The moon-faced man asks, 'How do you do?'
'I'm doing fine, thanks,' I reply.
The man in grey asks, 'Do you have a mobile phone?'
I say I do.
He asks for it and seems pleased I have one. He takes the Nokia, examines the casing, places the offending item in a brown envelope, seals the ends with tape, stamps a red mark over the seal and says, 'Do not use mobile phones in North Korea.' He hands me the envelope.
I am requested to open my bags.
The man with the moon-like face asks, 'May we smoke?'
I shrug.
They light up Marlboros.
Through the smoke, they peer at my possessions.
'What is this?' snaps the grey suit. It's a book by T. S. Eliot.
'Poetry,' I say.
He looks suspiciously at the cover. The other officer flicks through my guidebook to North Korea, examining the pictures and grunting.
'And this?' It's a thriller by Lee Child.
'Ah, crime action thriller,' says the man in the slick grey suit, as though this is absolutely OK with him.
I also have a copy of William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair; I expect I'll have plenty of time to read during my nine-day tour of North Korea.
'So you like the classics. Van-it-ee Fair. Is reading your hobby?'
I reply that it is.
'So you are a tourist?'
I'm travelling under the guise of working for a tour operator to help them hone their itinerary, though I'm intending to write about the experience for a paper. To save complication, I just say, 'Yes.'
'Are you married?' asks the grey suit.
I say I'm not.
He draws on his cigarette, exhales and replies, 'A single man may live like a king but die like a dog.'
With that, they hand over my passport.
'Happy troubles,' the moon-faced man says. At least, this is how it sounds.
'Sorry?' I reply.
'Happy troubles,' he repeats – and I realise he is saying 'happy travels'.
They depart. I am in. My visa is in order. I have received free lifecounselling from a North Korean border guard. I am a tourist in North Korea – probably the most secretive country on the planet.
The train rolls on to Pyongyang, the capital; from Beijing to Pyongyang is about 600 miles. Oxen pull carts across barren, dried-out dirt fields. Figures in blue outfits cycle by. There are no vehicles, apart from the occasional official van. Kim Il-Sung smiles from advertising hoardings. Children at stations seem shocked to see a whitey (me). Great concrete towers emerge. Women pause from seemingly doing nothing and turn to salute the train. I am visited by two officers in green uniforms who sit opposite, smoke cigarettes and stare. They go away after a while. More empty brown landscape opens up.
We enter a long tunnel and emerge by a tall, partially finished building shaped like a Ku Klux Klan hat. The train squeals to a halt in a long, gloomy station with ballroom music playing over speakers. Hundreds of passengers disembark, almost all wearing suits. Albert looks blankly in my direction and follows the crowd.
I step off the train onto the smooth concrete platform.
'Hello, are you a tourist?' asks a man who, like everyone else, is in a suit with a badge of Kim Il-Sung. This is a bit of a Dr Livingstone, I presume? moment. I am clearly, among all the North Koreans, the most obvious holidaymaker. And so I meet my guide and 'observer' (who rarely lets me out of his sight in the days to follow).
There are, he says, about 50 diplomats at any one time in Pyongyang, as well as maybe 40 tourists. So I suppose I'm foreigner number 91 in the communist state (population: about
25 million). We drive in a Toyota Land Cruiser past more posters of Kim in the direction of a tall, shiny hotel, where I eat dinner alone in an extravagant ballroom with pink and pastel-blue walls.
We board our train to Glory
The Pyongyang Metro, North Korea (2008)
The Pyongyang Metro opened in 1973 and is deep, about 100 metres beneath the surface of the capital. Long, neon-lit escalators descend whitewashed tubes to grand, spotless platforms approached by stone steps with fancy marble balustrades. Pink and green chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Mosaics depict Kim IlSung smiling heartily as happy workers follow in his wake holding little red books. In the mosaics, everyone's teeth are pristinely white and they have good posture and broad shoulders, though there is a tendency to lean ever so slightly forwards, as if pushing the nation onwards to fine new feats of communist endeavour.
I go down into the metro with two guides. One guide is not enough, I have discovered. Guides work in pairs – maybe to keep an eye on each other in case one feels the urge to tell any home truths. 'We are going from Renaissance to Glory. There are seventeen stations, covering 35 kilometres and the temperature is 11–14°C,' says the small female guide, who must only just be 5 feet and has a scurrying walking style and a ramrod gait. Renaissance and Glory are station names. The guide is good on figures. I ask how much a metro fare costs in North Korea and she tells me that it's 5 won. This, if I have it correctly worked out, is about 1p.
Operatic music plays and people stare; all quite normal in Pyongyang. It's not crowded, and the station is wide with a high ceiling and a short platform. A train, with pistachio-green and cherry-red stripes, arrives at the opposite platform. I ask the diminutive female guide, who is more talkative than the thin man who met me at Pyongyang station, what one of the murals means. She replies, 'The success of the workers, farmers, factories and universities.' The North Korean economy appears to be booming.
We board our train to Glory. We sit at green plastic seats lined along a red linoleum floor. At the end of each carriage framed portraits of Kim Il-Sung and his son Kim Jong Il, the reigning supreme leader, hang on wood-effect walls. Neither smiles and both wear navy-blue jackets with the top buttons fastened. Kim Jong Il looks jowly and sports his trademark bouffant haircut.
My guide translates a sign, which says that walking is banned. I ask what would happen if I broke this rule. She looks at me as though I am crazy. 'An attendant would ring a bell,' she says. 'They would lecture you.'
I sit still. The passengers nearby are stony-faced and inscrutable. 'Some people are shocked at how westerners look,' the guide says. We talk for a while. She tells me she is not allowed to use the internet or email. She has two children aged five and eight. She studied English for five years and has been a translator/guide for eight. She surprises me by saying that she has been to Bulgaria, Russia, China, Lebanon and Jordan, where she floated in the Dead Sea.
At Glory we exit and take a long escalator that emerges by a square with a fountain of marble maidens and a bronze of Kim Il-Sung. His right arm is held aloft, saluting the fine achievements of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea – though in his long raincoat and comfortable slacks he looks a little like an accountant hailing a bus.
Overground or underground in North Korea – at every turn and on every train – a supreme leader is never far away.
'Pike-perch with stuffed peppers'
Italy to Poland on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express (2010)
All down the line there are hundreds of them: Polish trainspotters. They're out in force; perhaps never before seen in such numbers. The Orient Express from Venice is passing through. Word has got out among Eastern Europe's railway nuts.
We boarded by the Grand Canal and have travelled during the night through the Alps into the Czech Republic and Poland, where our first stop is to be in Kraków, after which the train is to continue westwards to Dresden and Calais. It's a trip of a lifetime on an inaugural Orient Express route.
The trainspotters of Trzebinia wave and snap away at the fine old navy-blue 1920s and 1930s art deco carriages. Most look like part-timers, out on day trips especially to see our unusual train, but others – well, you can just tell they have been on these platforms when lesser game has passed. The shoulder cases, the long lenses, the scraggly hair, the sandals and socks, the inability to put do
wn the camera and simply watch. As we head north-east, it is the same at most stations. There is a feeling of celebration, almost of liberation, as though the train is being cheered on: is this how troops feel on entering a freed land?
Maybe a little, without the plush furnishings and fine cuisine. Our train is very posh indeed. It is configured thus: three dining carriages (waiters with gold buttons and bow ties; tinkling piano at dinner); six beautifully maintained sleeping carriages; and a loco. The carriage we are in dates from 1929, with mahogany-panelled cabins designed by René Prou, considered a master in this area of expertise. A sign says that the carriage was 'used as a brothel in Limoges, 1940–1945'. My companion, who has taken to little-black-dress-and-pearls for dinner as though to the Orient Express born, has a chuckle when I tell her this. We're dressed in our finery, heading into the depths of Eastern Europe in an old knocking shop.
Our cabin has a tiny sink in a mirrored corner cabinet. The mahogany is inset with patterns depicting tulips, foxgloves and sprigs of bracken. Purple flowers poke out of a thin silver vase. An olive-green sofa to one side converts into a bunk (this task is performed by a steward while dinner is served). A small fan hangs from the ceiling, though there's no air conditioning. Pete and Genevieve in the next-door cabin, an electrical engineer and a doctor's receptionist from Basingstoke who are celebrating an anniversary, have thoughts about the latter. 'A lady down the hall said that this train is cheaper than a divorce,' says Genevieve, who is finding the close confines hot and stuffy. It is a bit tight. There's also no shower room. 'This is authentic,' explains the supersmooth train manager Bruno, a single bead of sweat working down his brow.
You can't help feeling for Bruno: there are a lot of well-to-do passengers who expect affairs to be conducted just so. At one dinner I overhear him in conversation with an American woman of a certain age and wealth, who snaps: 'You're back. Oh, you're here again, are you? I would like a non-alcoholic drink. One without grapefruit juice. I can't drink grapefruit because of my pills. And no sugar, please.'
'Of course, madam,' says Bruno. A non-alcoholic, nongrapefruit, non-sugar drink is fetched.
Beyond more Polish rail enthusiasts at Czechowice-Dziedzice, we cross fields of wildflowers and nettles. We are eating a lunch of 'pike-perch with stuffed peppers' in our red-lacquer dining carriage – decorated with a motif of deer, sheep and trees – and being attended to by three waiters as we pass Oświęcim. This is the train station for Auschwitz: a grim, grey, low-level building next to a long platform.
Coffee and chocolates are about to be served, but suddenly I just can't eat a thing.
Press trip in the Andes
Cusco to Aguas Calientes, for Machu Picchu, Peru, on the Hiram Bingham (2005)
The man from the Press Association is unwell. He is suffering from altitude sickness and has been treated with oxygen from a canister. That was back in Cusco (elevation: 3,400 metres); now we're on the train to Aguas Calientes at 2,000 metres to visit the ancient Inca site of Machu Picchu, so he ought to feel better, though he still looks wretched: groaning with his head in his hands. We are in the observation car of the Hiram Bingham, an Orient Express train, listening to an acoustic guitarist accompanied by a man with a recorder playing a Peruvian tune.
A few of us are feeling queasy, although the reporter from the Oxford Mail and the journalist from Masonic Quarterly Magazine seem just fine. The previous evening we dined on guinea pig in Cusco. Guinea pig is a local delicacy, we were assured by our guide, who earlier that day had taken us to see the creatures scurrying across a village yard. Out came our dishes, each guinea pig with its legs perched on a sweet potato, wearing a half-tomato 'cap' with a decorative mint sprig. The animals' mouths were propped open by slices of carrot in what disconcertingly seemed like hey-how-you-doing? smiles.
The reporter from the Oxford Mail had tucked straight in, using hands, not knife and fork, as instructed by our guide: this is the Peruvian way. Her plate was soon bones. The man from the Press Association had turned from white to pale blue. 'I do not want to eat a blinkin' rat,' he stuttered. Doing so would be, he said, going way beyond the terms of his contract. He really was having a rough time. Meanwhile, the woman from Masonic Quarterly Magazine had stomped out of the restaurant without touching her plate. 'All of you, you're all monsters!' she said, as she went to eat elsewhere. After she had gone, I tried a few bites: it was awful, with a metallic, fizz-on-the-tongue taste. I wished I had joined her.
So we had gathered at Poroy station near Cusco this morning and boarded the Hiram Bingham, after watching a performance of dancers in red and pink outfits. Now we're in the observation car amid brass fittings and walnut panels listening to Peruvian folk songs and drinking champagne. At least, I am, along with the woman from Masonic Quarterly Magazine, the reporter from the Oxford Mail, a writer from The Lady, and the British representative of the tour operator Cox & Kings (the man from the Press Association has declined the bubbly). Cox & Kings has arranged everything on our behalf, including the guinea-pig extravaganza, in return for coverage in our various publications. This is how a press trip works – and we are on one. The representative of Cox & Kings is calm, and needs to be; under the stresses of international travel, some of the journos are beginning to crack up.
From the windows of the 1920s Pullman observation car, we watch as the Andes soar above, great slippery stone slopes plunging to the valley floor. The train twists along a jade river. On curves we can see the locomotive and carriages bending ahead. From an outside deck at the back, the track disappears through a heat haze towards Cusco. Women in red cardigans and straw hats herd sheep or sell bananas and citrus fruit at little stalls, though we never pause to take a look; there are no scheduled stops.
The Hiram Bingham is named after the Honolulu-born explorer who was, in 1911, the first outsider to come across the ancient Inca site of Machu Picchu.
The journey takes four hours, and brunch is included in a dining carriage with white tablecloths. As we eat (no guinea pig today), we look out and can see dots on the Inca Trail path; human ellipses plodding along with backpacks. The average hike over 50 miles from Cusco to Machu Picchu takes about five days, staying in simple lodges along the way.
On our press trip it's not like that. We arrive. The bottles of champagne are put away. A band and dancing troupe starts up. The man from the Press Association, who has been slumped in a chair drinking soda in a corner, grimaces and blinks upwards. 'Are we there yet?'
One of the wonders of the world awaits.
'¿Qué es esto?'
Barcelona to Zaragoza, Spain (2013)
I don't think I've ever seen a security guard's eyes open quite so wide.
I'm at Barcelona's França station, about to catch a train to Zaragoza, 1 hour 40 minutes away by AVE high-speed train. Barcelona marks the rough halfway point of a 1,000-mile journey around Spain's heartland that began in Seville and continued to the sleepy little city of Albacete, principally known for its traditional knife-making industry, followed by a stopover in Tarragona, a charming port with a fine Roman amphitheatre.
So far I have been travelling on Alvia trains, with a top speed of 156 mph. They're no slouches, but from Barcelona to Zaragoza and onwards to Madrid I'm to take even faster AVE trains, the most modern in Spain. These have a top speed of 194 mph and when they get going, as I'm about to discover, they feel as though they're floating on air. Spain has very good high-speed trains: perhaps the best in Europe.
During two hours in Barcelona, I have seen the famous La Rambla pedestrian street with its knick-knack shops, florists, poseurs and food stalls. I've taken in Antoni Gaudí's Casa Milà, a highly peculiar house that looks like melted wax, while eavesdropping on a guide pointing upwards and telling her tourists: 'Can you see the waves? Can you see the seaweed?'
Then I returned to França station, collected my bags from a locker and reached the security checkpoint for my AVE train. For the Alvia trains there had been no such X-ray machines, so I am surprised to see
them, though I think nothing of it. I place my luggage on a conveyor belt and step through the X-ray frame for passengers.
On the other side I wait for my bags. But there is a delay.
After a while a guard with a moustache says to me, 'Eh! Eh!' He has collected my larger bag and put it to one side.
I go over, thinking, What is it this time? Too much toothpaste?
'Eh!' he says again, and points at the offending item: my bag. 'Open, por favor! Por favor!'
Here we go again, I'm thinking. Too much shaving gel. Did I leave a bottle of wine in there? Anyway, nowhere says liquids are banned. What is this?
I open my bag and suddenly it dawns on me.
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