Or so reports USA Today:
The accommodations are, at best, just adequate. The food is mediocre. The service is indifferent. The hosts are controlling. And, at $500 or so a day, the trip isn’t cheap.
No matter. Tours of North Korea being offered late this summer are, as one tour operator puts it, “selling like hotcakes.”
North Korea, the secretive pariah state known more for its totalitarian regime, nuclear weapons ambitions and grinding poverty than its tourist delights, has long been closed to U.S. citizens, except for a few rare, last-minute occasions. And therein lies its lure. That, and the surrealness of it all, say those who have visited.
The so-called Hermit Kingdom will grant visas to Americans during its annual Grand Mass Gymnastic and Artistic Performance, or Arirang festival, for select dates from August to October. The show incorporates a cast of 100,000 performing synchronized movements in a 150,000-seat stadium and is by most accounts an eye-popping spectacle.
North Korea’s door has opened briefly to American leisure tourists on only three previous occasions, in 1995, 2002 and 2005, also timed for the Arirang performance. But word of the opportunity was issued so late, few could realistically go. Walter Keats, of Asia Pacific Travel in suburban Chicago, attended in 2002 and compares the show’s stature to performances of Aida staged at the Great Pyramids or Turandot at Beijing’s Forbidden City.
So, if you’re American, and you’ve been wanting to see the Workers’ Paradise (”All the paranoia of a fascist state, but with flexible train schedules!”), this is your chance.
13 Comments
Why don’t they do field trips to the counterfeit Benjamin printing factory and the opium production plants? That would be cooool.
It would be cool, if North Korea had any. Which it doesn’t, of course. The KCNA said so. And apparently, tourists taking pictures of non-existent drug fields is considered bad form.
Dude, a trip to the DPRK would ROCK!
It’d be worth $500 a day to see the Hermit Kingdom upclose and personal.
Hmmm, where should I go first, Dokdo or the DPRK?
I love that Yonhap story — “foreign agents” took photos of a nonexistent drug factory in N.K., and the part about the fake money: “Then they let these notes find their ways to the DPRK (North Korea) and go out of it in the course of commercial transaction….”
I’d just like to hang out with some foreigners at a bar in Pyongyang and trade war stories — I bet we would find ourselves relating very similar experiences
It’d be worth $500 a day to see the Hermit Kingdom upclose and personal.
Hmmm, where should I go first, Dokdo or the DPRK?
In both places you run the risk of getting stuck for an indefinite period of time.
It would be great to see the place, but I think I’ll wait until after reunification when my money won’t go to the pudgy piece of shiite. But then again, I may be waiting for a very long, long time.
I with snow. The reason it is 500 a day is because KJI wants foreign currency. AS much as I would like to see that surreal place, I can not in good conscious do anythign that will prop up his regime.
I don’t know why, but this comment freaks me out.
Still, toss in a game of ping-pong to the death with KJI and I’m there.
An escorted, tightly controlled short trip to see a dance performance in Pyongyang would be as disappointing as the views from Dandong and Tumen, China of shabby concrete buildings, silent ferris wheels, and rusting naval boats across the Yalu and Tumen Rivers.
I’d rather pay $500 and get a show than pay for the reconstruction of the north. I might go twice.
Maybe they can cut a deal with S. Korea: tourists bring in special paper and ink, and N. Korea prints up Benjamins to pay for the tour. Win-win deal.
If that sounds far-fetched, read this: http://english.chosun.com/w21d.....40018.html
In a perverse way, it might be worth paying the $500 a day to see such a ‘mass game.’ The reasonis that you can see such thing in only one place (no other society in the world wastes as much time and energy on such silliness) and probably for only a few more years will this be available. Once the regime collapses you will never be able to witness sucha thing again.
I’ve been wanting to go for months now, just need to gather up the funds for it. Sure $500 is steep, but that’s the price of bragging rights.