Serious reservations
Built to be a symbol of national pride, the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang has instead become one of ridicule for North Korea's Kim dynasty. As it is finally readied for business, a nervous Simon Parry breaks loose from his tour group to peek inside the 'the worst building in the history of mankind'
It has a reputation as being one of the most surreal cities on Earth. When you are alone on its dark streets before dawn, on a freezing winter morning, however, Pyongyang must surely also count as one of the scariest.
It is 5.45am and I find myself shivering from a mixture of cold and extreme nervousness as I jog along the potholed roads of North Korea's capital in pitch darkness. Foreign visitors are viewed with intense suspicion here and are banned from going out alone.
Dawn was still an hour away when I put on my running gear, pulled a dark woolly hat down over my head and slipped out of a heavily guarded tourist hotel nicknamed Alcatraz. Keeping to the shadows, I ran out of the grounds then joined a deserted highway into the city.
I feel a little like Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, as I run through the dark, listening for footsteps behind me as I head into the heart of the city that North Korea's own Big Brother, Kim Jong-un, calls "a socialist paradise". Luckily for me, there are no street lights in Pyongyang. Thin people in drab, dark clothes plod along like ghosts, some of them carrying large sacks of coal or wood on their backs. Others cycle noiselessly past before disappearing into the enveloping blackness.
Most apartment blocks are in total darkness. From a handful, dim lights flicker and flare. The near-total blackness and icy, uneven roads make each step treacherous until I realise it's safer to run along the tram lines.
After two kilometres, I am close to the city centre and feel more exposed. Running makes me conspicuous. Even as daylight begins to gather, however, no one challenges me. Instead, people walk towards me with their heads bowed. Anyone who catches sight of me in the headlights of the occasional passing tram or truck seems to quickly avert their gaze.
In this hermit nation, where neighbours and families are encouraged to snitch on each other, they are probably frightened: not of me, but of the avalanche of questions and suspicion that would engulf them if they reported a runaway foreigner.