Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places

by Adam Fletcher

  “Wasps?” Rob said next. “Any of you ever eaten wasps?”

  We looked around at each other. No.

  “They’re great. Not chewy. They’re crispy all the way through. Delicious. I’m more Chinese than most Chinese people, man. I know what I’m talking about. Have any of you ever heard about the North Korean kebab?”

  We hadn’t heard about that either. We were such amateurs…

  “So I’m in Rason, which is in the north-east. I’m trashed on beer and soju. We’re just standing there, me and this North Korean handler, in the kitchen of this bar. Great guy, I know him really well…” Burp. “Where was I? Oh, yeah.”

  He might have known what he was talking about, but he was having trouble talking about it.

  Hiccup. “Erm. What? Ah. So… suddenly, the guy reaches up and takes down two raw eggs from a shelf. He thrusts a chopstick in one, puts the egg to his mouth, and then makes this elaborate loud sucking sound.”

  We expressed audible disbelief.

  “So I’m like, is this guy serious? Oh well, what the hell. I dig a chopstick in the other egg and try it. The North Korean kebab.”

  The disbelief amplified.

  “Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. It was good enough for Rocky.”

  I was afraid that the train journey might degenerate into a Champagne Train. Not only was this another group tour, it was also through the same company that had hosted my Transnistria/Moldova debacle. Annett and I had only had a choice of five tours, and this one had been half the price of the others. Fortunately, this was a different group of people, with an average age of thirty; they were more mature, more knowledgeable about where we were going, more excited to get there.

  The next morning, by the time the first rays of light pierced the carriage’s flimsy blue curtains, we’d reached the Chinese side of the border. “Just to warn you, security here is a shitshow,” said Jack, our Irish guide. Yep, that Jack. Fast-talking, heavy-drinking, potty-mouthed Jack. I wasn’t overjoyed to be reunited with him, but so far he’d been behaving much better on this trip. North Korea was his normal route; Transnistria had been a one-off, almost a holiday for him. Here, he had to be responsible. One transgression and he’d be banned from the country, or worse. Otto Warmbier had spent a year here doing hard labour just for stealing a poster, before dying on his return to the US, his body showing signs of torture.

  The door to our train’s carriage opened.

  “Here we go,” said Jack.

  A mob of DPRK border guards entered, each wearing increasingly impractically large hats denoting their rank. They began going through the luggage of the North Korean and Chinese passengers amongst us. Thirty minutes later, one reached our set of bunks, where seven of us sat sharing the bottom two beds.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” said Jack. “Lovely day for it, aye?”

  The man smiled and removed his enormous hat. It was at least thirty-five degrees outside; more in the cramped train. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve before exhaling loudly and putting his hat back on. He looked done with this national-border-protecting nonsense.

  “Flwetcher?” he said, reading my name from the top of his stack of passports.

  “Yes.”

  “Phwone?”

  I showed him my phone.

  “Beebley?”

  This threw me. I looked at Jack.

  “Bible.”

  “Ah! No, no Bible.”

  “Bookey?”

  I showed him my Kindle. He turned it over in his hands as if it were something I’d smuggled out of Chernobyl before handing it cautiously back. This was easy so far.

  “Bag?”

  I got my bag out from under the bunk I was sitting on.

  He patted it as though it were a dog he distrusted.

  “What in? Clotheses?”

  I was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to be giving me the answers. “Yes, clotheses.”

  He put the bag back under the seat. This was absurd. The most paranoid place on earth? Israel had treated me so much worse. Sighing under the weight of his hat, he turned and took the next immigration form from the pile.

  Clotheses really was the magic immigration word. After the guards checked our bags, without opening our bags, the only things that lay separate, on the middle bunk, were our laptops. They awaited a DPRK technology expert, who, based on what we’d read online, would promptly wipe all the drives and then set the whole lot on fire, like they were medieval witches. This person arrived, and I was curious as to how he was going to search seven laptops thoroughly, on a congested train that probably contained another hundred. We got the answer quite quickly. He wasn’t. He began by opening the laptop of a Filipino travelling in our group. “The Philippines having a good relationship with the US,” said Jack, “they usually check them boys more than us.”

  I watched over the DPRK technology expert’s shoulder. He went to Start then Search, and typed “Interview.” Of all things they wanted to stop getting in from the outside world, what they were most afraid of was The Interview, a bad movie, in English, starring Seth Rogan and James Franco. A movie that features the execution of Kim Jong-un, and, if the Internet conspiracies were right, a movie that had so incensed the regime that they’d hacked into Sony and released lots of embarrassing personal documents as revenge for its mere existence. North Korea’s regime was not famed for its sense of humour, but then, neither was the movie The Interview.

  The IT expert’s search didn’t uncover that movie. However, predictably, it did find some interview-related documents. He flicked through them then closed the laptop.

  “That’s it?” Annett asked Jack.

  “That’s it,” said Jack. “The poor bastards don’t have time to do anything more.”

  Forty-five minutes of opaque bureaucratic tomfoolery later, our elaborately hatted friends all bade us adieu and stepped off the train, which groaned in apology as it trundled into the Hermit Kingdom. Another trolley came through with alcohol. It left just a trolley. The train accelerated to an impressive thirty-five kilometres an hour. “Is the train going slow so that we can better see everything?” the Filipino asked. Jack laughed. He seemed to enjoy his job. And his beer.

  Looking out of the train’s windows, we were treated to a lush landscape of bright, almost neon, green. A land seemingly unspoilt by the usual human malevolences of power stations, shopping malls, and Irish bars. There was palpable excitement amongst us. Anything was considered photo worthy at this point, merely because it was North Korean.

  Annett high-fived me. “We did it!”

  “We sure did.” Although what we’d done was unclear. Would it really be like what we’d read? A giant Kim family personality cult? There were plenty of North Koreans on the train, returning home. They all wore the red pin badges of the dear leaders on their hearts, a requirement for every adult, every day of his or her life. If that part was true, maybe it was all true?

  Then… they appeared. In the third town we passed, atop a hill sat a giant white mural depicting Eternal President Kim Il-sung (K1 for short), his arm outstretched paternally, and Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il (K2) standing in a field, looking down at the town below.

  It was all true. Here was the evidence! Look!

  Jong, a half-Swedish half-Chinese member of our group, failed to get his camera out in time, and was furious at having missed this photo opportunity. Jack laughed once more. “That’s not going to be a problem, lad. Once you get out of this place you’ll check your photos and realise 99 percent of your pics feature dem two bruddas.”

  I sat back in the bunk. “Why do you call them brothers? They’re not brothers.”

  He winked and opened a new beer. “Very perceptive. It’s just a bit of a nickname we have for them.”

  Jack then told us where this nickname had come from. It involved the worst two tourists the company had ever hosted—American rappers, called Pacman and Pe$o, who’d raised the money to visit via a Kickstarter campaign that promis
ed to create the first-ever North Korean rap video.

  “They’d never left the USA before,” said Jack, between swigs. “And they only had one outfit each with them, these cheap tailored suits they’d got made in China. They were freezing their asses off the whole time, they were. They never wanted to get off the buses and they knew nut’ing about the country. On the third day, we’d stopped at a monument of the dear leaders, probably like the twentieth of the trip, right, and one sidled up to me and said, no word of a lie now, ‘So whose dem two bruddas?’”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s like going to Egypt, pointing at the pyramids, and asking if it’s a sandcastle.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, or going to Italy thinking Mussolini is a type of pasta.”

  Annett shared round a packet of barbeque-flavoured crisps. “Did they make the video?”

  “Aye. It’s called Escape to North Korea.” He rocked back in laughter. “The opposite direction of all previous escape attempts involving North Korea. Idiots.”

  After four hours, and a dozen more murals and statues of dem two bruddas, the landscape began to change: fields and paddies surrendered to longer and longer stretches of paved roads and houses until finally, the glass facade of a gleaming new airport came into view. We were approaching the capital, Pyongyang.

  Jack pointed at it. “Apparently Kim Jong-un visited the airport and gave on-the-spot guidance that arrivals and departures should be separated. They tell you this like it was very innovative, bless ’em.”

  This was the first time we’d heard the phrase “on-the-spot guidance.” It would not be the last…

  North Korea’s dilapidated train network had managed to turn a 160-kilometre trip into five hours of slow-paced sightseeing pleasure ending in Pyongyang’s impressively Soviet central station. We were giddy. We’d made it to the centre of the most secretive place on earth, and so had all our clotheses.

  Outside the station, we were divided into groups across four smart, new air-conditioned buses. Jack said a few words of welcome then passed us over to our North Korean handlers. Conveniently for the absent-minded, our guides were called Mr and Mrs Park who welcomed us over the P.A. system as we pulled out into Pyongyang as harried-looking pedestrians scurried around the city like ants. Many wore military uniforms and marched in formation. For civilians, since all the clothing is supplied by the government, there is only one style of dress; it almost looks as though people are wearing uniforms. The men wear silk shirts and suit trousers, and the women wear loose-fitting blouses and skirts. It seemed as if everything was required to be two sizes too large, maybe to help with the heat.

  Pyongyang seemed a reasonably attractive city let down by a little too much concrete and brutalist Soviet high-rise pomp. The atmosphere was a mixture of hubris and the Cold War. Most striking to me in this showpiece city was the complete absence of graffiti.

  “It’s spotless,” Annett said, photographing from the seat next to me.

  “I know. Part of me wants to go and drop a wrapper just to see what happens.”

  Almost every tourist in Pyongyang stays at the same hotel, Yanggakdo, because it’s situated on a small island, making overthrowing the government very impractical. During dinner, in the hotel’s top-floor revolving restaurant that wasn’t revolving, over a buffet of rice, vegetables, and mystery meats, we met one final member of our group: a lanky Croatian called Kir. Kir had arrived a day earlier than the rest of us to visit an attraction in the north. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked, four seconds after introducing himself.

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Last night I was in another hotel, in Pyongyang’s centre, and I sneaked out for a walk. I thought they’d stop me, of course. But the guard was distracted with something and so I just kept on walking and suddenly I was alone… on the streets of Pyongyang.”

  This was strictly forbidden. He showed us a video on his phone. “It was incredible,” he said, his shifty eyes darting around to check that none of the handlers were listening. “I walked around for about ten minutes.” The video showed him walking along a street. The buildings he passed were dark, lit only in their stairwells. “Then a car pulled up and the driver gave me a strange look and so I ran back to the hotel.”

  After dinner, Annett and I headed down to the hotel’s basement, where we found a bar with some pool tables and a karaoke lounge. As we’d be unable to leave the hotel each evening, these were to be our only entertainment options. I found Kir in a corner of the pool room, his phone in his hand, asking people if they could keep a secret. He certainly couldn’t. At the bar, instead of the change I was expecting from the purchase of a beer, I was handed four sticks of Wrigley chewing gum.

  The barmaid smiled apologetically. “No change.”

  A few of my tour group were nearby playing pool. They laughed at my confusion, and waved their own chewing gum change at me. Money is based mostly on belief, so chewing gum makes about as much sense as rectangular pieces of dead tree with the queen’s face on them. I decided to be a believer, and pocketed the gum. Later, when I returned to the bar for another beer, I took these chewy sticks of legal tender with me and attempted to exchange them for more alcohol. The woman simply laughed as I presented them, and pushed them back across the bar. She was no longer a believer.

  The next morning, at the extremely antisocial hour of 6:30am, Annett and I trudged up to the revolving restaurant for a breakfast of rice, vegetables, mystery meats, and eggs. Last night’s meal plus egg. We had a perfect view of the city. Where we’d expected it to be slowly shaking off the previous night and yawning lazily into the new workday, we found it already abuzz. There were groups everywhere moving with a commendable sense of hurry and purpose. I got (even more) tired just watching them.

  “Can you believe we’re in North Korea?” Annett asked.

  “Nope. And I think it might even be weirder than I expected.”

  It was 7:30am when we climbed onto the tour bus for the first packed day of sightseeing. Our first stop was a collective farm. There to meet us was a beautiful woman with a beehive hairstyle. She wore a pink-and-red floral-patterned traditional dress. “Welcome, comrades,” she said. Behind her was the entrance and to the left of that, two large marble statues of dem two bruddas.

  “Welcome to the Kim Il-sung collective farm, where under the expert tutelage of the dear leaders, the people work to grow food for our great nation.”

  A few people moved in the direction of the farm’s gates. “Wait, comrades!” She ushered them back to the group. She wasn’t finished yet. “The collective farm was first visited by Eternal President Kim Il-sung in 1957.”

  Okay, fine, nice, good.

  “Only the fiftieth time we’ve heard this name so far this morning,” Annett whispered in my ear.

  The woman turned and swept her arms in the direction of the statues. “In honour of his visit, we presented him this statue.”

  Of himself. Humble.

  She bowed her head slightly. “He praised it for its revolutionary spirit.”

  Is it important how often Kim Il-sung was here and what he thought of his statue?

  “He next visited the collective farm in 1971.”

  I guess so.

  “Where he gave on-the-spot guidance to local farmers that significantly increased harvest yields.”

  On-the-spot guidance again. Apparently the dear leaders were true Renaissance men and could give on-the-spot guidance on an incredible range of matters, from running the economy to the engineering of buildings, the design of school desks, and harvesting techniques. They were certainly not Mitläufer, like me. Someone sighed, eager to get inside. The nice lady in the traditional dress still wasn’t finished yet, though.

  “Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il first visited the collective farm in 1984, where he praised it for its architectural beauty.”

  Ah, K2. We haven’t heard his name in five minutes. A veritable drought.

  “Suprem
e Leader Kim Jong-il visited the collective farm again in 1997, when…”

  I was on the edge of my feet.

  “I feel on-the-spot guidance coming on,” Annett whispered.

  The woman turned to the statues again. “…we presented him with his own matching statue!”

  “Damn, so close,” I said.

  What do you buy the dictator who has everything? Another big-ass statue of himself, that’s what. The country has forty thousand statues of dem two bruddas.

  “He praised the statue for its artistic integrity.”

  “Hurrah,” said Kir, sarcastically.

  The woman turned and beckoned us in the direction of the statues. “Now, please show your respect.”

  We lined up in rows of fours, behind each other, facing the statues before bowing together to the dear leaders. Our Western tour guides laid a bouquet of flowers at the statues’ feet. We didn’t know it yet, but this same scene would play out at every attraction, all day long. On the bus, off the bus, pretty woman in traditional dresses, an explanation from her of how often the dear leaders had been to the thing we were seeing, some bowing, then we would finally be given permission to enter it. This for up to fifteen hours a day. It got tedious.

  However, there were occasional, fleeting moments where it felt like, just maybe, we’d smashed through the facade of utter nonsense and experienced something real. The first was during a visit to Pyongyang’s enormous new water-park complex. Until then we’d had no meaningful contact with the city’s people. How could we? Our Korean handlers never left our sides. Yet as we pulled into this enormous new complex, Mr and Mrs Park informed us that they would be waiting outside. We’d be free to mingle unsupervised amongst the thousands of bathing, swimming, and splashing locals.

  I ran inside giddy with new-found freedom. It didn’t last long. Inside the lobby I skidded to a stop in front of a familiar face—K1. It certainly takes some chutzpah to put a three-metre-high bronze statue of yourself in the lobby of a swimming pool complex. K1 was all chutzpah.