bad getting it for that price, but in the end it probably was a good deal for both sides; and one of the few things I was able to buy overall. (More on prices and overpricing in the article about Day 7!)

After lunch we headed north to Rason. Since there is no freedom to travel in North Korea, not even within North Korea, we had to cross an internal border and needed two different “visa” for North Hamgyong and Rason – and also two different sets of guardguides, since Mr. Li, Mr. So and Mr. Sin were not allowed in Rason unless they had special permission. (And none of us were allowed in Pyongyang! If we would have hurt ourselves seriously, they most likely would have taken us to China, not to the capital – because we didn’t have proper documents to enter…) About half an hour away from the internal border the unavoidable happened – our bus broke down with a flat tire in the middle of nowhere and it took about an hour to fix it. Luckily we had a spare on board, so we left the forest just before the sun went down. Interestingly enough there were many locals strolling through the forest – probably the cause of the omnipresent plastic waste. Seriously, this was one of the dirtiest sections of forest I’ve ever been to! A real surprise, given that it was plastic trash and North Korea. Who knew they even had plastic there?! 😉

Finally arriving at the Rason border, Mr. Kim and his team took over (not the driver of the North Hamgyong bus, another one…) – and he turned out to be a jokester. First he apologized for the bad quality of the road, but hoped that we would enjoy the free massage for the next 10 minutes. When we asked him to turn off the internal lights of the bus, so we could have a better look outside (it was dark by then), Mr. Kim told us that one of the advantages of the DPRK (and the huge number of blackouts) was the fact that there was no light pollution in North Korea. Damn, if I ever do a comedy routine about NK I’ll definitely steal those two jokes!

Exactly 10 minutes later we left the bumpy dirt road and reached a normal one – and soon later we passed Rason Harbor on our way to the city center of Rajin. (Rason is a Special Economic Zone consisting of the cities Rajin and Sonbong – here the DPRK experiments with capitalism in cooperation with its ex-communist buddies China and Russia, plus a few others.) And by “normal” I mean that the road was not only smooth, it had street lamps! Light. In the darkness. 13 adult travelers excited like little kids. It’s interesting how fast you forget that you miss certain things you are used to – and how equally easily excited you can be to get them back. We all take electricity for granted and it’s truly amazing how much of it industrialized countries waste. While North Hamgyong is clearly lacking supply, Rason uses it reasonably; Yanji wastes quite a bit and Osaka… I’m sure Osaka uses more electricity than all of North Korea – and given that pretty much every apartment building and busy neighborhood is lit up like a Christmas tree, Osaka probably wastes more electricity than North Korea uses; which is amazing given the constant talk about being green and how the electricity price exploded in Japan after Fukushima!
After dinner at a well-lit (!) restaurant (in the same building as the local travel agency), we were supposed to check into our hotel just down the street, the Namsan Hotel – but Mr. Kim had a surprise for us: Instead of staying at the slightly run-down accommodation in Rajin’s city center, we drove up a mountain between Rajin and Sonbong to the newly built Pipha Hotel with a stunning view at the city’s (in)famous Emperor Hotel and the beautiful Changjin Bay. Upon arrival we found out that we were the first guests there – EVER. (And probably the last, as itineraries for future Northeastern Adventures still mention the Namsan Hotel…)
The Pipha Hotel turned out to be a slightly weird… installation. First of all, the hotel didn’t have a reception; it looked more or less like an annex building. We entered via an external staircase on the second floor, basically through a tiny lobby with a couple of seats in a hallway. There was a first floor / ground floor, but we never went there. As Mr. Kim said, the building was brand-new, so it was by far the most modern and overall best hotel I stayed at in North Korea across both trips. Hot water, running water and a (not working) AC, which was compensated by heating blankets. The first shower in three days felt wonderful! At the same time the Pipha Hotel showed how little experience North Korea still has with tourists. For example:
The bathroom had some toiletries, but those were sealed shut. While it’s worldwide standard that little packages of shampoo have a small cut so you can open them easily, the ones we were provided with had to be opened with a pair of scissors.
The room itself was quite nice, but when the architect planned the hotel, it seems like he didn’t think along… and put the main light switch of each room in the hallway instead of inside the room right next to the door. As a result it was impossible to switch the light on / off from within the room.

None of it affected our happiness about hot running water or the overall experience, those are just two more examples of things that we take for granted and that stand out when they are not the way we are used to. And despite looking strangely familiar, it turned out that Rason was full of things that were not the way we are used to…

(Please *click here to get to Abandoned Kansai’s North Korea Special* and *here for a map about the tour at GoogleMaps*. *Like Abandoned Kansai on Facebook* if you don’t want to miss the latest articles and exclusive content – and subscribe to the *video channel on Youtube* to receive a message right after a new video is online…)

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North Korea Revisited: Day 4 – Pochon, Mt. Chilbo, Kyongsong

Posted in Asia, DPRK, Hiking, Hotel / Ryokan, Korea, Kyongsong, Map, Mount Chilbo, Non-Urbex, North Hamgyong, North Korea, Photography, Sacred Site, Spa / Onsen, Travel, Video, Visited in 2013 on 2014/02/03| 17 Comments »

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…

(Please *click here to get to Abandoned Kansai’s North Korea Special* and *here for a map about the tour at GoogleMaps*. *Like Abandoned Kansai on Facebook* if you don’t want to miss the latest articles and exclusive content – and subscribe to the *video channel on Youtube* to receive a message right after a new video is online…)

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North Korea Revisited: Northeastern Adventure

Posted in Animals, Asia, Chongjin, DPRK, Hiking, Hoeryong, Korea, Kyongsong, Map, Monument, Mount Chilbo, Non-Urbex, North Hamgyong, North Korea, Photography, School, Travel, Video, Visited in 2013 on 2014/01/21| 15 Comments »

My *first trip to North Korea* was a great experience. I went there with a certain amount of ignorance, to “enjoy the show”. And it was a good show, a great show… a fantastic show actually. It was so elaborate, that it was easy to believe most of it. No freedom of movement? Sure, their country, their rules. Regular blackouts outside of Pyongyang? Unfortunate exceptions. Taboo topics? Well, you avoid bringing up politics and religion in most parts of the world. The radio wasn’t working? Who cares, it would have been in Korean anyway – there was barely enough time to watch TV. Not much traffic? Well, it’s a poor country with fuel shortages, but everybody is trying to make the best of the situation. And the guides telling us that walking a lot is healthy anyway? Well, probably just North Korean humor – it’s not like Japanese jokes are much funnier…

North Korea is changing, no doubt about it – opportunities to “enjoy the show” are getting sparse, and now is probably the last chance to get a glimpse at the old regime, the strict, stiff, dictatorial North Korea. If you visit Pyongyang you already get a watered down, rather easy to swallow version. While a couple of years ago visitors had to refer to Kim Il-sung as “Great Leader” and Kim Jong-il as “Dear Leader”, nobody seems to care about the use of honorary titles like that anymore, as it alienates foreign visitors. The guides in Pyongyang speak English quite well and most of them have enough experience with foreigners to know how to handle them and follow the rather strict limitations (forced on them by their bosses) at the same time. It’s easy to get lost in that charade and blame all the evil things happening on America or the people themselves – if they would have followed the rules, they would not have been put in jail. (Which is bullshit, as we all know. In the Early Modern Age countless women were tortured and killed as witches, because their resentful neighbors made a claim and the victim had to proof their innocence. And that’s pretty much how North Korea works today.)

After my return to Japan and the series of articles I wrote about my trip to North Korea, I wanted to see more. I wanted to see a different side. I wanted a rougher version, to see myself whether Pyongyang was just a sample of an aspiring country striving for success – or if it was the exception, a Potemkin village to fool visitors.
In July 2013, while still writing articles for the first series, I decided to go back to North Korea. This time I chose a tour with a completely different itinerary with a route that wouldn’t even get close to any destination I saw on the first tour. The Northeastern Adventure was introduced in spring 2013 and opened the border crossing in Tumen for western tourists. Up till then the few visitors to North Hamgyong province used to fly in from Pyongyang or entered via Rason to visit the famous Mount Chilbo area. With the Northeastern Adventure I had the rare opportunity to see the Wangjaesan Grand Monument and to spend a night in Hoeryong. Next stops were Chonjing, the homestay village near Mount Chilbo and Kyongsong before spending three nights in the Special Economic Zone Rason. (*Click here for a GoogleMap to give you a better idea.*)
Believe it or not – I got what I bargained for. North Hamgyong and Rason were a lot rougher than Pyongyang and the places in the south of North Korea. The guides were rougher (“It’s comrade Kim Il-sung! / “No take photos!”), the conditions were rougher (no running water and no hot water for three consecutive days – which is not unusual in a poor country, but irritating when that poor country always pretends to be on par with the rich ones…), the locals were rougher. The cities were smaller and less colorful, the anti-American propaganda was less subtle, the infrastructure was less developed. While the southern parts were all about the Korean war, the northern parts were all about the Japanese occupation – down to the guide’s countless stories about Japanese atrocities, some of which started with “Sorry Mr. XYZ, but it’s historical fact!” as the Northeastern Adventure was accompanied by two Japanese citizens. (To everybody’s surprise as most Japanese people don’t want to have anything to do with North Korea.)
Speaking of my fellow travelers: This was an extraordinary group to travel with! When signing up for a group tour you never know what you get. While I enjoyed the Pyongyang group for several reasons (hey Jeff!), the Northeastern Adventure group overall was much more relaxed and less stressful – probably because it wasn’t the first trip to North Korea for anybody, with one exception. Everybody knew what to expect, everybody knew how to behave (at least most of the time), there were no “I am so cool because I am traveling to North Korea!” characters, it was just a great group!
Which brings me to related topic: You won’t find a picture of myself on Abandoned Kansai and, like last time, I tried to extent this courtesy to the rest of the group for this article series – which worked with two or three exceptions. If you see yourself on a photo and don’t like it, please drop me a line and I’ll remove the picture right away! As for you, dear reader: This time the group consisted of thirteen people plus one British guide (Amanda) plus three Korean guides during the first leg in Hamgyong province and three different Korean guides during the second leg in Rason, where the group shrunk to twelve people as one of our Japanese group members had been to the Special Economic Zone before and decided to leave early. (A “Special Thanks” goes out to my friend Mayu, who didn’t join me on the trip, but provided valuable translations afterwards. Whenever you see captions to Korean text on photos – those I owe to her.)

For the first trip I decided to write separate articles for each major stop on the tour, which resulted in more than 30 posting over 10 weeks – way too long for a blog that usually is all about urban exploration. So this time it’ll be more like a classic travel report: eight articles, one for each day; plus this introduction and an epilogue with some final thoughts. Some of the articles will be freakishly long (up to 2.500 words…), some of them will contain rants as I won’t stay away from hot topics this time. Nevertheless I hope you’ll enjoy reading what I have to say – my mind was blown several times during the trip and if everything goes according to plan you’ll make a “WTF?” face at least once per article… 🙂

Oh, and for all you hardcore urbex fans out there: The next abandoned place will be posted on February 25th – an amazing original find I explored almost two years ago!

(Please *click here to get to Abandoned Kansai’s North Korea Special* and *here for a map about the tour at GoogleMaps*. *Like Abandoned Kansai on Facebook* if you don’t want to miss the latest articles and exclusive content – and subscribe to the *video channel on Youtube* to receive a message right after a new video is online…)

Let’s Achieve The Best Quality Of Products And Buildings!
Let’s preserve our forests!

P.S.: I almost forgot – welcome, dear readers from North Korea! I know you don’t stop by often and I doubt that you are regular people who surf the internet after a hard day of work in the fields. But, according to the basic statistics WordPress shares with me, I had 12 page views from the DPRK between my first and second trip to North Korea, much to my own surprise. So again – welcome, comrades!

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Back to North Korea – Or: Hunger Games, The Musical

Posted in Asia, Chongjin, DPRK, Hoeryong, Hotel / Ryokan, Kindergarten / Nursery, Korea, Kyongsong, Map, Mount Chilbo, Non-Urbex, North Hamgyong, North Korea, Photography, Pyongyang, Rason, Travel, Video, Visited in 2013 on 2013/11/19| 32 Comments »

I am a bit in a pickle here…

Do I write and publish the article I have been thinking about for several weeks now – or do I keep my mouth shut? In October I went back to the DPRK for a second time, an experience even more intense than *the first trip in spring*, way more disturbing, way more conflicting. On the one hand I enjoyed both trips tremendously, on the other hand I saw and experienced things I would like to share with all of you. But if I do it in an honest way, I probably shouldn’t show my face again in North Korea for a third time…

When I first visited the “Hermit Kingdom” in spring of 2013 I did it with a slightly ignorant attitude, willing to enjoy the experience, knowingly accepting that I will be fooled and restricted. And I actually enjoyed the tour. A lot! So much that I visited the DPRK again in October of 2013, this time the northern parts; North Hamgyong province and Rason.
The guides in Pyongyang were nice and surprisingly open-minded, the food was fantastic, Pyongyang with its high-rise buildings and solar-powered streetlights was a lot more modern than expected, the photography and video limitations were a lot more loose than (almost) everybody claims… and the bowing in front of statues, the bumpy countryside roads, the regular power-cuts outside of Pyongyang, the restrictions of free movement – all of that was commonly accepted as North Korean quirkiness in a combination of group effort and voluntary Stockholm Syndrome; it became natural within hours, everybody always gave the home team the benefit of the doubt. And I was intrigued, I wanted to see and experience more… despite my friends and family universally thought that it wasn’t a good idea, some of them being worried about the articles I wrote about my first trip, about remarks I made in the comments.
Of course I went anyway, fueled by what appeared to be authentic moments – and I still think that some of them actually were honest and unstaged, like the *picnic at the Taesongsan Park & Fun Fair*. I also believe that life in Pyongyang is decent, but I had to come back with a clear mind and travel to the countryside to get a look at the costs of it, because Pyongyang isn’t a typical example of North Korean progress – it’s an exception, a severely subsidized prestige project that only exists because the almighty political elite doesn’t care much about, and in some regards even sucks dry, the rest of the country. The power-cuts in Nampo and Kaesong weren’t the exceptions, they were just small glimpses at reality in the DPRK outside of Pyongyang – and the southern parts of North Korea are quite blessed. The temperatures are rather mild in comparison to North Hamgyong, the economy is comparatively successful thanks to the train and ship connections to China, and the much larger amount of Western tourists doesn’t hurt either…

Group Photo With North Koreans

Fool me once…

I really enjoyed my first trip to the DPRK, but after going there a second time, I have to admit that I’ve been fooled a lot more than I thought while writing about my experiences. The strange thing is: I liked my second trip to North Korea even more than the first one! Despite (or maybe because?) it dawned on me that this trip was a lot more real – a much better look at the current state of the DPRK, yet still just a scratch on the surface. On the first trip pretty much everybody ate up what the guides / guards / guardguides / guideguards had to say, but this time the vibe was different. People behaved even better, but for different reasons. Some were hardcore North Korea fans, others just wanted to allay all the worries our constant companions might have had about us to get a little bit more freedom and insight than previous visitors. I don’t think the minders were blatantly lying to us, but they were controlling all information – what we heard, what we saw, what we smelled, what we tasted. And when you are in almost total control and nobody questions that power, it is actually quite easy to shape impressions just by leaving things out. Some of it became very apparent during this second tour, some of it only while I was reconstructing the experience with the help of my photos, the adjusted itinerary, GoogleMaps and Wikimapia. (I added lots of new locations to my original GoogleMap about North Korea. *Please click here to have a look.*)

The fact that shocked me the most after my return was that we passed three of the biggest concentration camps in North Korea by less than 10 km! When we visited the city Hoeryong right at the beginning of the tour, our guide kept repeating that the city is famous for its three beauties: Beautiful women, beautiful white peaches and beautiful earthenware. I knew that he was bullshitting us just by looking at photos of Hoeryong’s most famous daughter, Kim Jong-suk, the wife of Kim Il-sung and mother of Kim Jong-il – no offense, but when I talk about the beauty of German women I don’t get Angela Merkel associated! (And after this comment I guess I better not return to North Korea…) Luckily Germans are more forgiving and Mrs. Merkel won’t throw me and my family into jail for the rest of our lives. Speaking of which: Hoeryong is famous for another thing, though it’s everything but beautiful – Kwan-li-so 22, Labor Camp 22; one of North Korea’s biggest and harshest concentration camps, where (according to two defected eyewitnesses) 1500 to 2000 people per year get worked or tortured to death, up to 4% of its total population. Maybe got, as the camp might have been closed in 2012 – which means that those prisoners were either killed or continue their sufferings in other camps. All of that I didn’t know at the time when I was spending a night at a hotel in Hoeryong, just about 5 kilometers away from the camp’s gate… (BTW: Prisoners only receive(d) a small amount of the food per day, despite a food factory in the camp’s labor colony Haengyong-ri. Like everywhere else in the country most of it was delivered to the capital Pyongyang, even if the locals and prisoners were starving, like during the Arduous March between 1994 and 1998.)

Kim Jong-suk With Husband And Son Food Factory In North Korea

Get them while they are young!

Other examples for leaving out information we experienced at two kindergartens, where we were about to watch typical performances by local children; singing, dancing and playing musical instruments. At the first kindergarten we walked through long hallways on the first floor with Hello Kitty and other colorful child-oriented images painted to the walls, then we were rushed through a staircase directly to the third floor, where the children were waiting to perform for us. I was able to sneak five meters down a hallway on the second floor and took quick photos of a painting depicting two snowmen being attacked by armed children, a subject that didn’t go along well with the stuff I saw on the first floor. Back home I asked friends what was written on the snowmen: American Bastard and a derogatory play on words about a former president of South Korea…
At the other kindergarten (with a different layout) we weren’t shown much of the second floor neither – and this time it was a fellow traveler who found a room she later described as “a war museum”. Sadly I wasn’t able to see it myself, but it goes without saying that our Korean guides didn’t mention it. They also didn’t mention the huge chariot sculpture in front of the kindergarten. At first sight it looked a lot like a simplified version of the one in front of the *Mangyongdae Schoolchildren’s Palace* in Pyongyang, which is all about the future and having fun. The one in Rason? Well, the first child is holding an automatic rifle in his hand, the second one a missile. Nobody pointed out those details…
Chariot of Joy Chariot Of Destruction
Instead we went through yet another musical performance, because North Koreans like to sing and dance – I don’t. Malicious gossip has it that it’s because they don’t have anything else, but hey, they love it, so if it helps the understanding among nations I suffer through 20 minutes of creepily smiling kids at a kindergarten… or a guide singing the national anthem / their favorite NK pop song. Usually both the kids and the adults (guides, waitresses…) are pretty good at what they are doing, which eases the suffering. What really started to irritate me is that you never know when you get dragged into the whole thing. You are never safe… not at kindergartens, not at schools, not at restaurants, not at BBQs, not even on the bus. What is announced and starts as a more or less harmless performance can end with you starring it – and I HATE that kind of attention. At the same time you don’t want to be impolite, so you basically have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. One time on the first trip all the guides, one after another, were singing the national anthem of North Korea on the bus – and then kept nagging all tourists into singing theirs. My only way out was to claim that Germany is so anti-nationalistic now, that it is actually punishable to sing the national anthem without written permission by the government; interestingly enough not only the Korean guides but also some of my fellow travelers from all over the world believed that story… (And yes, the singing and dancing was even more intense on the second trip!)

Hunger Games, The Musical

While I visited North Korea for a second time in October I felt like being part of “Hunger Games – The Musical”: A totalitarian system concentrating all the power and wealth in the capital… and everybody was singing and dancing all the time! This wasn’t the rather cozy Pyongyang bubble anymore, this was a glimpse at a system that is plain and simple batshit crazy. Back in spring I actually thought that the DPRK was a little bit misunderstood and just needs some good PR, that Pyongyang was just a sample of what’s going on in all of North Korea, but obviously I was wrong. North Korea needs massive change from the inside, the mindset of the population has to change drastically. And I don’t blame individual average people, most of them are just doing what they are told to do (look at the communism loving Russians that now hump capitalism like a pet bunny does its favorite plush toy…), they are simply trying to survive without getting into trouble themselves, probably being traumatized by decades of subjugation from psychotic despots! I’m sure it’s not all bad in North Korea, but it definitely isn’t as good as tourists are made believe when visiting Pyongyang…

It will take me a couple of months to write about my second trip, especially since this time I want to have the whole set written before I start publishing it. Like last time I have no political or financial agenda, and I will write about my vacation as I experienced it. I just wanted to give all of you a heads up that this time it won’t be as positive and naïve – it will be full of love for the coast and the mountains, for fearless toddlers and curious language students. But you will also read some completely messed-up stories about extreme poverty and regular power-outs, about electric fences along the coastline and despicable acts towards children, about denunciation, double standards and deception – and about how I will rather never go back to North Korea again than deliberately ignoring or even sugar-coating the things that I’ve experienced…

(Please *click here to get to Abandoned Kansai’s North Korea Special* and *here for a map about both tours at GoogleMaps*.
If you don’t want to miss the latest article you can *like Abandoned Kansai on Facebook* or subscribe to the *video channel on Youtube*…)

Border guards don’t like to be filmed, yet I managed to tape me walking from China into North Korea. (As far as I know we were the second Western tourist group ever to enter North Korea on foot from Tumen, China!)

At the end of the video you can hear a guideguard approaching me after he caught me taking this video, despite him announcing that it’s okay to take pictures from the bus just 5 minutes earlier…

One of the most beautiful hours I had in North Korea – sunrise at the beach of the homestay village while most of my fellow travelers were still sleeping.

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