Checking out North Korea

Ever wondered what it was like in a country that has been closed to the world for 50 years?

A country that received a donation of 50 bicycles in 2001 from the Red Cross so that doctors could make house calls to patients and get to hospitals? A country where foreign movies have been banned for 50 years but the leader of the country has his own book written about his favorite blockbusters. I think Batman tops his list.

Can you guess what country I’m talking about?

North Korea is an amazing country if you look past the constant antagonistic government that threatens to sell nuclear weapons abroad or even to use them, you will see a remarkable country.

James Rankin is the feature teacher of the month. James just took a trip to the secretive Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Here is James Rankin's inside perspective on North Korea.

"I think the person who most understood my desire to visit the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was my good friend Sandy. She’d done the trip almost 10 years ago now, and provided the best advice by saying: “Go. Go now. Because it may soon be too late, and you may never be able to do it again.” At the time, she was living in Moscow and wanted to visit the last Stalinist country in the world. My own curiosity was a little different; I too wanted to see what the Kim Il Sung personality cult was all about, but I also wanted to see what similarities existed between my South Korean friends and their socialist brethren. And I wanted to go because Bush had labeled them part of the “Axis of Evil.” Or was it an “Outpost of Tyranny?” Either way, they didn’t sound very nice, and just to see if this was true was reason enough for me to make the trip. As it turned out, the North Koreans were very friendly people, proving once again that you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.

Traveling to North Korea from the South is much harder than you might think. In order to get a tourist visa, there can be no record of my work in South Korea on my resume, and I must provide proof of employment in Canada. South Koreans are not permitted to travel there and as such, there are no flights to Pyongyang from Seoul. The two countries are separated by a heavily militarized (and ironically named) Demilitarized Zone, a one kilometer-wide no-man’s-land that spans the width of the Korean peninsula. Travel between the two countries is virtually impossible, although recently a mountain resort has opened near the border on the northern side for wealthy South Koreans to visit. Although these Koreans are technically traveling to the North, they are not able to interact with any locals and are certainly not allowed to leave the resort.

And so, the first leg of my journey to the DPRK was an overnight stay in Beijing. You might think that Seoul, Beijing and Pyongyang are all relatively close to each other, but I can assure you this is not the case. Although the drive between the South and North Korean capitals (if it were possible) would take less than two hours, my flight to Beijing took almost 90 minutes. And the flight to Pyongyang the next day took just as long. I felt like I was traveling from Montreal to Ottawa, via Chicago.

Arriving in China, my first stop was to meet my tour group. Simon was to be the tour leader for our group; his company was the one I’d found had the most experience running tours to North Korea. I don’t normally participate in group tours, and prefer to travel on my own or with a few friends, but individual travel is technically impossible in the DPRK. Every tourist or group is accompanied by two North Korean tour guides and a driver. With Simon coming along, we’d have four pairs of eyes keeping watch on us at all times. Hence the group trip, with a few more like-minded Westerners to sip beers with, was the best available option.

At Simon’s suggestion, I accompanied him on his mission to pick up our tourist visas from the North Korean consulate in Beijing. The consulate was very much like I’d pictured it: a spacious and cool waiting room, where you had sense that the work was mostly quiet, but could potentially explode at a moment’s notice. We had a four o’clock appointment with Mrs. Lee, who arrived armed with her pile of papers, scissors and glue almost 10 minutes early. Simon didn’t think the visit would last more than an hour."

I had expected that we would quickly pick up the visas and be gone, but the scissors and glue signaled that something else was about to happen. While Simon read out the names of each person in the group, Mrs. Lee first recopied them in Korean, then cut each person’s photo to the exact specifications of the visa form. She then glued the photo onto the form, and double-checked her work at the end. In my opinion, the passport photos would have fit any Western bureaucrat’s form almost perfectly, but this was bureaucracy taken to a whole new level. By the end, we had 28 complete visas, a half-empty glue stick, and a small pile of photo clippings from the pictures that had been shaved down to size. Getting the visas had taken two and a half hours, had involved three people and had felt more like finishing a high school project on a Sunday night than preparing for a 5-day trip. If it took this long to prepare for the arrival of less than 30 tourists, I thought, what would happen when the country finally opened its doors to the rest of the world?

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