Should you ever get sick of where you live and want a complete change I have a suggestion for you. NK is about as opposite to NZ as you can get. My week’s visit was very intensive with no real unexpected adventures because that is pretty much impossible. I went on a tour, and our group was 8 in total including our leader and I think I was the least intellectually qualified which meant I had to be a bit careful before opening my big mouth and having an opinion. Our leader was a professor in north east Asian studies and an international leader about NK. He grew up in East Germany and Russia so had a good understanding of living in a communist society. There was a NSW Supreme Court judge who sounded like an Oxford graduate because he was, and he was also the author of several books with another one on the Korean War under way. His wife was also a graduate. The next intellectual was born in Iceland but lived in Norway, now retired as a professor, and his PhD was in economics and his speciality is fisheries economics. He was the oldest and is a considerable traveller who after a drink can recite his own humorous poetry in English. The only solo woman was a university career person in education and libraries who got a terrible cold for a few days and had firm opinions about what she was seeing. There was a younger couple, both Oxford graduates and she described herself as a conceptual artist but was far from flaky. The male rejoiced in the name of Mustafa Suleyman because his father was Syrian although he was born and lived in England, and if you want to be nosey google him – he and 2 others formed a company called DeepMind which they sold to Google a few years ago for $US140 million. A very sharp mind and a pleasant person, also very useful at fixing any tech problems those with smart phones had. And then there was me with a C average B Com from Auckland. I learnt lots just being in that group and if any of you have stuff on your computer or on a cloud you will be pleased to know that strangers getting at it is even easier than you thought.
As with all NK tours you also have guides/minders who are with you at all times apart from when you are in your hotel room or a toilet somewhere. There is no wandering off on your own, no walking down the street without them and if you are wearing unsuitable clothing they will sort you out – I had an informal jacket on when visiting the mausoleum and it got put aside. The librarian in our group was wearing a red puffer jacket and was told she should take it off and she flatly refused, which was a winning tactic. If you take a picture of the wrong thing they will help you delete it – I did this only once. Pictures of any one in a military uniform or of any construction are not allowed along with anything that might put the country in a poor light. Our leader said the first day with these people was very important because if they get the impression there are no stirrers they will relax and not make your life too difficult, so were very good and the next day there was no one observing from the back of the bus so we could do low down pictures whenever we wanted, and it stayed that way. We also got to do a few accompanied walks that were not on the itinerary and generally the guides were not too bad in the context of what could happen.
Times in NK are a bit tense at the moment because of the first congress of the ruling party in 30+ years. People work 8 hours a day, 6 days a week and on top of that have to do another 8 hours a day of helping the state which may be work such as gardening or rehearsing for spontaneous demonstrations of love and affection for the Leader, which was going on in a big way when we were there. On top of that they may spontaneously volunteer for extra work so things can happen much faster than normal. At present they are just finishing a 70 day period of spontaneous volunteering for all people in the country. They all look tired. Some of the terminology I am using is the translated stuff they use and became part of our conversations during the tour. We all did spontaneous stuff, but mostly we liked to do ON THE SPOT GUIDANCE. This what the very big boss does and there are lots of paintings and pictures of all 3 Kims looking leaderish and pointing while offering OTSG, and in the background support staff all have a note book and pen to record these divine utterances. . Mustafa said that he is known to do flyby micro management but now he is going to move to OTSG.
NK is a theocracy which for those who want to know, is a religious dictatorship. The religion is headed by Kim 3 at the moment but his departed dad and grandad are also gods and treated as such. The official paintings try to make them look similar but that fails especially with the present Kim 3 because not only is his face quite different but he is also really fat. More often than I expected we would all line up in front of statues, pictures or paintings of them and show our respects by bowing. Once we had to show respect at a big marble plaque that had Kim 2’s autograph on it. The nice ones in our group bowed deeply and I moved my head. We visited mostly big government stuff and there were always lots of statistics as in when the building started and finished, measurements, number of bricks and blocks of marble, and the deep significance of the relationship of some of these numbers to Kim 1, 2 or 3. So the length might be the numbers in the date of a birthday or something similar. Absolutely fascinating but surprisingly I can’t remember any thing specific. Also everything was finished really quickly, often in exactly one year because of the spontaneous volunteering of extra work by the worker soldiers.
Conscription is for 10 years and starts at about age 16. They do a lot of construction work and also are very good at military displays. You can tell the serious ones by the callouses on their hands because NK is keen on martial arts, and because civilians are often in uniform-looking clothes you can pick the real ones by their footwear – and avoid taking a picture of them. The famous traffic directors have very smart uniforms and very little traffic to direct and we were told the female ones are known as the flowers of Korea. They do actually do their stuff even when there is nothing on the road. Outside of the capital, Pyongyang, there are mostly bicycles and trucks with very few cars or buses and the roads are not too wonderful with some being about 6-8 lanes wide. We wondered if they were auxiliary airports. The locals apparently have a great regard for the army which may be because one of the axioms of the country is “Army First”. This came from Kim 1, or maybe 2. Hence the fixation on nuclear weapons and delivery systems in a country where oxen-pulling plows are common. Every bit of land that can be cultivated is. Rice is the main thing but they also do wheat, millet , potatoes and every vegetable. The countryside at present is brown because it is has been prepared for planting and in addition to the ox plows there are tractors for the big fields and paddies. The agricultural correspondent, who is not present, would wonder how such old and battered machinery could still do the job. They have no fertilizer because of sanctions and you see them making little piles of combustible stuff which is then burnt on the tilled ground. The villages all look the same with whitish cottages and curving tile roofs built after the war because everything got destroyed. There are no trees apart from ones planted (voluntarily) in the last few years, mostly along the roadsides. It gets really cold in the winter and firewood is hard to find.
Pyongyang is very, very different from the rest of NK. We were all surprised at how developed it is but this is not just something caused by economics. Because there is almost no market economy the big buildings and modern stuff you expect in a main city are there for a political reason. To live in Pyongyang you have to be a proven top supporter of the political structure and show that in all you do. Even if you wanted to get there from some hole in the country there are movement restrictions so a visit has to be approved by the authorities. The city, therefore, has to be better than anywhere else both to make people strive to get there, and to act as a symbol of power to the peasants who get to go there once or twice in their lives to do some spontaneous demonstrating or whatever else is decreed. Continuing on that approach the places that such people visit exude power – the mausoleum of Kim 1 and 2 is all marble and huge works of “art” that make you feel small, the passages are very long, the main rooms are very high and the lighting in the rooms where the supposed bodies lie is very gloomy and a bit spooky. I say supposed because all you see are the heads and I reckon Peter Jackson could have them made very easily. This place is called The Kumsusan Memorial Palace and apart from the remains, also has each of the two Kims Mercedes cars as well as a room each of all the honorary degrees, medals, welcoming plaques and other junk they received from repressive countries like Niger and the Congo. This does sort of spoil the impressions for ignorant westerners like us, but it shows how internationally important they were to the locals. NK is very keen on stating how all the world respects them and their achievements.
Some of the places we went to have very cool names. The Pyongyang Grand Peoples’ Study House is a sort of library and continuing education place where we were shown how they can play any sort of music as proved by a rendition of Hey Jude. Of course it stuck in my brain for the next few days partly because it was so incongruous. The Three Revolutions Museum had lots of cool stuff from the Korean War and the US Navy vessel Pueblo, (remember that ?) along with lots of exhibitions about how the glorious army captured it from the bastard imperialist Americans. Not surprisingly the Korean War is serious stuff for NK. I didn’t know the extent of the damage to them which was massive. All cities except one were levelled by unopposed bombing and it was a war so all participants did stuff that was not nice, although in NK it was only the bastard etc guys who were bad. Or so we were told. Down near the border with SK is The US War Crimes Museum which is pretty grim and covers in obsessive detail some nasty stuff the US forces did, and it is almost certainly true, but once again there is no balance and no mention of the SK troops. Or NZ for that matter. To say that NK is unable to move on is an understatement. They seem to want to stay there in the 1950s and that is a deliberate political position because a dictatorship that keeps its people in penury has to have an enemy to blame. And that is the bastard imperialist Americans. The DMZ was very peaceful and I sat at the table where the 3 years of armistice negotiations took place. We were also shown bits of a concrete wall built by SK which the NKs say stretches right across Korea and it can only be seen from the north, but SK and US say there are tank traps but no wall. I have done a quick google but can’t find anything definitive. This is not unusual as there is a lot of stuff about NK that is unknown. Our team leader often replied to our questions with an opinion but also a qualification that no one really knew.
NK used to be a non-monetary economy which meant no money was needed because the government provided everything and there was nothing, and nowhere, to buy stuff. After the famine in the 1990s people had learnt that when the government can’t supply you have to find another way and a small black market started. This still exists in a larger form and, as a counter, official markets have been set up. They generally have round blue roofs so can be seen, but visiting is not allowed for tourists. Basics like apartments, essential food and clothes, bikes and presumably cars are still provided but supplemented by buying privately, so capitalism is there and I can’t see it going away unless there is some catastrophe. All our questions to the guides about comparative wages were slid around so we don’t know who gets paid the most, or even if anyone does. There is certainly a more-equal-than-others class and they are obvious, especially the children who flaunt their superiority. This includes the guides who while not being ostentatious are from privileged backgrounds as tips in hard currency are very important. There is a local currency which tourists cannot have so all cash transactions are in Euro, $US or Rimimbi and everyone is good at the maths. The stuff we could buy was in hotel and museum shops and the range was limited, shall we say.
Geopolitically NK is a buffer between China, Russia, SK, Japan and the USA in several ways. It is paranoid about all of them and conducts a balancing act based around its nuclear weapons which is largely a bluff. They know that using a bomb anywhere would result in massive retaliation from which they have no defence, so they have to act like they are unpredictable and seemingly a bit crazy in order to keep the enemies off balance. And they do it well. I am sure in the back of the minds of the Kims and their mates, is the fate of Ghadaffi who stopped his nuclear program and ended up dead in a drain. It appears to be generally accepted that most of the enemies are quite happy to have NK between them but worry about Kim 3 having a meltdown and going away from the set routine and actually pressing the launch button, or offering OTSG for someone else to do it. NK, as it presently is, will not give up the nuclear option, they are very clear about that. Which raises the question about what will happen to the regime? There seems to be two choices: a gradual change as per China, to a more capitalist society or a big collapse. which would involve SK taking over. It is hard to see the later happening but who knows? NK talks big about unification but their formula is completely unacceptable to SK because they want equal votes but only have about half the population.
We never felt unsafe in any way despite all the military and police guns everywhere. Although we were mostly kept away from the locals we sometimes got to mingle and “hellos” and waves were swapped. We saw plenty of other tourists but in the hundreds at the most, not thousands. There is a beaten track and we kept running into the same people, our favourites being a couple from Kansas – the wife, who was in her 50s, had a penchant for filmy, very short-hemmed dresses which caused our guides much concern. The locals are quite conservative and restrained in their dress and always have a lapel pin starring the 2 first Kims. However, the lady from Kansas redeemed herself in our eyes when we visited a big park on May 1, an important holiday, when everyone had been issued with picnic food and beer and had crowded into this park to celebrate. This included women in traditional costume dancing and right in the middle was the tall blond from Kansas in the Korean costume of a colourful floor-length, A-line dress having a grand time and wowing the locals. We thought that took some doing so decided she must be ok. The hotel we were staying in had 43 floors with slow lifts and she was in the same lift as me the next morning so we a chat on the way down and she was in recovery from the exercise. Earlier in the tour we were staying in an old, traditional hotel with paper-thin walls and she and her husband were next door to our team leader. He heard them come in late at night, having partaken of the local rice wine, expressing endearments loudly for each other. He was very concerned at what noises might follow but luckily the rice wine won and all he heard was snoring. All the hotels we had were fine if a bit tired and we had plenty of food mainly of a sort that was what they thought imperialists would like. The local beer was fine and the best one was pointed out to us early on so we were experts and able to give OTSG to other tourists.
We left by train to Bejing, a 24 hour trip in 4 berth cabins. Being a generous person, and aware of the need of assistance to sleep, I repeated the exercise that Colin I did in Uzbekistan which was to buy a bottle of vodka. It came from Lithuania and apparently was good because everyone felt fine next morning. We could not get any glasses so I advised everyone to keep their empty water bottles for conversion to handy drinking receptacles with my Swiss army device, our German leader being very impressed at my experience in such matters.
When we arrived in Beijing I discovered I was a day ahead of myself because Kay was supposed to be there but wasn’t. But it was all right because I had a hotel booking and she turned up early the next morning.
There is lots more I could bore you with but this enough. If you want to know anything not mentioned just ask – I can go on for hours.
Dennis.