Tours of North Korea are monitored, but offer insight
Carefully monitored tours to North Korea give insight into life in the world's last Stalinist state, writes Juliet Rix
my friends ask. It is, in fact, remarkably easy to visit North Korea (or, as they prefer to call it, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, DPRK), the world's most secretive state. Today, tours run regularly from Beijing, many of them well organised and comfortable. While North Korea's government thunders about war, more of the country is being opened to foreign tourists - albeit, in tours monitored by Korean guides.
A visit here is almost like seeing a dinosaur species in the wild. It is a peek at a throwback culture preserved behind a very current iron curtain.
I arrive not knowing what to expect - certainly not the 47-storey, 1,000-room Yanggakkdo Hotel with panoramic views over the capital. Pyongyang is a post-Korean-war city of concrete; the communist tower blocks are softened by tints of colour and the skyline is enlivened by a few modern buildings, such as the unfinished Pyramid Hotel that rises like a rocket from the streets.
The broad avenues (one a full 100 metres wide) carry few cars - and very few of these are privately owned. Most of the action is along the edges of the roads. Here, beneath the omnipresent images of The Great Leader Kim Il-sung and the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, and slogans exhorting hard work for the fatherland, support for the army and death to the "American Imperialists", crowds of people walk, pull handcarts, cycle and labour in tightly-packed gangs - weeding, planting, paving, and endlessly sweeping.
Children in neat blue-and-white uniforms with the classic socialist red neckerchief look at us curiously, occasionally waving or saluting. Some perform with spectacular skill at the vast Schoolchildren's Palace where the talented (and privileged) attend after-school classes. I am reminded of China in the mid-1980s, and I'm not the only one thinking of the past: a group of young Shanghainese staying in our hotel says they are having a fascinating time "looking at our parents' youth". But North Korea is different, too.
We visit the country's "most sacred, holy place" - the Kumsusan Memorial Palace of the Sun, the mausoleum of the Kims. The Great Leader died in 1994, his son in December 2011, and the newly double mausoleum reopened earlier this year.