Day 1, Tuesday April 30, 2002:

Our first day effectively started the late afternoon of Monday, April 29th, when we all met in the International Departures Hall at Beijing Main Railway Station.

There were 34 of us, coming from as far afield as Canada, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, Spain, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and expats now living in China. The train to Pyongyang was scheduled to leave at 17.28 hours and usually we would just take it from outside the waiting room, but for some reason we had to go out and up and along some platforms to find our overnight sleeper.

Leaving Beijing

The journey Beijing - Pyongyang takes about 23 hours, which sounds much more than it is, because not only do you sleep a good 8-10 hours in a surprisingly comfortable compartment, you also have a very good dinner in the early evening and a couple of hours of diverting immigration procedures at the border the next morning.
We arrived at Dandong at about 7.30am and spent a few minutes buying provisions for the remainder of the journey from stalls in the station. We were then taken outside (past a huge red stone statue of Mao Zedong that's a sight in itself!) to a bus that would drive us a few yards up the road.
It was of course still early morning and we didn't get to venture far, but even at that hour Dandong was full of life, with plenty of people on bicycles on their way to work, others opening up shops or cleaning the pavements.

Dandong Emigration. Note the bridge at the top right that leads across the river Amnok into North Korea!

At the Chinese emigration offices our passports were taken and all we could do was wait. That made us easy prey for some sales women, offering any number of nicknacks such as umbrellas, sweets, fans etc.
A large number of Chinese tourists were also crossing into the DPRK, mainly to see the Arirang Mass Games (more on that in the Day 2 section). Usually there are 500 Chinese crossing over every month, but when we went it was closer to 500 a day!

We finally got back on the bus and set off to cross the river Amnok into North Korea. The adventure was about to begin. I had been waiting for this for a long time!

 

Propaganda Poster in Pyongyang

I cannot begin to describe the difference between Dandong and Sinuiju, the North Korean border town.
The very first thing we saw when we crossed the bridge was a small dilapidated funfair, with a couple of broken-down rides and people squatting to hack away at some weeds. Low houses, huts almost, virtually no cars, no traffic noise, no hustle and bustle, no colour even, nothing! Where Dandong had an almost mediterranean seafront full of large white office buildings or hotels, Sinuiju was grey, dead and dirty. What we did see were the first of many propaganda posters of Kim Il Sung, motivational slogans on big billboards and piped revolutionary music. Not that anybody on the bus was able to read the signs or understand the words, but it became quite clear quite quickly that everything we saw was state controlled and of a political nature.

We were driven to the immigration office at the railway station, where we had to heave our luggage up some staircase to get to the scanning room (such as you see at airports) to get it checked and have ourselves examined for any metal objects we might carry. I then had to take my suitcase to a small curtained-off area, where the contents were examined by about five young soldiers. They seemed particularly interested in a CD I had bought in Beijing the day before of Faye Wong, some singer I had never heard of before, but because the cover looked like it promised modern easy-on-the-ears pop music I had bought it as a souvenir. All five soldiers had a good look at it (and her) before finally letting me have the CD back.

That out of the way we met our tour guides for the week. As there were so many of us, we were split into group A and group B, mine being the latter. Our guides were Mr K and Ms M, who would prove to be friendly, hardworking and flexible in making arrangements to suit our interests. (Mr K, mid 30s, tall, thin, well dressed in a dark western style suit but with white socks, Rolex wrist watch. He did virtually all the talking, translating and explaining. Ms R, very short and thin, almost fragile. Recently gave birth to her first child and probably homesick all week. She didn't speak much apart from brief weather forecasts in the morning.)

To kill time while the formalities went on we went to buy our very first authentic NK souvenirs. A small stall on the platform had pins, books, postcards, Arirang posters plus Russian spirits and cigarettes for sale. We bought mainly pins and posters.

On the train we got given a rather tasty lunch. Two styrofoam boxes contained pickled vegetables, a boiled egg, some beef and chicken, plenty of rice and a bottle of Chinese (I think) mineral water.

An hour or so later we set off on the final leg to Pyongyang.

Kwaksan Railway Station

Against my expectations the carriage was not sealed, i.e. we could open the windows and lean out. Most of us did, as the train was slow and there was much to look at. Photography of any kind however was forbidden and it took us a while before we were brave enough to ask if we could take pictures of a train station. We were allowed to do so, see Kwaksan station above. We stopped at a few stations and they all looked like this, with Kim Il Sung's portrait at the roof and virtually nobody on any platform. Once I saw a waiting room full of people, but behind closed doors. I never saw anybody get onto our train.

Along the journey there were hundreds of uniformed officials standing near the track, holding up yellow or red paddles. I cannot remember seeing any electronic signals.

What we saw of the countryside, in a word, was bleak.
Plenty of rice fields but all grey or red earth. No lush green fields and only very few trees. Central planning has ordered rice to be planted everywhere, even in unsuitable areas. They are using an inferior strain of rice, have hardly any fertilizer and are only just learning to get two crops per year.

Fields near Kwaksan

We saw very little farming activity, a handful of old tractors maybe, but mostly ox-drawn carts and manual labour. The amount of people just sitting around in the fields doing nothing at all or maybe a spot of weeding was staggering. The few large buildings were either schools or town halls, or empty and rusty warehouses or factories. Construction cranes were spotted, but they were unpainted and rusty and not one looked as if it had been used recently.
Most towns looked deserted. What little activity we saw was people walking along dusty roads (not tarmaced) or a few on bicycles.
Everything just shouted 'Unproductive!'. Even a massive investment boost would not resurrect the economy any time soon and virtually everything would have to be built up from scratch. Despite the decline of communism in the rest of the world, the NK regime seems pretty stable (and resolutely unwilling to embrace change and foreign influences of any kind), so it will be many years before living conditions will even begin to improve. I cannot for one minute image what it must be like living in the NK countryside!

The first thing we saw of Pyongyang was the 105-storey Ryugyong hotel. Construction had started in 1987 but when money ran out in 1991 the project was abandoned. To this day it is unfinished and stands derelict!
South Korea had built a 102-storey hotel in Singapore and NK one-upmanship dictated they must built one as well, but of course even bigger and higher! Now it's just a window-less shell with a very small, dilapidated and rusty construction crane right at the top. The structure is grey, waterstained and unlit.
NK has no tourism to speak of and how they thought they'd be able to fill such a place is a mystery. It's a behemoth that you see whereever you are in Pyongyang and to me it embodies the folly of this regime and its complete disregard of the people's needs over prestige objects that serve no purpose but self-aggrandisement.

Ryugyong Hotel

Pulling into Pyongyang station at 16.40 we got onto our bus and were driven straight to Mansudae Hill to lay flowers and pay our respects to the Great Leader Kim Il Sung. Nick, the tour organiser, had brought two bouquets that he and J from Hungary laid down. We then bowed and marvelled at the view from there over the city. The weather was good and were able to see for miles. The statue itself and the monuments around are very impressive and kept spotlessly clean. Solemn music plays from speakers at all times.
Like at other sights throughout the week that we were supposed to see, here we were free to take as many pictures as we'd like, so we snapped away freely. The only restriction here was that we must not cut off any part of the statue, i.e. no pics of just the feet and none from behind either! It's all quite grand and impressive, so I scanned a picture from a book to give you an idea of the area rather than use one of my snaps.

Grand Monument on Mansu Hill

That done, we were off to the Yanggakdo Hotel, where we were to stay for the week.
It's on a small island in the Taedong river. There was talk that we might be put up in the bigger Koryo Hotel, but it seems NK authorities prefer this one, because its location makes it easier to keep tourists under lock and key. As a normal tourist (more on that later) you are not allowed to walk through Pyongyang by yourself. This way, because it's on an island, nobody could even attempt to sneak out and wander off unsupervised.
I don't think that would even have occurred to us, but a stroll along the river after dinner would have been nice. (There was no such thing as 'evening entertainment' set up for us other than drinks at the bar or watching Bizarro-World Television.)

Even before check-in I was off to the bookshop. I had watched the Polish TV documentary 'The Parade' and seen a number of books I desperately wanted, such as 'The Leader Of People' (paintings of Kim Il Sung in various situations, giving on-the-spot guidance in fields or factories, surrounded by children or foreign dignitaries, all ecstatic to see him!), a picture book on Pyongyang, guide books, postcards, Korean Film Art, videos of army parades and mass games etc etc. Within 5 minutes I had spent $95 (they are happy to accept US-Dollars cash!) and this was only Day 1!

My room was huge, with a TV and VCR, which was brilliant for my purposes as I really wanted to tape some NK television. I don't think many rooms had VCRs.

left: Yanggakdo Hotel (with the International Cinema in front) - right: not my room, but almost identical

Then to dinner in Dining Room One and later a couple of beers with M from Canada in the revolving restaurant on the 47th floor. We had a nice view towards the city centre with the Juche Tower and Kim Il Sung Square all illuminated, but as we slowly 'revolved' away the rest of Pyongyang was dark with nothing really to see.

And so to bed at 23.30, tired but excited.

 

[Update: I have since seen pictures of modern equipment in a number of factories in Sinuiju, such as cosmetics, shoe and enamelware factories and a textile mill, so that would suggest the place is not as dead as I thought, but I shall never know for sure...]

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