This is a wonderful photo essay of a North Korea trip with detailed photos and accounts. The post was originally published by an unnamed Chinese national, who had the fortune of visiting North Korea as a tourist back in 2005. It has since been reposted on a number of Chinese websites and forums. In case the readers are not aware, in recent years the North Korean government has been opening up their border to selected tourists from China and a few other countries.
The author’s itinerary was strictly limited to government-sanctioned routes and locations, and he and his companions were heavily monitored by a government agent during the entire trip in case they “wondered off”. Despite all the restrictions, the diary still gives a rare and good glimpse of many aspects of the contemporary Hermit Kingdom and her strikingly dutiful and obedient citizens. More importantly, it offers a Chinese’s perspective on topics such as economic development, ideology and culture.
At 11:30 am, we landed at Pyongyang Airport, via a free, half-hour flight from Air Koryo that took off from Beijing Capital International Airport.
Pyongyang Airport’s parking apron was small, and the airport was rather quiet. The first thing we saw when we got off the plane was a portrait of Kim Il Sung standing on the roof the terminal.
My plane was occupied with basically Chinese tourists. We got on the airport shuttle bus to the terminal building and got ready to pass the custom. This is the shuttle bus drivers.
Next boarding the bus was a female airport police, scanning everyone on the bus with her eyes. We were told when we were leaving Beijing that cellphones are prohibited to be brought to North Korea, but cameras were spared from custom check. Therefore, at the departure custom in China, our passengers had obediently handed the phone to the hands of [Chinese] customs officers, but our long guns and short pistols[i.e. professional cameras] easily got through.
This is first tourist scene we saw after we got off the plane: vending booths and North Korean sales girls outside the airport.
North Korea is a country where foreigners are not allowed to travel freely. Because of that, we were lead by the local travel agency to a tour bus that had been waiting outside the airport. Along the ride, we made our best effort to appreciate this long-yearned city that was always covered with mystery in our mind: high-rise buildings and some of the more exotic spectacular architecture could be seen from time to time, but the tone of the entire city was gray and white, the building’s exterior walls were of rustic character, and there were no luxurious or beautiful decorations.
Gigantic slogans, colorfully drawn propaganda posters and monuments can be seen almost everywhere. For those of us who have experienced
Cultural Revolution during childhood, they brought back memories and made us feel like travelling back in time.
The common citizens on the street dressed in plainly colored clothes, you rarely saw women dressed in traditional costume, but without exception, everyone was wearing a badge of Kim Il Sung.
While our bus was passing through an intersection, there suddenly appeared a beautiful female traffic police officer with her valiant figure. The tour guide said that Pyongyang’s major traffic junction traffic control are mainly staffed by female police. Traffic police is a good career prospect: a stable job and high income. The female traffic police officers were required be tall, good looking and never married. The competition [for this career] is fierce.
The bus took us to the Chongnyon Hotel [translate: Youth Hotel] where we would stay for the next three days. The hotel was a big disappointment to us despite its thirty-story height. We had heard from friends who had traveled in North Korea that foreigners visiting Pyongyang were able to be arranged to live in the best hotels around the city, such as Koryo Hotel, Yanggakdo Hotel and Miao Xiangshan Hotel. Still, these three mentioned hotels are equivalent to at most three- or four-star hotels back home. This hotel in front of us must be of even worse quality, but we were not at the position to complain: they had already offered us free flight. Fair bargain.
The hotel room did not have a luxurious look, but was neat and clean. It has air conditioning, color TV, refrigerator and shower facilities. According to our tour guide, it was considered first-class hotel in Pyongyang; the above mentioned Koryo Hotel and Yanggakdo Hotel were supreme-class hotels. There was only one channel on the hotel TV. The channel was dedicated to the stories of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il with TV dramas, dance and singing programs praising their thoughts and ideas.
Upon finishing the hotel registration procedure, our passports and documents were taken away by the tour guide. Except a few major streets, there are no street lights at night in Pyongyang. Although we have more freedom moving inside the hotel, we could not travel much further outside. Our tour guide told us that there were rarely taxis, and they would not serve foreigners if they were not accompanied by locals. Thankfully, though, we were able to catch a view on the distant skyscrapers and streets from our hotel room. Our hotel was located at Pyongyang Guangfu Avenue.
This is our coach.
Before dinner, our tour guide decided to take us to Kim Il Sung’s former residence, which was not far away from our hotel. One of our tour guide’s name is Li Jun, and we call him Li Dao [Dao is short for tour guide]. He was 30 years old, and worked for North Korea Third International Travel Agency. He studied Chinese for for four years in Korea, and seemed like a very kind young man.
There were 24 of us in total on the coach. All tourists are Chinese except one person who was from Belgium. As soon as [Li Dao] boarded the coach we requested him to sing “Flower Girl” in Chinese and Korean revolutionary
songs. He had a good voice, and was very pleasant to listen to.
Li Dao told us beside the driver, there is Cui Dao[Tour Guide Cui] in the crew with us on the coach. In fact, we had long noticed the mentioned “Cui Dao” sitting at the end of the bus. Furthermore, we were very aware that for every single tourist group visiting North Korea, there is bound to be a “tour guide” who stays quiet and follows the group the entire time.
With Unlimited respect to President Kim Il Sung, the Korean people hailed Mangyongdae as “Holy Land of the Sun”.
This is the before mentioned “Cui Dao”. Vigilant eyes never left his face. His job every day was basically doing head counts. His Chinese was very good, and sometimes asked us some basic information, but it sounded like doing some kind of investigation. We always gave him frank answers.
Soon we became acquainted with him. We offered cigarettes and chatted with him, but whenever we asks questions about whether he worked for the military, he blushed and shook his head hard. We Chinese tourist understood the difficulty of his job, and consciously abides by the rules. However, our teammate from Belgium gave him headaches all the time.
Whenever the tour guide was not paying attention, our Belgium tourist would indulge himself in quenching his curiosity by wondering around the street. At the beginning of the tour, Li Dao explained to us that at most attractions we are allowed to take photos, unless at prohibited places he would explicitly mention to us. As for the streets, “good things” are allowed to be photographed whereas “bad things” are not. We would come to appreciated his point later on: as soon as we finished visiting an arranged attraction, Cui Dao would immediately urge people to get back on the coach, never leaving us the chance to stay longer and look around.
At many places of our visit, we ran into other tourist groups with the double-tour guide configuration just like ours. The only difference is that they generally had two Korean girls as their guides, one of which, needless to say, had the same status as our “Cui Dao”. They spoke good Chinese and were good looking too. They never refused our taking photos of them. Our fellow male group mates kept complaining in private that the agency did not arrange two females tour guides for our group.
Back to the hotel. We had our first meal in North Korea. While there were chicken and fish, the meal was meager in quantity. This was one of the worse meals we had in North Korea.
Before coming here, we head that there was an ongoing food crisis in North Korea. Basic food was a huge concern in their country. Therefore, we were mentally prepared and even brought some of our own food from home. After the meal, perhaps due to psychological effect or just us being greedy eater, we went to a small grill restaurant behind the hotel and had an additional meal. It cost the four of us 60 yuan to have two plates of roast beef, two dishes of kimchi and a bowl of Pyongyang cold noodles. I heard that a meal like this would cost a significant portion of a local’s monthly income.
The Tall Pyongyang Arc de Triomphe stood above the road, the front engraved in gold color with Baekdu Mountain, “Song of General Kim Il Sung” and “1925″, “1945″, during which period Kim Il Sung joined the revolution and made a victorious return. The structure strikes a remarkable resemblance with to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France. Because there were very few vehicles on the road, we were at ease to stand in the middle of the the road and took panoramic photos of the Arc.
Here stood the Monument of the Liberation War of the Motherland. We noticed the building pointing to the blue sky behind the monument. This was what we had long heard about: the Ryugyong Hotel of Pyongyang. Standing 105 stories tall, it was built to compete with the United States [for the tallest hotel in the world]. However, due to lack of funding the construction had suspended. It remained standing alone there for a good 20 years, and ended up becoming the world’s tallest “shabby tail”[unfinished] project.
After lunch, we walked into the North Korea Museum of the Motherland Liberation War. It was a giant, magnificent architecture, and had a similar layout to the
Great Hall of People., Inside are dozens of exhibition halls, covering the entire Korean War as well as a a panoramic oiled painting museum dedicated to the
Battle of Taejon. However, there were only two exhibition halls dedicated to the
Volunteer Army of China. They covered record and heroic deeds of the Chinese People’s Volunteers.
In the exhibition hall of the Volunteer Army, displayed are photos and stories of
Mao Anying [one of the sons of Mao Tse Tung],
Luo Shengjiao,
Qiu Shaoyun,
Yang Gensi and
Huang Jiguang, along with many Chinese Volunteer soldiers that was previously unknown to us. Feeling overwhelmed and reluctant to leave, we stopped there for a very, very long time.
Long have we head of the world-famous Pyongyang subway, known as the world’s deepest subway, reaching 100 meters deep underground. It took us several minutes to take the escalator down to the platform. We speculated the reason why they dug it so deep: perhaps they could serve as shelters should the Americans initiated attacks?
Upon getting onto the platform, despite a wave of humidity that came at us, our eyes were lit up: this was a perfect underground palace, with arched high ceiling supported by marble pillars, the ceiling decorated with beautiful chandelier, creating an atmosphere of warmth and softness. Huge mosaic murals depicted the great and difficult history of the founding of North Korea.
A train arriving at the station.
The most important moment for our trip was to watch the massive rhythmic gymnastics and artistic performance “Arirang” at the May Day National Stadium. The stadium looked grand and magnificent from the outside, with huge capacity inside. It is said that it could fit in a hundred to two hundred thousand people, claiming to be the No.1 stadium in Asia. We were in such a hurry to get into the stadium that we did not have time to take photos outside. To our surprise, though, we ran into the Chinese rock star Cui Jian who happened to be entering the stadium at the same time.
“Arirang” is an ethnic song with a long history and a beautiful legend. Sitting across us are tens of thousands of middle and elementary school students, with flip boards with beautiful, complex, brilliant patterns. Their flipping motions were without a single trace of errors.
Such ambitious scene completely entranced us: the choreography and overall lighting design are absolutely of world class! Extraordinary ethnic colors, music, dance, gymnastics, acrobatics, and perfect rotating background sets. Electro-optic devices, laser lighting, and many other image effects make the show unbeatable.
Our tour guide told us that from August 16 to October 17, except Sundays, thousands of performers dedicated their lives to perform like this every single night. It was rumored that in 2002, pay for the same performance is a few kilograms of Korean food stamps per show. We could not bear to ask Li Dao about this.
The reader should now be fairly familiar with these two kids, who greeted President Hu Jintao during his recent visit to North Korea.
On October 2, we were arranged to go to Panmunjom, a place that we had longed to visit. The distance between Pyongyang and Panmunjom is 168 km. This road is roughly equivalent to an arterial road in China. Very few vehicles could be seen, and there was not a single gas station. We occasionally came across checkpoints with soldiers. Neither were there many peasants working on the farms.
After a two-hour ride, we saw heavily harmed soldiers at the gate to the Demilitarized Zone and a Benz jeep parked nearby.
At the gate were People’s Army officers with solemn looks on their faces. We were led by one of the People’s Army soldiers into Panmunjom.
South Korean soldiers looking at our side via binoculars. Their cool looks and relaxed manner created a great contrast with the North Korean People’s Army soldiers’ erect posture.
Upon returning Pyongyang from Panmunjom , we were led to visit the U.S. spy ship captured near Wonsan by the North Korean naval vessels on January 23, 1968. This is the U.S. spy ship “Pueblo”, parked in the river Datong.
Our plane began to slowly taxing on the runway, and we would soon leave the country. During these few days, we had have too much complex emotion surging in our heart. Every one of us was silently praying and wishing the best for the North Korean people!
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