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

  A quick bow later, sufficient respect displayed, we headed to the changing rooms. It was strange to be surrounded by locals in such an intimate setting of mutual nakedness. We’d been told that North Koreans had been told that all foreigners were enemies—prisoners of capitalism living in inferior, miserable countries—who wanted nothing more than the destruction of the real Korea. Whereas we’d been told that they were all just brainwashed lemmings. Whether or not either of these things were true, as we undressed together, saw each other naked and failing at the same basic human things like not falling over while taking off our socks, we seemed pretty similar to me.

  Stepping out of the changing rooms and into the complex reminded me of the scene in every Western where the stranger enters the rowdy saloon. We were still in Asia, so no one stared blatantly. However, they would steal quick glances at us before quickly looking at something else, usually the floor. No wonder they were looking—we were unusually shaped. Tall, lumbering, chubby, bearded. Some might have never seen a Westerner in the flesh before; certainly not this much flesh, anyway. I also understood now why Annett and the group’s other women had elected to wait in the coffee shop instead. If our bodies were getting this much attention, in a country where few had seen white foreigners, the arrival of a sudden wave of Western women in swimsuits would surely have raised more than eyebrows.

  The park had at least ten giant slides, some of which required the use of rubber rings or inflatable dinghies, and the whole complex was connected by a network of rapids. Thousands of locals were cooling off in the water during the hottest month of the year. It was really exciting to be in such close proximity to them.

  “Actors,” said Kir, dismissively, as we walked around. “Splashing around and pretending everything is fine here.”

  I sighed. “As if they would go to these lengths just to show a few white people everything is fine in North Korea.”

  He blinked slowly. “Oh come on. Don’t be so naive.”

  The idea that there might be a swimming complex and that the hardworking, loyal, elite party members might get to go there at the weekend didn’t seem ridiculous to me. It couldn’t be tyranny all the time, could it? If there is a Hell, I’m sure even it would have the odd bank holiday.

  Unfortunately, we had only two hours at the water park because while there were limited hours in our days, there were unlimited numbers of statues of the dear leaders to bow in front of. Kevin, a confident, outspoken American with wild curly hair bounded up to us. “You need to go on the diving boards,” he said, pointing at a structure about fifty metres away. “It’s so awesome.”

  The diving boards had attracted about a hundred spectators, who surrounded a rectangular diving pool. The tallest board was a lofty fifteen metres up into the clouds. “When we go on,” said Kevin, “they go wild.”

  Being clapped for by a large crowd of excited North Koreans? That seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. The only problem was that I didn’t know how to dive. I didn’t even really know how to swim. Annett mocked me mercilessly for my one swimming stroke, which she’d coined “the drowning monkey.” I don’t think anyone on earth expends more energy, to go less distance, than my monkey and I. I looked up at the highest board. Could anything go wrong if I jumped from it? Was it worth it for the risk, to have had the experience?

  I decided it was.

  So up I went.

  About halfway up I peeped over the side.

  I decided it wasn’t.

  I came back down again.

  It was high up there.

  I guess that’s the point.

  I was going to walk away, but then I passed the lowest diving board, suspended one solitary metre in the air. I could just walk to the end and fall off. No harm would befall me, would it? How could it? I would do it and find out. But if I was going to do it, I wanted to be loved. I wanted applause. So I decided I’d really ham up my dive for the crowd, give them a show.

  I stepped confidently up onto the board, as if I’d been diving all my life. I bowed slightly in a greeting to the audience. This got a laugh. It felt great. I edged further out onto the board. I looked out at the audience. I bowed. I looked down at the board. I twisted my face into one of shock and horror. I faked losing my balance. I opened my mouth as wide as I could. I screamed and trembled. A second laugh. I pretended to be stuck, afraid of a fall of just one metre. Then I punched the air defiantly, my fears suddenly conquered, dropped my weight, and made the board shake below me. This was where things got confusing. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do next to get off the board. I’d never dived before. So I bounced a few times more than anyone was expecting, panicked, pretended that was part of the act, and fell sideward into the water. I landed horizontally with a loud slap.

  The crowd went wild. Cheers, clapping, some light whooping—I was huge in North Korea! In fact, I was pretty much the Bono of slapstick North Korean water-park diving. Some doubted my methods, sure, but I got results, entertained. This was international relations done right. My head swelled. An Australian called Tim had been watching and decided to lance it. “You can’t dive for shit,” he said, as I climbed out the end of the pool.

  I puffed my chest out. “What? I was just working the crowd. Did you hear that reaction?” I considered telling him I was the Bono of slapstick North Korean water-park entertainment, but it seemed as though the moment had passed.

  Back in the changing rooms, Bono couldn’t get his locker open. Bono was embarrassed, and wet, and unable to get dry because his towel was in his locker, which, as Bono mentioned, Bono couldn’t get open. Luckily, a few lockers down from Bono stood a tall, muscular, naked North Korean. He saw Bono struggling, put on a T-shirt, and came to help. Why the man had picked just a T-shirt, to cover only the top part of his torso, Bono had no idea.

  “It is not working when wet,” he said.

  This was a surprise. “You can speak English?”

  “Yes. Little. I student at Kim Il-sung University.”

  Under his expert tutelage and on-the-spot guidance, the locker door sprung open. I had so many questions. None of them about the locker. “What are you studying?” I asked.

  He smiled, revealing a set of wonky front teeth, then stepped gingerly back across the wet floor to his locker, to continue changing. After everyone had finished swimming, we visited a Starbucks-style coffee shop in the swimming complex. The friction between the tourists intensified. “Maybe this table is bugged?” said an absurdly tall man from Belgium, peering under the coffee table, presumably in search of covert recording devices.

  “I don’t think that,” replied a Dutch girl, “but I think that they are sort of required to be at places we go to, to show us the good side of the country.” She looked out through the glass and into the water park, at the thousands of people enjoying it below us. “Maybe they were all invited here today? Did you notice how no one pays for anything anywhere?”

  This stopped us in our tracks. We thought back to all the places we’d been thus far—restaurants, coffee shops, museums, the circus. None of the locals had paid for anything, at least not that any of us had seen.

  “Proof!” said the Belgian, high-fiving a paranoid German student who was backing his photos up each night across seven hidden SD cards. “Also, in the park, I forget the name—”

  “Kim Il-sung Park probably?” the Dutch girl suggested. Everyone laughed. The naming of things was easy in the DPRK; they just picked a Kim and then added the appropriate noun to the end: park, square, stadium, flower.

  “Anyway, at that park,” the German continued, “did you see that guy with the expensive camera? How did he afford that? Why does no one else have one like it?”

  He looked around at us one by one, provoking us to find holes in the cheese of his logic. No one dared. We were on a roll. We had answers. It was all fake…

  “Yes! I saw that too,” said the Dutch girl. “And… and… did you see those young guys playing volleyball?”

  A few people nod
ded.

  “Well… as soon as we left, I managed to sneak back behind the group and away from the handlers.”

  We sat up a little higher in our seats. “Guess what?” she said. “They’d stopped playing and left! I think they were actors.”

  I cleared my throat. I didn’t want to be the one contrarian; however, I’d always been a big believer in Occam’s razor, in favouring explanations that were simpler, that required fewer presumptions. Since we’d arrived in North Korea, I’d felt trapped in an episode of The X-Files, as the only Scully amongst fifty tourist Mulders. They wanted to believe. I wanted to know, and if that wasn’t possible, to err on the side of caution. All the other weird places I’d visited had only reassured me there isn’t all that much New out there. The wrapping changes, but underneath are the same flawed humans muddling through as best they can, getting to be either the ones who give the orders, the ones who have to obey them, or something in between. The stories we’d been told about North Korea in the media were sensationalist, but so were the stories I’d been telling of Thetford. Sensationalism sells. Not that North Korea was ordinary, but that didn’t mean it used three thousand actors to stage a play of leisure normality for fifty tourists.

  “Guys,” I said, “it’s a fun theory, but the sheer logistics involved in it are just baffling. Look how many people are out there. All for us? And, I mean, perhaps more importantly, why? Why would they care enough to stage all this?” I swept an arm in the direction of the water park below.

  The Belgian tutted. “Because they want us to think everything is normal here.”

  “Okay, but why?”

  “So we go home and tell people it’s normal.”

  “Okay, but why?” I had become a five-year-old.

  He sighed. “So that other people will come here.”

  I clenched my jaw. “But why would they come here, then? It would just be a boring normal country full of statues, a place where you can’t talk to anyone, and have to spend eight hours each day on a bus, and all your time off it bowing. If it truly were normal, there would be no reason to come here. It’s not fun. It’s almost certainly one of the worst places on earth, in fact.”

  We sipped quietly at our coffees. People looked out at the water park and the actors pretending to enjoy themselves within it. I wasn’t invited to further conspiratorial discussions.

  The following day was, well, so many things. It was clear from what we’d seen so far that the DPRK had a pretty tenuous relationship with modesty. Nowhere was this more evident than our next stop: Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, K1 and K2’s mausoleum. Every North Korean is required to visit it once. Some come much more often. Many were there that day, dressed, like us, in their finest formal wear.

  The building itself was typically North Korean, which meant it was typically Stalinist, which meant it was eight times larger than it needed to be and probably took Herculean efforts to heat. Inside we found opulences of marble and gold at scales dizzying and awe-inspiring (oh, and bragging).

  “Apparently it took a hundred million dollars to build the bugger,” said Jack. The interior was a collection of travelators, wide moving walkways. We were not allowed to walk on them, despite the very slow speed they were set to. Instead, we had to simply stand on them and be carried along. This was so we’d have enough time to enjoy the countless numbers of propaganda pictures of the dear leaders adorning the walls and ceiling: K1 and K2 visiting factories; inspecting military hardware; being entertained by smiling children playing miniature musical instruments; giving on-the-spot guidance. Many of the photos were obviously Photoshopped—colours didn’t match, and shadows suggested our planet is actually heated by two suns. Sweeping, lamenting orchestral music was pumped out of hidden speakers. It set the sombre tone.

  It was simply absurd. The oddest thing my two eyes had ever seen. “I’m struggling for words,” I said to Annett. “Since you never have that problem, can you help?”

  She smiled, staring at an enormous picture of K1 holding a baby. “You’ve got to give it to them. They know how to do pomp.”

  “Yeah, it’s kinda like Madame Tussauds on acid at the end of the world,” said Jack, the best summary so far.

  Finally, after an hour of being shuffled through this maze of indoctrination and having adequately mulled over the extraordinary, monumental achievements of the dear leaders, we came to an air-blowing, shoe-cleaning station. Relieved of our external impurities, we passed into a dark room illuminated by only the faintest red strip lighting. In front of us, in the room’s centre, surrounded by columns of red marble, lay, embalmed in an elevated glass sarcophagus, the body of demigod Eternal President Kim Il-sung. A red Workers’ Party of Korea flag covered him to his chest. He wore a dark suit jacket, his arms resting at his sides. Around the casket were dozens of pink Kimilsungia flowers. Did I mention K1 and K2 have their own flowers? I didn’t? I take it you’re not surprised?

  Good. Because we’re just getting started.

  Annett and I followed the row of four in front of us and approached the casket. We bowed to three sides of it, but not to the top, as that would imply we were above the great man and could look down upon him. As if. The room was perfectly quiet except for the high-pitched squeaking of one pair of shoes. My shoes. I’d only ever worn them once. Where did I have to go that might require smart shoes? A guard clutching an automatic weapon to his chest frowned.

  “Dude,” said Tristan, another of our Western guides, “do something about those shoes.” I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do about the shoes. Nor when and where I was supposed to do it. A few minutes later, we reached the second room, the resting place of K2. He lay wearing his trademark, iconic, olive zip-up suit.

  Squeak. Squeak. Bow. Squeak. Frown. Bow. Squeak. Squeak. Frown. Bow.

  Around him, predictably, were dozens of bright red Kimjongilia flowers. The next room was equally absurd. It was the awards room of K1, and contained every trophy, medal, key, and plaque presented to him in his distinguished life of gangster kingpindom. The walls were adorned with pictures of him posing with world leaders. K1 fraternised with a select crowd of despots and dictators: Stalin, Honecker, Mubarak, Ceauşescu, Gaddafi—the room was a shrine to history’s assholes.

  The final chamber was the same, only for K2. I knew modesty had finally died, been embalmed, and given its own Kumsusan Palace of the Sun when I saw a photo of K1 awarding K2 the “hero of Korea” medal.

  Kumsusan was North Korea at its most ridiculous, absurd, offensive, gaudy, and shameful. The exhibits spoke for themselves. They said, “Can you believe we got away with this? That now, even in death, we’re still getting away with this?” I couldn’t. At the exit, shell-shocked, disorientated, depressed, we stumbled back out into the torching sun.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” I said to Kir.

  He nodded. “Yeah, they really turned the propaganda to eleven.”

  As mentioned, the reason we’d picked this specific tour was that Juche 105 (the North Korean calendar is based, of course, on K1’s date of birth) was the seventieth anniversary of the end of Japanese Imperial rule. To celebrate this, that evening, there would be a mass dance held in the city’s main square. Would you like to have a guess at the name of that square? That’s right, Kim Il-sung Square.

  Shortly before 8pm, we stepped down from our tour buses and were led up into a pavilion. What we saw from that pavilion, well, if there were words for it, none of us could locate them. I got so dizzy that I had to sit down.

  “Wow,” said Annett. “It’s…” But nothing further came.

  “I can’t,” said Kir. “It’s. Jesus.”

  Even Jack was humbled. “It’s like the Bermuda Triangle fucked…” He faded out, defeated by the grandiosity of the spectacle.

  Below us were ten thousand adults all staring straight ahead and standing perfectly still in blocks of thirty. The blocks covered the entire square and continued all the way to the banks of the Taedong River several hundred metres in the
distance. The men wore formal shirts and ties, while the women wore their brightly coloured traditional dresses. We fumbled hungrily at the buttons of our cameras: it was pointless. There was no way to capture the beauty and absurdity of the spectacle. Of so many people standing stiffly, in formation, like marionettes awaiting their puppeteer.

  “They’re like the terracotta warriors of Xi’an,” I said to Annett.

  “Yeah, only these people are alive.”

  The music began to play. The people raised their heads and pumped their fists to it, in near-perfect synchrony. How many nights had been lost choreographing this? After that first song had finished, a more upbeat one began, and the men and women turned, faced one another, bowed, and began to dance.

  They danced beautifully. No one bumped anyone else. No one tripped. No one arrived late, drunk, or in the wrong clothes. Who had coordinated this remarkable feat of logistics? Although the visuals overwhelmed, it was the logistics that baffled me most.

  “Look at their faces,” said Dennis, a Swiss lawyer.

  They were completely devoid of emotion. “I’d call them robotic, but that would be a little offensive to robots,” said Jong. This was supposed to be a joyous occasion, the celebration of seventy years of “freedom.”

  “They look so bored,” said Annett

  Jack lowered the enormous lens of his camera. “You would be too if you’d been dancing to the same half dozen songs since childhood.”

  My mouth dropped open. “What do you mean? There are only six official songs?”

  “Yep. This song will loop again in a few minutes, just you wait. And there are only a few officially sanctioned dancing numbers. They learn all the steps in kindergarten, the poor bastards.”

  “Ah,” I said. “That’s why no one makes mistakes.”

  Four songs in, the handlers beckoned us down from the pavilion. My pulse raced as I skipped down the wide steps to the square. With so few tourists and so many groups, it was easy for all of us to spread out and have a block of thirty DPRK dancers to ourselves. Annett and I looked at the group in front of us. So perfect, structured, flawless.