Pyongyang Diaries: Escape from Yanggakdo

(Pyongyang station) The train station has a curious architectural style… ionic columns and an eight-sided pagoda-like tower.

As the train rolled into the station, I looked out the window and saw the sign above the entrance: 평양 (Pyongyang). Finally – the capital of the hermit kingdom. KPA soldiers herded us out of the train onto the platform, and down through a dark tunnel underneath the tracks. There were no lights, and it was too dark to make out the red script on the walls, but I had some idea of what revolutionary things they said. Only a few hours earlier that day, I had been in a similar tunnel at Dandong station, except on the walls there were advertisements. I was disappointed, because I really wanted to see what advertising was like in the DPRK.

(Pyongyang station, across) Pyonghwa motors ad with four cars… spoilt for choice!

Right outside the train station was the first advertisement I saw in North Korea: a billboard for Pyonghwa motors, the DPRK joint venture with the unification church. It was also the only advertisement I saw; there were other Pyonghwa billboards scattered around the city, but no other company enjoyed this privilege. I suppose Pyonghwa would have cornered the DPRK auto market if not for all the imported Toyotas I saw, which may reflect the relative cost/value of its product lines.

(Pyongyang highway) Another Pyonghwa ad. This one is for the hwiparam (whistle) aka Fiat Siena. I never actually saw one on the road, though.

I didn’t have time to ask the local guides about it then, as they rushed us from the train station doors into the tour bus, as if to limit our exposure to the people outside (or perhaps their exposure to us). I snapped a brief shot of the ad for later perusal, when we were warned again not to take pictures unless expressly permitted to. Yeah, right. I put away my DSLR, which was perhaps too conspicuous, and switched to my teeny point-and-shoot, which is why many of the street pictures you will see here are somewhat blurry and poorly composed.

(Pyongyang street) Another propaganda mural about songun and juche. There were so many I was almost glad that my vocabulary was too limited to understand them.

As we drove through the city, it occurred to me that it was like I had stepped into a time warp to the fifties and sixties. Some of the vehicles on the street looked like they had been manufactured then. The buildings looked dull, their monochrome paint faded in patches. The only bright colors were the red banners and propaganda murals. I wanted to get off the bus right there to get a closer look at the shops and pedestrians, and perhaps also the jangmadang black markets, and hatched a plan to escape from the hotel as soon as the coast was clear.

(Pyongyang street) I was under the impression that all their school uniforms included red scarves. One kid is wearing his orange cap backwards, no doubt a dangerous nonconformist.

Unfortunately, our tour group was to be accommodated at hotel Yanggakdo. Not Ryugyong hotel. Not Koryo hotel. But Yanggakdo hotel, on Yanggak island. It had not occurred to me that I would be stuck on an island in the middle of the Taedong river, and I despaired, seeing the many checkpoints and lack of cover. Unfortunately, my only stealth training was from playing Metal Gear Solid and watching Bond movies. Which is to say, none.

(Yanggakdo hotel) I guess one way to isolate the foreigners is to put them on an island.

We arrived at the hotel and were given our room assignments when I noticed a large delegation of tourists from the ROK in the lobby – I could tell because they wore special passes on lanyards. A few of them were priests and nuns, which I thought was interesting. The mainland tourists went off to enjoy the entertainments offered in the hotel. I dropped off my stuff in the room, and against my better judgment, told my roommate that I was going out to walk around. He insisted on coming along. I guess I felt better that at least I wouldn’t be alone if I were arrested for ‘hostile acts’ like seditious foreign journalizing.

(Yanggak Island, Pyongyang) The view from the 46th floor of Hotel Yanggakdo. Note the checkpoint on the bottom right.

It was a bad idea to bring him along. We got past the empty parking lot and golf course and took a short detour towards the spiral-shaped building, which was the ‘international cinema house’. And then we saw a group of locals playing volleyball. This kid just didn’t have any discretion – instead of avoiding them by going around, he went right up to announce our presence and tried to chat up the ladies with his phrasebook Korean. (more about his antics later) They looked half confused, half afraid. The entire group stopped playing and stared at us. Soon after, our tour guide came running up from the hotel and told us that we were not allowed to wander unsupervised. Someone must have sounded the alarm that foreigners were on the loose.

(Pyongyang international cinema house) Doesn’t look like its operating… maybe it only opens during the Pyongyang film festival.

In retrospect I probably wouldn’t have gotten much farther on my own either. First mistake: daylight (I thought I wouldn’t get good photographs otherwise) Second mistake: appearance. While my ‘southern province’ complexion wouldn’t necessarily give me away from a distance, I hadn’t been dressed and groomed conservatively to blend into the populace – I didn’t see a single local rocking a t-shirt, jeans, sneakers and a messy college hairstyle. Also, my DSLR was a dead giveaway. If I had looked the part, brought the point-and-shoot, and snuck out after dark, it might have worked, as it did for Jerry Guo – but the game was up for me.

(Pyongyang TV) I haven’t seen this kind of test signal since the early 90s.

We were taken back to the hotel, and since I have no interest in casinos, bars and the other ‘entertainments’, I ended up watching k-dramas like I always do (DPRK-dramas, that is). The one I saw that night was set in the colonial era. While I couldn’t understand most of the dialogue, it was pretty easy to tell what was going on: Japanese girl is in love with Korean guy, Japanese dude who is into the girl gets jealous, Korean guy prevails. Gee, I didn’t see that one coming. I think I’ll stick with F4, thanks.

(Pyongyang apartment building) All the buildings were grey and dull… the only bright colors are on the banners and murals.

I wondered that evening why I came on this tour if I wasn’t going to see economic reform and real, grassroots market development. Without seeing the jangmadang, everything else would be reading between the lines, seeing between the road stops of regime propaganda at the pain and suffering beneath. And I wasn’t here to see pain and suffering. I don’t want to have anything to do with poverty porn. And unlike the MDV tourism, the profits of the Communism zoo only go to the development of a privileged few.

I remember the older mainland tourists exclaiming to me how the countryside and the cityscape reminded them of the China of their youth, like we had stepped into a time machine back to the Cultural Revolution. The tone they had was a kind of sad sympathy mixed with a sense of schadenfreud relief. They could’ve gone anywhere else for a holiday but chose to come here. Why?

(Mangyondae, Pyongyang) The kids on their school trip seem as disinterested as we are to visit the great leader’s birthplace.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that the tour operators to the developing world, or to here, don’t contribute something positive – they do, and I hope they prosper and flourish to the point where they become obsolete, and tourists will come to the DPRK for different reasons altogether (like maybe historical/cultural/eco-tourism or whatever). But to reach that point, we should be aware of the unspoken premise of the tour as it is now: to see an impoverished people living in fear and isolation. To be fair, awareness-raising on both sides, learning more about what’s going on, being part of the solution, are also part of it. I wonder how much we can really learn though.

Previously on Pyongyang Diaries: The Tourists
Next time: The Guides