A Stroll Through the Poppy Fields

So, what do you get when you take a legion of 30 or so Westerners, wake them up at 6 or so everyday with a wake-up call from the early 50’s, put them on an extensive tour of the world’s last hermit kingdom in 30C+ temperatures, use only somewhat broken English, and then put them on a bus for three hours?

You get a bunch of sleeping westerners and, happily, sleeping tour guards as well.

Behold! North Korea!

After our visit to every American’s home in Pyongyang (and really, if you can’t trust the USS Navy to build a ship who can you trust?) we were loaded back up on the bus and this time, we headed out of the city. Destination? Kaesong City.

According to Wikipedia (and yes, I know I need to find a better source for my North Korea knowledge than Wikipedia), Kaesong City is the only city to have changed hands after the end of the Korean War. A capital during the Koryo era, it now serves as the light industry center of North Korea.

Its one other claim to fame is how close it is to Panmunjom, the hastily constructed truce village for the signing of the armistice, which almost every (Western) visitor to North Korea visits. This and the DMZ, which is also quite close. In a better world, Kaesong might be doing as well as Seoul is now.

North Korean Countryside

But quite a few kilometers and three hours of bus ride stood between us and this city of pines. And given everyone’s relative state of exhaustion, most people fell asleep. Which meant I could take some pictures with my very loud camera relatively unhindered. (Taking pictures from the bus was, according to the guides, a no-no)

Road conditions aren’t good in North Korea. No lights for driving at night, no traffic going the other way, large potholes in the road and equally large buses meant that we stuck out a bit. So people who were out and about by the highway (and no, I don’t know why they were out there) pretty naturally came up and took a look.

Deforested Hills and Empty Bridges

We were supposed to take a faster route, but for some reason we couldn’t – our guides were always a little evasive about why we couldn’t do one thing instead of the other. The detour took us down into some of the smaller roads for a bit, which I have no pictures of. When the bus is tossing back and forth because of the poor road conditions, everyone tends to wake up and that makes for bad illicit picture taking.

The North Korean countryside, from what I could see, is beautiful, desolate, very green, and rather used-up. I saw some farms, but nothing particularly big or impressive. I don’t know my plants very well, but nothing seemed as big and ready for harvest as what I assume Western farms would look like. North Korea’s need for humanitarian aid to feed massive amounts of its population is well known, and I found out after I returned from my trip that there had been one of the largest droughts to date earlier this year. Many of the hills were badly deforested as well. But there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, at least.

The Bustling Highways of the DPRK

Halfway through our trip was a rest area where we all took a break. A large building, stretching over the road, housing quite a few empty rooms and a small eatery. I took pictures (well, we all took pictures) we bought water and flavourless, stale cookies, and kept on the road to Kaesong.

About half an hour outside of the city, our bus driver hit something and soon after began to back up. This ‘something’ turned out to be a bird and, after backing up for a couple of minutes, the driver ran out of the bus, returning soon after with the bird, which he stowed in our baggage compartment. Our guides reaction? “I don’t understand the hunter spirit.”

More likely, our intrepid filmmaker knew better than to waste food in this country. He surely ate well while we were there, but I don’t hold any doubts that his meals would probably take a solid nosedive once we left.

Given that brief interruption, we soon made out timely arrival in Kaesong.

There are pictures of the city, which will go up next time. Suffice it to say, however, that even seeing Kaesong proved to me that Pyongyang, where the favored crust of DPRK society lives, is something wholly different than the rest of North Korea.

If you visit North Korea and only see Pyongyang, it’s possible, though hard, to fool yourself into believing things are ok. Sure, there aren’t many lights on at night, sure, there seems to be much more importance placed on the monuments and all than on public works or anything, and yes, people look small, malnourished and dirty. But the streets are clean, the buildings are (mostly) kept-together, there are some lights on, and cars, and some semblance of life as the modern world knows it. It’s difficult, but you can almost say to yourself “Ok, there are some weird things here, but really it’s just a country down on its luck.”

You can’t keep those illusions and visit Kaesong.

As far as I understand, Kaesong is still one of the upper cities in North Korea – if they bus westerners through it must be. But the streets are full of dirt, there are piles of rubble (not trash, but piles of old building materials, concrete, rocks) in front of decaying apartment buildings, and there’s a haze in the air that cannot be healthy. There were a lot less people walking around with purpose and a lot more in groups just watching. There was just a sense of slow but irrepressible death in the city. The bus, for its part, seemed to try and move us as quickly through the city as possible.

After a stop at our hotel (the Kaesong Folk Hotel below) we went on our one tour spot of the day: King Kong Min’s Tomb.

An Old King's Tomb

Designed by himself before he died, the tomb holds the remains of King Kong Min (a king during the Koryo period) and his wife. To get there we drove around some nerve-wracking roads perched on the edge of some very large hills. Our guides were not too forthcoming with what role Kong Min played in the Koryo period, and, for our parts, we didn’t push them. We were happy to have some time to just unwind.

But soon we were on the bus and taken back to the Kaesong Folk Hotel.

Kaesong Folk Hotel

Featuring its own private creek (rumored to have actually been diverted from a river that runs through Kaesong) this hotel is the only part of Kaesong City you will see as a westerner. A walled compound with no windows and a large gate that is closed once you enter, the only sites you’ll see are the other bungalows. A bunch of small courtyard bungalows to be exact, fashioned in traditional Korean style with heated floors (though not in the summer) and mats to sleep on.

Our own private paradise

One room for the two was about the size of two mats to sleep on. But first was dinner.

Apparently, Koreans eat dog soup three times a year, all during summer, to strengthen one’s resolve against the heat. It’s a spicy kimchi soup with dog meat meant to sweat the heat out of you and (surprise surprise) we just happened to be in on one of those days. We were lucky enough to be able to try dog soup for the low, low price of 5 euros.

But what the hell, I say, you only get to eat meat of questionable origin in a hermit dictatorship every so often, I thinks, and so I order a bowl.

Dinner is served in a hot room, with no air conditioning and one pathetic fan. You sit on the floor as the servers (unlike the ones in Pyongyang, these don’t know even the most basic of English…another level of difference) dish out the various plates. The quality is poor, to say the least. The beer is warm, the hot food is warm, the cold food is warm. Everything is roughly the same temperature.

The light by which you eat is one flickering bare lightbulb on the wall – due to power conservation you understand.

And dog soup? Well, it is a spicy soup (almost too spicy to get down) and bright red. It’s served in a thick metal bowl and there is meat in there. Somewhere.

You see, dogs are scrappy little beasts even when they’re well-fed, so it’s not a huge stretch of the imagination to consider that dogs in North Korea might be a bit on the lean side. To their credit, I’m sure they tried to put as much meat in as possible. But the majority of the soup was offal. Black, bulbous and soft bits from who-knows-where.

This time, we stopped eating because we wanted to, not because we couldn’t eat anymore.

And what do you do in a hotel with no electricity (remember, energy conservation) no tv, no books, and no lights? Well, given our early start for the next day, we figured that we would wash up before bed and just go straight out from there.

Well, there was no hot water (again, energy conservation) but we did have electricity for our room light…but not the bathroom light. The hotel has its own generator, but that can only go so far. We have some cold water, but no soap, no shampoo.

It was a bonding experience, to say the least, to take turns in the dark bathroom, door cracked open for a bit of light, passing remarks and swallowing screams as you washed off the days the travels with handfuls of ice cold water. Bedding down, my good friend and I shared the days impressions (mine somewhat less lucidly due to a couple of nighttime cold pills) before going to sleep, which came late after the talks.

Now, I know you’re probably thinking terrible things at this point. What kind of person am I to rag on the bad food and terrible amenities when, in all likelihood, I still ate better than a very high percentage of the Kaesong population and, unlike them, I had a light to turn off before I went to bed? You could hear people walking back and pushing carts outside the hotel walls, a world you and I could only imagine as to what it was. You couldn’t help but wonder what their dinner was, what their room looked like – did they know that we were enjoying (limited) electricity and edible food and turning our collective faces at it?

Maybe so. Maybe not. We couldn’t see them, nor they us. All we could hear was people going past – like hearing a heated argument behind a heavy door, the best you could get were vague impressions.

But as bad as Kaesong had it, at least they managed to conserve enough power to keep Kim Il-sung light up at night.

Mr. Kim and his hilltop vantage

What a cruel joke. I don’t know how many hours that statue was illuminated each night, but it was a glowing beacon in an otherwise wholly black night. I’m sure the official party line is that the North Korean people hold Kim Il-sung so highly in their hearts that they are happy to give up some (all?) power each night to keep the statue alight.

Still, how cruel.