Dream Vacation Spot

I know many inveterate travelers. Off to Belize. Off to the south of France. Off to Alaska. However, if the travelers I know want to impress me, they should include the only country in the world without a travel guide: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Anyone can go off to a major industrial country. Anyone can go off to a tourist-trap country: Come in and let us rip you off! The destination for real travelers is Pyongyang. Be sure to take plenty of Won (valuable Korean currency). If this be (fair & balanced) travel advice, so be it.

Holiday in Hell
A guide for tourists in the world's most repressive nation.
BY JOHN H. FUND

It's safe to say that no country in the world is more dangerous or more shrouded in mystery than North Korea, but some people would like to see it all the same. And yet, until last month, North Korea was just about the only country in the world without a travel guide. (There hasn't been one to hell since Dante.) While only about 3,000 Westerners a year manage to finagle a visa into--and, more important, out of--North Korea, everyone would benefit from the new Bradt Travel Guide's chapters on the country's rich history and on the psychology of a government that makes Saddam Hussein's regime look enlightened.

The guide, written by British journalist Robert Willoughby, sometimes twists itself into knots to be judicious, but when it comes to politics Mr. Willoughby can be quite candid: "Remember that this guide is only useful in the country if it's allowed in, so what I haven't explicitly written about I've included [Internet] links to." Among the best is the human-rights work of Norbert Vollertsen, a German doctor who was expelled from North Korea in 2001 and has just written a book on what he saw there (to be published next month by Encounter).

Even with its pulled punches, the book does a mind-bending job of describing the personality cult that surrounds the late dictator Kim Il Sung ("the Great Leader") and his son and successor Kim Jong Il ("the Dear Leader"). The guide laconically notes that tourists will "be asked to 'pay respect' to statues and shrines" of the two men. "Just do it" is its terse advice. After all, this is a country where even the newspapers are folded in such a way as to avoid creasing the photos of the Leaders.

After a lengthy list of cultural do's and don't's the book settles down to the tourist sites, all of which must be visited with "minders" who robotically describe their glories. Mr. Willoughby quotes the North Koreans saying that Pyongyang, the capital, is "the political centre, the centre for culture and education and a wellspring of our revolution." But it's apparently dangerous to let guests too close to the wellspring. Most stay in a high-rise hotel on an island in the middle of a river where guards can easily block unsupervised access to the city. The guide calls the island "an Alcatraz of fun." It was once planned that visitors stay in the Ryugyong Hotel, a 105-story pyramid whose construction was halted when famine hit North Korea in the 1990s. Though brochures show it brilliantly lit up in night photos, it is still an empty shell that has never been wired for electricity.

But some things in North Korea do work. For two months every year the state puts on "mass games" in a giant stadium with 100,000 performers engaged in dances, gymnastics and parades. One visitor hailed the beauty of the games but said she would never forget the "ghastly grins of compulsory excitement" she saw on the performers' faces.

Some Pyongyang sights teeter between the comic and the sinister. The Mangyongdae Fun Fair features a grenade-throwing ground and machine-gun stalls. A museum on the Korean War features "the gruellingly written confession of one U.S. helicopter pilot whose handwriting suggests what broke him to spill all beyond his name, rank and serial number." Until recently, the captured U.S. spy ship Pueblo was on display.

But nothing quite captures the regime's mindset as a visit to Department Store No. 1. The Bradt guide notes only that, when it visited, "none of the lights were on." But a previous visitor on an unsupervised visit, British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels, was surprised to see it full of goods and shoppers. As he recounted in his book "Utopias Elsewhere," he soon noticed that someone he had seen with a shopping bag was suddenly without one. He followed her to an upper floor and saw her stand in line to collect another bag and be paid with a pair of brown socks so she would continue her Potemkin shopping excursion.

The regime is clearly desperate, and its nuclear blackmail program is obviously an attempt to stave off the final collapse. It will go to any lengths to scoop up hard currency. When Wall Street Journal Europe columnist Claudia Rosett visited in the 1990s she was overjoyed to finally be settled into her airline seat for the flight out. Then she noticed a military official run up the ramp and board the plane. She experienced a surge of anxiety as he approached her. Then he calmly held out a piece of paper and told her that she had forgotten to pay her laundry bill at the hotel.

She gladly paid it and considers it the most prudent money she ever spent as a tourist. If the Bradt guide had been around then, she'd have known that the North Koreans always get their cash. Let's hope that in this latest crisis the U.S. finally learns to say no.


Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.