Trip to North Korea - review of an unforgettable journey (pt. 2)
I will start this entry with a little postscript from part 1 of my travelogue. After publishing that entry, I thought a little more about how I could make things even more interactive for you readers, and with the help of some software, I may have managed to do that. So for those of you with Google Earth, I have now included bookmarks in that previous article, which will show you satellite images of the places I visited (well, the ones I can locate, at least) in DPRK. And to make it easier for you guys, the list of places and relative Google Earth links from part 1 are just below:
Susan Airport
May Day Stadium
Fountain Park
Grand People’s Study House
Statue of Kim Il Sung at Mansudae
And with that out of the way, it is time to move onto part 2 of my trip. Thank you to everyone who sent me messages about part 1 - I really do appreciate every person who takes the time to read my writings 
online. Onto business. The hotel we stayed at was the Yanggakdo Hotel in central Pyongyang (Google Earth link ). If you go to DPRK, you will most likely either stay here or in the Koryo Hotel. This hotel is excellent and is on its own island! It has a 9-hole golf course, cinema, football stadium, casino, rotating restaurant at the top of the hotel (this is a recurring theme), and pretty much everything else you could want in the hotel grounds (so tourists wouldn’t be tempted to cross the bridge into the capital itself?). The hotel also has 47 floors and around 1,000 rooms. But the thing is, there were only around 25 people staying at the hotel, and in our tour group people were sharing rooms so at the most, 20 rooms would have been occupied. All our group were located on the 25th floor, and people were making frequent comments about what could possibly be on the other floors. As far as I know, nobody was brave/foolish enough to try and find out. Although the hotel was much akin to a ghost town, the rooms were nice and clean, and offered a great view of the city, including the Juche Tower. The photo to the right shows the view looking south from the hotel. In the foreground you can see the golf course, and beyond that the cinema and then football stadium. The bridge going off to the right leads to central Pyongyang.
While we were going to dinner on the first night, we were told that there wouldn be few, if any shows or festivals on at the moment, due to everyone working in the fields. At that time, the university had closed and a number of government offices had been closed as people were mobilised to plant rice due to fears over food shortages. Having seen similar stories about China, this seems to be the communist way of dealing with problems like that; throw everyone you can at it. It might not be so productive and is certainly not efficient or economical, but it is what they do. It also shows the Juche, or self-reliance, ideology coming to the fore. Our venue for dinner was the National Restaurant, and we were the only guests there. This was also a common theme - we were the only people dining out. Although this isn’t hugely surprising, and I doubt if we were not visiting the restaurant would even be open. The food was pretty good actually, and it was obvious they were trying to showcase DPRK’s fine dining. It made me think and reflect a little though. They were serving up some of the best food they could offer in the country to us, and yet so many people in other parts of the city are coping on tiny rations of rice and vegetables each month. Again, it’s one of the things you just have to accept while you’re here. Accompanying dinner was live music, by a group of women in traditional Korean dress. The songs were revolutionary songs, and the music had a definite Russian feel to it. I looked around for copies of “The Best Songs Dedicated To The Great Leader and The General Album… Ever!!!”, but alas it was nowhere to be found. We did conclude that the drummer constantly looked like she wanted to just start thrashing the drums, rather than stick to the regular tapping of the cymbal. Not sure what the state of heavy metal music is in DPRK, but she’d fit right in.
Going back to the hotel, I had a couple of beers before heading back to my room. Once there though, I was able to turn the lights out, open the window and gaze out into the night skyline. If you do that in most cities, and especially capital cities, you can hear road works, traffic going past, loud music etc. In Pyongyang it was almost silent. You could hear a couple of voices drifting over the water to the hotel, but other than that it was quiet. There were relatively few lights coming from the large number of buildings that were a kilometre or two away. For some reason I woke up at about 4am in the night, and once again went to the window which we’d left open. Looking out, you could see nothing - there wasn’t a single light visible and the only sound was a dog barking somewhere in the city. Very eerie, but a fascinating experience.
Woke up early and switched on the TV in our room to get a fuzzy BBC World transmission (DPRK don’t pay for any TV rights, so they have to unscramble the signals as best they can themselves I believe). There was an announcement that it was International Environment Day, which was appropriate as I was probably in the cleanest capital city in the world. Pyongyang makes Tokyo look like a trashy dump, and I didn’t see a single piece of litter on the street throughout my entire trip. Another thing Pyongyang has is vast open spaces. It is reported that according to UN environmental statistics, Pyongyang has the largest amount of green and parkland per person of any capital city in the world. The skies were blue, but it was pretty hazy and you could only just see over the Taedong River and into Pyongyang. But after breakfast, that was our destination and first up was the Juche Tower.
The Juche Tower (Google Earth link ) is a 170m tall stone tower (I believe the tallest in the world) which is dedicated to the Juche ideal. An offspring of communism, Juche is summed up quite well by Wikipedia: “The core principle of
the Juche ideology since the 1970s has been that “man is the master of everything and decides everything”". The most fascinating features of this structure are all to do with numbers. The tower was created in celebration of Kim Il Sung’s 70th birthday, and the building has 25,550 blocks (one for each day of KIS’s life). The tower is actually made up of tiers: on the north and south side there are 18 tiers and on the east and west side, 17 tiers. Add those up and you get the magical 70. Also, at the base of the tower there are flowers carved (the Kimilsungia) into the stone. 35 flowers on the east and west sides gives you… you guessed it, 70.
The views from the bottom were pretty good, but the panaramic views from the platform at the top of the tower were breathtaking. You could see the entire city, although there you could see virtually no cars on the roads. There were a couple of bicycles, but almost no motorised transport. Following the Juche Tower, our next stop was the closeby Korean Workers Party Monument (Google Earth link ). This was erected to celebrate 50 years of the Korean Workers Party, and again the numbers play an important role. The top of the hammer, sickle and brush (denoting the 3 classes of people in society) are 50m high, and the diameter of the monument is also 50m. The history of the Party is written in bronze letters on the wall of the monument, and the size of the things has to be seen first-hand to be appreciated. The people built this in one year, which goes to show how productive they can be when given the resources to play with.
After seeing a little our of the city, we headed out of town, past Kim Il Sung University, and went to Mt 
Taesong and the Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery (Google Earth link ). Here, around 200 martyrs of revolutionary fighting against Japanese Imperialists are buried and remembered. Each martyr has a statue made from copper and all the busts face Pyongyang, positioned so that each one has a clear view of the capital. Pride of place at the top of the cemetery goes to Kim Il Sung’s wife (pictured left). In the cemetery, sombre revolutionary music player (I’m sure, solely because we were there), which gave a strange feeling to the whole event.
Lunch was taken in the (rotating) restaurant at the 230m tall Television Tower (Google Earth link ). A rickety old lift got us up to the top but it must have been the slowest lift I’ve ever been in! It took about 3 agonising minutes to get to the top, with the constant fear that the string that was pulling us up could snap and sent us plummeting to our certain doom at any time! But we made it to the top and the views were spectacular. The food was, once again, the best that DPRK had to offer, and our after lunch entertainment was karaoke courtesy of the 2 waitresses who’d been serving us. A smile towards one of them ended up in her holding my hand while she sang her song (I’m sure talking about the greatness and wonderfullness of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il)! I was slightly distressed that I might have unknowingly just joined the Workers Party of Korea, and wouldn’t be allowed to leave!
First stop after lunch was the Arch of Triumph in the middle of Pyongyang (Google Earth link ). Sound familiar? Well, you might think of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and when you look at this arch you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for 
the Parisian landmark. This arch was modelled on the one in France, but built bigger so that the claim can be made that this is the largest stone arch in the world. You’ll notice that DPRK likes its world records. The arch was pretty impressive, as was standing in the middle of a 3-lane road for minutes while taking pictures of it, without the slightest fear of a car coming. Try doing that in London! On the photo to the right you can see the Arch of Triumph in the foreground, but I expect many of you are wondering what the triangular-shaped building is in the background. Well that is a secret for now, and all will be revealed in part 3 of this travelogue. Rest assured, it is definately worth waiting for! Near the Arch of Triumph is another stadium in Pyongyang, and outside the stadium were some people preparing their gymnastic routine for the Mass Games. It was fascinating to see this group activity, and I managed to get quite a nice shot of them walking to practice in front of a huge mural of Kim Il Sung (see below.
We headed back out into the sticks after seeing the arch, and towards a buddhist temple. On the way, we saw loads of people working in the fields, even on a Sunday (their supposed day off during the week). This was real subsistence agriculture though; you saw oxen pulling makeshift ploughs through the soil and in some places it just looked so dry and barren that anything would struggle to grow there. The temple itself was quite interesting, although not as much as the sights I’d seen previously in the day. Apparently, Buddhism was the main religion in DPRK before the Juche idea was put forward. I have read conflicting evidence about this though, & there are many reports that religion is banned in DPRK, despite what we were told by the guides. I can’t report either way though - I’m just stating what I saw and keeping unbiased about everything. After the temple trip we headed back into Pyongyang and it got a little surreal. We were taken to a clothing export exhibition, which showed examples of the garments that they had exported to other countries (mainly sportswear). They gave us examples of the countries they exported to (e.g. UK, Hong Kong, China), and we were then taken to a shop where we could buy some DPRK authentic clothing! Other were sceptical but I just jumped right in and goy mysrlf a T-shirt! The whole trip here was as if they were saying, “Look at us! We produce things that other countries want and need!”.
A 30 minute bus journey led us back into the country and over to King Tongmyong’s tomb. The guide at this site wasn’t an English-speaker, but our resident guide translated everything for us. We were shown around the tomb on King Tongmyong, who lived around 5,000 years ago. It was apparently he who set up the nation of Korea, and who founded the first capital city in the country. In the grounds of the temple, there were 3 artists painting the landscape (by chance, or told to be there?). I wanted to think it was the former, and the pictures were pretty good so I bought one. Hopefully not all of that money would go straight to the government. I got the artist’s name on the picture and had it dated, and I gave a present to the guide for showing us around. The result: I had another DPRK girl holding and strokign my arm as we walked back to the bus! So much for being told we would have very little contact with the locals.
In the south of Pyongyang is the Mangyongdae Shrine (Google Earth link ), which is where Kim Il Sung was born and where he spent his early years. The house he was born in was fairly humble and it sounded like his family was quite poor. The house’s setting was now in a park and was really nice to walk around in; the walk to the viewing area was interrupted only by a couple of squirrels and chipmunks crossing our path. We were told that Koreans didn’t visit the house after KIS’s death because they wanted to keep it in a prstine state. Not sure if that is strictly true, but I just nodded and smiled and took it all in.
And that’s about it for day 2 of my blog. Hope you enjoyed reading it. Once again, post comments and questions, and I’ll get back to you with part 3 in the near future.
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Very enjoyable read Dave.
Keep it coming.