Batshit Crazy - Pyongyang, North Korea
Pyongyang, North Korea
So as you can see I've been slaking off with blogging but in my defence....we were behind the 21st Century iron curtain....aka North Korea! I also wanted to give it some time to digest everything and having been in Tokyo now for a few days (and celebrated Lizzies birthday) I have finally found some time and clarity to put it down on e-paper. I am writing this from our micro AirBnB flat having spent hours deleting photos and getting my thoughts prepared. My apologies for the delay but nice to know we have some fans of the blog (and maybe even the bloggers too) ! So some background. I was dead keen on visiting North Korea in a culture-vulture type way, Lizzie less so and consequently we decided to book a shorter tour with a Beijing based UK company called Koryo Tours. In the end 4 days was enough! The tour was €2000 for 4 days inclusive of flights,'food' and hotel rooms etc. Although a pricey it was basically a trip to one of the least visited places on earth so we ventured forth. We have taken to travelling through different parts of Asia purely based upon geographical proximity so considering we were in South Korea prior to this trip, it made sense for us to go and see the modern day East and West Germany. Luckily no sign of David Hasslehoff!!! Although we did have a lot of hassle! ;) So our trip started with a briefing on the Monday 16th at Koryo Tours office. All 65 (yes 65!!) crammed into a little wooden panelled room in northern Beijing as we started to get our first taste of what to expect. Our tour guide Rich Neal, a 6'5 dead pan Brit, seemingly irritated by the ignorant (but understandable) questions about North Korea, gave us the dos and donts. Obviously for us it made it all the more fun and exciting. We were told not to ask stupid or insulting questions, to remember we are not going there to change the minds of our government tour guides, and to basically not let the club down. You'll recall in the last few years a few journos have pretended to go for tourist reasons, only to come back and trounce the regime using videos and material from the tours which is obviously a big problem for Koryo and the government guides that walk around with us. Our English guides were really scathing of the John Sweeney Panorama piece saying it was just awful journalism. So we completed our briefing, headed home for an early night and did our packing. The group of 65 was split into 3, with Lizzie and I being with Jessica a Brit/German Beijing based guide who had actually gone on the Koryo Trip a few years ago herself as a tourist - this proved to be very useful as the trip developed. Our start the next day was an early one as the flight from Beijing was at 12:30 local time via the state owned airline Air Koryo (Koryo is the old name for Korea way back when). Upon arrival to the airport, we headed to the single Air Koryo desk where we intercepted our fellow travellers and loads of tiny North Koreans and checked in. The lineup of tourists was hilarious, you can imagine the types of people doing this trip aren't your usual 18-30 crowd. The best example of this was an American white guy called Chris, in his early 30's wearing full Ethiopian tribal dress, with shorts, white socks and suede brogues *not Ethiopian*. It turned out this guy would be one of the highlights of the trip, as we learnt he was autistic and travelling around the world trying to be the first person with autism to see all 6 continents - inspiring stuff. In the queue he randomly came up to Lizzie and I asking whether we had been to Iran out of the blue whilst we were in mid conversation with Jess our guide.....we knew we were in for a ride with this one! The remaining people in the queue ranged from travellers like us looking for the North Korean stamp on the passport, to retired bankers, from couples in their Autumn years who decided to quit everything and see the world, to a film director obviously gathering information for a new commission. The people on this tour would turn out to be one of the significant highlights. One weird situation did occur pre-boarding the flight, Chris ran into another guy called Nicholas - a 28 year old power station worker from Leeds (think Lizzie mentioned him - he was ironically the stereotypical 18-30 type) - having previously met him in Auckland 8 years before. These two would develop into a double act of awkward moments and a lot of laughs. Nick became infamously known for his views of women, of "burrdds" as he unashamedly said throughout. Sounds bad but was actually very very amusing to the group. Anyway both of these characters were in Jess' group of 20ish people. Chris would start up on the bus PA system and tell jokes, Nick would heckle and we would all shriek with awkwardness at times. So anyway we checked in for our flight, around 200 people on the plane which was good news as I feared some old propellor joby airplane for our 1:40 flight to Pyongyang. As it would turn out, the flight was a very interesting one. We've travelled on a few planes of late so we are becoming accustomed to different internal layouts and this one seemed weird. It looked and felt relatively similar but had loads more head room and the Business Class seats all seemed different (not that we sat there of course). Anyway we got comfortable, enjoyed the sight of the North Korean ladies football team returning from some tournament in China and got ready for take off. The plane ventured up as normal and we were on our way. About 30 minutes out from Pyongyang we started to notice the real difference as our plane started to roll from side to side, not the kind of turbulence we have experienced before. As it would turn out this plane was actually a Russian made Tupolev aircraft. Air Koryo owns a small fleet of Soviet made airplanes which are flown manually by the pilots and not by typical GPS Auto Pilot. It mad sense when you think about it, I doubt Boeing or AirBus feature big in the Communist machine. That means some North Korean dude with a joystick up front playing Air Combat...hence my sweaty palms! In flight entertainment was this bizarre mass games style recorded dancing show with the District Marshall Kim Jon-Un on a massive screen with wind blowing in his hair. Perfect weirdness preparation for the real thing we thought! At our briefing Rich Neal described North Korean obsession with the Kim's as basically cult like religion....we were about to find out just how much and that he was spot on. The bumpy ride ended with our descent and touch down in Pyongyang airport. We disembarked the plane to find a relatively new and shiny airport with loads of small weird shops you would expect in most airports. We cleared passport control, the guards then took our cameras and phones from us to 'check them' and also inspected all luggage for any religious materials - apparently they had some missionaries there a few years ago who left bibles all over the place. We were met landside by loads of tiny North Korean people gawking at us whilst we waited to get our luggage. We were forbidden from taking photos of the airport (although I did sneak a few) or of anything which made North Korea seem bad or vulnerable. That's a little like a kid in a sweet shop to me....that's the stuff you want to take photos of and as time went on this became more relaxed to the point we were only not allowed to take photos of certain government buildings or officials/military personnel. We grabbed our stuff and ventured to the buses where we met our local guides. We had three, Mr Lim (around 40, intelligent but very Gastapo like), Mr Kim (30 years old, more loose lipped and curious about the world) and Ms Cheng (24 years old, very intelligent with superb English, but with a weird dark sinister side). These three would be our local KITC (Korea International Tourist Company) guides for the next 5 days. The time was now about 4pm and en route to our hotel we were to be brought to the see the Mansudae Grand Monument which was this bizarre square with two new MASSIVE bronze statues of the late President (Kim Il-Sung) and Great General (Kim Jon-Il). The incumbent leader is 32 year old District Marshall Kim Il-Sun, all very odd names and we wondered who will be next and what their title will be. Lizzie was already struggling to keep track of which Kim was which and this only got worse as the days went on! After wandering around the statues and taking photos, we headed to our hotel. We were very lucky as the government had just renovated the hotel which meant less power shortages and 24/7 hot water. The normal hotels had cold/lukewarm water and regular power outages. But although the water was always hot is was varying shades of brown. The food was generally poor, loads of kimchi ****** coffee and eggs. In the power front we only had two outages at the hotel but one was while we were in the lift - scary as hell when you are on the 9th floor!! Worth noting we never saw any power issues effecting the lights illuminating the stairs of the leaders! This hotel was a 27 floor tall hotel, which had the 65 of us plus a random Russian boxing team in it. That meant for the 800 odd rooms, only 50 were in use. Maybe they were expecting a rush on Thomson holidays to Pyongyang! The rooms were fine and relatively tidy with satellite TV including BBC World and CNN. This hotel was an 'oasis' for westerners to be kept in relative comfort away from the locals. All the hotel staff basically we're very good looking and clueless as to what they were doing - it took someone an age to get ice in a drink even though they owned an ice machine! We were not allowed outside of our hotel at any time without our guides so we had a few drinks in the lobby, acquainted ourselves with the Russians (I managed to steal their North Korean flag!) and headed to bed to prep for day 2. Our first full day in Pyongyang was a slightly later start than the other groups which was much welcomed. Koryo had organised a jam packed itinerary for the day starting off at the War Museum which was an the same scale and size as the one we had seen in Seoul. Whilst we felt in Seoul that there was a lot of propaganda, and at times a bit too much like a theme park (there were two 4D experiences for example), this museum was for all intensive purposes an educational tool to emphasis the 'victory' over the US. We arrived at the huge entrance disembarking in front of around 500 North Koreans already there ready to go into the Museum. Naturally we looked out of place and it was a little awkward that we all walked straight in whilst the cold North Koreans looked on lined up in the light drizzle outside. The first stop was a trip around the blown up or captured American hardware from the Korean War. We were shown destroyed tanks, artillery guns etc and a helicopter which had been blown out of the sky whilst spying on North Korea in the 1960's. Again no mention at all about South Korea, the UN or allied forces - only the Americans. We then were shown around a dry docked American ship captured in the 1970's having strayed into North Korean waters, photos of the captured captain and his crew who only escaped execution by writing an apology letter to Kim Il-Sun which acknowledged Americas aim to try and destroy North Korea - all for the propaganda clause after all. We entered into the main museum which was similar to that of the South Korean museum we saw in Seoul - a lot of money spent to fabricate their truth. The story told of an American imperialist policy to control the Korean Peninsula, the war occurring only because of American provocation before a righteous victory in 1953 by the North. No meaningful mention of China and Russia yet again. We saw pictures of dead people, video footage we saw in a Chinese museum clearly lifted by the North to emphasis the death and destruction of warfare. The tour of the museum culminated with a 360 rotating platform with an oil canvass round painting of the victorious war and the success for the North. That was pretty different in fairness. By this point fascination of the propaganda manchine had warn off and we were absolutely ready to venture on to our guided trip of....Pyongyang Metro! The metro is a 1970's built 6 stop single lines metro which is used to educate the locals about the local news. It is also there to show how modern Pyongyang is. The metro is very deep (around 100m) in the ground extremely similar to that of Moscow/St Petersburg (remember no help from outside at all...*promise*) and each of the three stations we visited had a statue depicting the great leaders. The carriages on the tubes smelt old and fusty - the light was the dim yellow light we were becoming accustomed to. The locals just looked at us with relative hostility -'it really was great and unusual to be hated for nothing at all. Most looked with disgust some with others with complete apathy. We got a few smiles when we smiled at them first. The smell was really bad and we assumed this was the locals who do not have hot running water in most homes. Each platform had female guards who were particularly hostel to us, even shouting at Chris for moving too quickly on the platform. We exited the metro to find the weather had turned and it was raining quite hard. The afternoon had differing agendas for Lizzie and I, I was going on an Mi17 Russian helicopter ride whilst Lizzie was touring around more monuments. So we went our separate ways and I went back to the airport we had arrived at to catch my 45 minute flight over Pyongyang. This was a really cool thing because no other tourist group had ever helicoptered over Pyongyang and we were the first group they wanted to try it on. Weirdly the Daily Mail wanted to do a telephone interview with me about it but the journo did not have whatsapp or FaceTime (and I wasn't about to waste $ on the Daily Fail!) but we still made the photos at least http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/trave l_news/article-3336186/North-Korea-allo ws-helicopter-tours-Pyongyang.html The helicopter itself was a large white chopper capable of taking 31 people on board easily. It had no seat belts - fair enough I thought. The Americans have begrudgingly acknowledged the benefit of these choppers in warfare even though they are Russian made - by comparison the Blackhawk chopper carries only 13 and costs a lot more! The inside of the chopper was like a 1970s council house I reckon. It had fake lino wooden floor, some ****** curtains and the captain sat on what looked like a little stool covered in carpet. The flight itself went fine, not too bumpy and we had some solace as our group split and a group went up and down just before us. We would later find out that this was the same helicopter used for Dennis Rodman when he recently came to North Korea - apparently he was very drunk and called out to Kim Jon-Un " get over her you little fat ****er".....lucky he made it out alive. The journey itself took us over the newly built futuristic buildings, the new Science and Technology Park yet to open, over our hotel and the football stadium adjacent to us and out of Pyongyang over some rice paddies. There were some weird looking and hidden camps full of military types which we were not allowed to take photos of - even I resisted. After our 40 minute journey we returned to the airport to let the next group have a go. It cost €180 for the trip so not cheap but really cool to be the first ever group of tourists to have the privilege of taking a birds eye view of Pyongyang. Post flying we headed back to meet Lizzie and the rest of the group, stopping at a stamp shop where there were loads of stamps (shock) before heading back home for dinner and drinks. Day 3 was our trip to the mausoleum of The President and Great General in the morning, followed by a first ever trip to Nampo docks, on to Nampo Dam, then the national glass factory, and finally Nampo Square. So post breakfast we made our early trip at 6:30 to the mausoleum where we had to wear tie and shirt. I managed to grab a tie from an Aussie guy on tour with us and smarten up. The mausoleum is basically the old palace Kim Il-Sung used to live and work within and upon his death in 1994 they turned it into a huge mausoleum. Kim Jong-Il was put there in state when he died in 2011 so both father and son were on the agenda this morning. We are becoming accustomed to seeing former crazy dudes lying in state having now seen Lenin and Mao previously. We entered the Mausoleum and immediately were on travellators which brought us slowly past around 200 pictures of the two former leaders on the walls. We walked through the show cleaners and then the dust blowing machines to ensure we were clean before entering the dark red room holding Kim Il-Sung. No pictures allowed at all, not even phones onsite. It was a very large dark room in which we had to walk around and bow three times at each of the leaders. To be fair they were both in decent nick. We then walked through the their medal rooms in which former communist countries decorated each leader with random medals of peace and victory through their reigns. All very bizarre to see a peace medal being awarded to leaders who regularly tested Nuclear weapons. One of the highlights of the day was leaving the mausoleum heading back on the travellators thingys, going about 2mph past about 1000+ decorated soldiers going the other way to see their great leaders just staring at us and giving us the evil eyes!!! Good job they were literally all about 5'5 so they weren't on proper eye level. Did I mention I was 6ft by the way? I seem to have shrunken by an inch or so since we left he UK. The next stop was our trip to the Nampo Docks which was a 1 hour drive to the coast. We arrived and were turned away by the army on guard - this was another first for a tourist group visiting the DPRK but unfortunately the guards were having none of it. We ventured on to Nampo Square which was SUPER cool and my highlight of the whole trip. We got out of our bus to see a new statue of the Great General revealed on the 9.9.15 (good date eh) and this was the first time any tour has come to Nampo like this. Mr Lim seemed very worried and this was probably my highlight of the trip, the locals were really interested in us, much more than those in Pyongyang who we guess are more used to seeing outsiders. We paid our respects and high-tailed it back on the bus to head to the Dam. Although we literally just walked around a square watching the locals dismount their bikes to respectfully walk past the statue and not ride, this was a 'real' experience nobody had done this before not even the KITC guides, the locals looked at us in a weird way which made it a little scary but exhilarating at the same time. They were not accustomed at all to foreigners. It was really nice to see a little child waving at us - non prejudice or discrimination there...not yet anyway. We ventured onwards was the pretty cool Nampo Dam, it is an 8km long concrete dam built in the 1970's connecting the west river to the sea - tiny compared to the Three Gorges we saw in China but still massively admired by the locals. They were proud that the idea, designs and technology for the dam had been 'entirely' North Korean and had been built with no outside help - we were really sceptical of this but when I asked in the Q&A sessions about foreign assistance they denied any help from the USSR or China. This was a common theme on the trip, an essential part of the indoctrination machine is the belief that DPRK is the best country in the world (obviously the best country would never need help from another country). They also showed us a cool video as to how dams are built and interestingly a photo of Kim Il-Sun with President Jimmy Carter back in 1994. People claim that since the Soviet Union failed, Kim Il-Sun was more open to conversations with the West and unification with the South. Unfortunately it was only due to his untimely demise at the age of 82 only 3 weeks away from a meeting with the South that North Korea firmly closed its borders and left the nut job Kim Jong-Il in charge! "I'm frickin' busy here Hans Bwix" - YouTube it. Our final stop was the North Korean National Glass Factory which for me was actually really interesting. We got to the the staged processes from the furness to the cutting right up to the moment it is boxed and sent out. Absolutely no health and safety gear, what would clearly be a big no no back in the UK! The pictures do the talking. It's was pretty cool although we arrived when it was very dark. Again more rhetoric on how this was 'the best and strongest glass in the world and was in high demand in other countries'. On the way back to the hotel we were all given the option of either heading back to the hotel for more Kimchi, or heading to a pizza restaurant for some western rest-bite. We headed to the pizzeria which also doubled as a Korean restaurant in the basement. We were invited into a room with 100 people celebrating a Korean wedding. It was really cool as we were all together laughing, clapping and enjoying the fun. The bride and groom dressed in wedding outfits - North Korean military uniform - No joke. The people in the wedding seemed less bothered or inquisitive at our presence, just happy to see us like some westerners bought in as a party trick at the end of the night. We all clapped and laughed and then headed for our pizza which was awesome!! Margarita was the choice....wasn't sure about carcinogenic North Korean ham and pineapple wasn't in plentiful supply. We had about 5 blackouts over the pizza but luckily iTorch was in plentiful supply!! ;) So our final day in North Korea was our second trip to the DMZ having done it a few weeks prior on the South side. We had read a lot about the differences between the two and actually it was one of the main reasons we first started looking at North Korea. Having been there recently people were interested to hear information about it. Our day started early again as we needed to get there before the Southern tours start. The way they deal with the DMZ area is on a first come first served basis. We were told this on the south side also, that if we turned up and the north had a tour in the DMZ area then we couldn't go in. Obviously the south have thousands of tours each year and the north much less, so the bigger risk was not going in when on the Norths side. Our day started with a 3 hour trip to the DMZ area along a really long, wide 'motorway' which was full of potholes and people just walking along the side of the road. It looked like some apocalyptic scene for most of the journey. The trip was 168km so you can do the maths on the average speed we were doing to get there in 3 hours! Whilst the trip was long and bumpy we managed to get a really good glimpse of the countryside and although our guides did what they could to keep us from looking out of the windows (loads of scripted jokes, singing, story telling) we managed to see some cool stuff. Maybe I'm cynical but then again....maybe I'm just perceptive. The fields told the stories of loads of cabbage growers, agriculture done by animals, people moving around using bikes and walking only. The further south we ventured the nicer the road and surroundings got - we are not sure why and it seems logical to avoid the pitfalls of "because it's close to the south". So we arrived at the entrance to the DMZ and unlike the south side which literally had a theme park, there was little to no tourist elements other than a weird small souvenir shop which sold the usual rubbish. As all 65 of us descended into this shop, the shop owner was showing us all oil posters by North Korean artists. Someone asked whether he had any of the famous propaganda posters - you know the ones showing Uncle Sam being hung upside down or a fist crushing an American rocket. Anyway so the guy pulls out loads of these awesome posters and puts them on the tables. Suddenly everyone starts grabbing at them to buy them (around €30 each) and he (or his boss) got annoyed and took them all back. I managed to get one later on at a stamp shop which also sold art. Technically propaganda art is not allowed to be sold in N.K which is why the guy got spooked and also why we couldn't send the poster home from N.K, our helpful guide Jess kindly posted it from Beijing for us! So post buying a few gifts, all the group met our North Korean military officer who gave the run down on their version of events. In essence they have been spoon fed that it was America who started the war, not the North Koreans themselves and that the armistice deal in 1953 which ratified the DMZ was actually a glorious victory for the North against American imperialism. They showed maps and illustrations of the propaganda and said that they would sweep aside America should they ever attack again in the future. The North Korean guide was only one of the few relatively tall North Koreans we saw. He was actually quite a friendly and nice guy in the end, I managed to sneak a few photos with him which was great. Anyway we boarded our bus and headed into the DMZ area. Remember there is a 4km area after the checkpoint followed the actual Demarcation Line. Luckily upon arrival to the DMZ there were no South tours as we were there quite early so all was set for us to head in. The same thing really, into the room, explanation about the evil Americans (not a mention of the south or the UN) and then out again to take pictures of the guards and surroundings. The experience was a much much more raw environment, less scary things to talk about and no disclaimers to sign before we enter. This is all because of the lack of the Americans (no doubt) but also because this time we were with the crazies and not starring at them from the other side. Lizzie and I did find some of the propaganda and out right lies to be difficult to sit through. A lot on the tour didn't actually know about the war or the history, and it was amazing to see so many people from the UK by the end of it seem to have sympathy for the North Koreans and animosity for the Yanks, even the Americans on tour not in the know seemed oblivious to the spoon feeding that was going on. There were two distinct times we found it particularly ********e was a story around 15 years ago in which a South Korean woman came north. At the time the north and south were attempting to normalise tourist travel for South Koreans to the North on a very limited basis. The woman was pregnant and was walking along the beach. The story in the South goes that she strayed into an area she shouldn't have and was shot dead by the military. The south instantly froze travel to the north due to security fears. The North had a slightly different version, surprise, that the women gave birth and the child is now 15 and doing well. The second time was a story in the 1970's in which a tree in the DMZ was big and blocked the South's view giving a cover point for the North. The South took an axe to the tree, but the North were unhappy, there was a scuffle and the North ended up killing the South guys. On our tour to the North the story was basically the same but of course it was all the Americans fault and they deserved to die! There were loads of little things like this throughout the tour which made for an interesting time for us - not many places on earth you can experience such diametrically opposite views being delivered with such passion. It's very difficult to know exactly what is true when the views are soooooo different. Post the DMZ it was time for....wait for it....WOOF WOOF....Dog! We went to a Korean restaurant and the main event was served as a red spicy soup, almost like 7 hour cooked lamb which if we had been oblivious to the origin, we would have wolfed it down (get it get it...*sigh*). In the end though we had a bit and couldn't stomach the rest - it was OK. Next stop was our 3 hour drive to the State Department Store where we had he opportunity to buy some goodies with actual North Korean money. Foreigners are band from using anything other than USD, Euros or Chinese RMB Yuan. Since leaving home I have been rekindling a childhood treat of collecting money (this time without a metal detector) so it was awesome to get some notes. When changing to North Korean, they purposefully didn't give us notes with figureheads on them so we managed to go and exchange with some others to get them. It is illegal to take money from North Korea but we managed to sneak it out without an issue .... Tourists always do this on the low down and the guides helped us hide them in our luggage along with the bags of cocaine and bibles! ;) We had a nice final evening together eating at a duck BBQ followed by a trip to a micro brewery for a few before home to bed. Our flight the next day was at 08:25 which meant a 5:50am departure from the hotel. There was little to no chat on the red eye to the airport, all of us exhausted after the jam packed schedule. There were some really weird and wonderful things in North Korean definitively worth mentioning. These guys LOVE Kimchi and it was cool to see on our arrival to Tokyo that UNESCO are considering the inclusion of North Korean style Kimchi into their records. We saw cabbage lying around everywhere and farmer after farmer growing it. North Koreans use their own calendar, known as the Juche calendar (they are currently in year 104) which starts at the day of Kim Il-Sungs birth in 1912. They have their own metric and speed system which luckily we didn't have to negotiate. The land and architecture is something out of a 1970's sci-fi novel, it is pretty amazing. The residential buildings are all colourful kind of like Downtown Miami or Havana, Cuba but the paint is so faded, it looks like it hasn't been redone for about 20 years and all the colours ultimately have become a shade of grey/grey, this just adds to the bleakness. They still have the Chinese style coal power stations smack in the middle of their cities but it's a little more forgiving than the Chinese government in Beijing. Even then the power just randomly goes off for 20 minutes at a time every night - people including us just got used to it. Other weird things included nobody knowing how many brothers and sisters Kim Jon-Un has as his private life is keptly very secret amongst many other things. That was weird for us as surely the North Koreans must wonder what would happen if he passed....did they even know of him until very late on when he father became elderly! The streets at night are eerily dark with no street lights at all. The famous image of North Korea and South Korea at night from space really isn't an exaggeration, North Korea in autumn/winter is really dark by 4pm with people walking/cycling home in the dark. Another noticeable thing to us was the lack of trees, the place is full of 1-1.5m high young trees throughout the countryside which feels very strange. This is because the locals cut them down for fuel when the country ran out of fossil fuels in the 1990's. The leadership recognised the problem and consequently each year the President is pictured planting trees, and urban people are encouraged to go to the countryside to help farmers and landowners plant new crops and trees. Finally the leaders and their cult admiration for them is quite bizarre. Everywhere you look there are label badges depicting Kim this and that, or big mosaic walls with their faces on, and most oddly great bloody bronze statues of them. Rich Neal was right, it is basically an isolated cult perfectly formed by the geography of a country isolated in the South by the DMZ and in the North with a border with China and Russia. At least in East and West Germany they could literally look over the wall at each other, but in this case North Koreans are completely blinded to anything other than the news they are fed by the regime on the TV or the metro station newspaper stands. A famous example of this was the FIFA World Cup in 2010 whereby North Korea qualified for the tournament to some surprise. Once they arrived in South Africa, they proceeded to lose every game and returned home early. North Koreans were denied the opportunity to watch the game live (very common most games are shown recorded), the regime informed the public the team had done very well but the US denied them access to broadcast rights in North Korea so they could not be shown at all. When the team returned home, they were all sent to a labour camp for 2 years due to their poor performances. This of course could be propaganda but having seen the country, I could very well believe it. Basically the country is frozen in time. Outside of Pyongyang little has changed since the 1970. This made whole experience really strange. The difference between the shiny new science centres and hotels of Pyongyang is unbelievable to the conditions is the other cities and the countryside. Pyongyang really is a show city and we can now see why there are few places outside this that tourists are allowed to visit. We had a fantastic time in North Korea, but more because we knew the history and wanted to see such a bleak place for ourselves. It's not a 'holiday destination' for wealthy Guardian readers maybe the way Cuba was for years - it really is grey and depressing at times, frustrating slow considering what is happening down south. We were really luck to travel with the people we did on this trip. Our English guides were great also, they were empathetic towards us whilst also getting their jobs done. Jess very kindly sent home some items for us including the postcards to the family too - no Royal Mail in North Korea! :) The Korean guides were probably as good as they could be, all of them showed signs of not allowing us to see what they didn't want us to, but mostly they were friendly. Above all the trip to the Koreas was the absolute best example of Capitalism vs. Communism and it was a real eye opener for Liz and I. That two groups of people, being one only 60 years prior could now have such a drastically different outlook. North Koreans are small, have a 15 year less life expectancy than their Southern brothers, a much higher child mortality right and much poorer human development indicators. By contrast South Korea had the same GDP as Ghana in the 1950s and today is the 13th biggest economy in the world sandwiched between Australia and Spain where Ghana resides at 91st. By contrast North Korea is 102nd right next to Trinidad & Tobago and Estonia. The overriding feeling of this trip was one of dreadful sorrow for the North Korean people coupled with frustration that the people seem to have no interest in listening to another view. I became engaged one night over a few beers with Mr Lim (the older gastapo one) and he was asking about the South's DMZ experience. I told him I would show him pictures on my iPad the next morning and he seemed interested. The next morning, I sat with him and started to show him and he quickly jumped up and ran to the front of the bus apologising in the process. Just so frustrating they have no interest in at least seeing a different side. In the end I couldn't help think about Lenin and that arguably he was the culpable root cause for all the suffering/poverty we saw on this trip. It was his revolution which led to this Cold War standoff and breakup of Korea, and that legacy lives on to this day in North Korea. America and particularly it's capitalism isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but at least thanks to it I got to 6ft tall, probably won't die early, have a nice warm North Face coat and extra fast food chub on the waist for the winter months to come. I am also not a cabbage farmer. North Koreans needs information, as soon as they get that they will escape the clutches of a ignorant and irrelevant dictatorship. Until then, don't expect Thomson airlines to change the flight path from Egypt to North Korea anytime soon. Lizzie rated North Korea 4/10 I rated it 8/10 Hovis xx