Brett Cole, an MPhil candidate in the Department of Korean studies at the University of Sydney, travelled in a tour group around the North Korean capital Pyongyang for a week between April and May this year.
He was warned by the European-based travel agent not to reveal his payment was for an official tour of North Korea as it might contravene international sanctions against the regime.
Brett lived in South Korea for four years, and is married to a South Korean.
He has always been curious about what life may be like north of the DMZ, just 40 kilometres from the South Korean capital Seoul. This is the first of three pieces he has written for SBS about his visit to the north.
By Brett Cole
A group of North Korean army officers and their wives or girlfriends are sitting at a rest stop by a highway with roast chicken, vegetables and rice along with plastic bottles of the fiery Korean liquor soju.
The soju has had its effect on the officers. All are red-faced and reeking of alcohol as they invite a foreigner to sit, drink and eat with them.
South Korea's President “Lee Myung-bak is a rat,” says one. “We'll march all the way to Seoul to crush him.”
On May 1 in a Pyongyang park children were lined up in front of two effigies of the South Korean President. Each child ran up to the dummies with a stick and hit the face or body of Myung-bak's likeness, drawing cheers from the adults before passing on the stick to other children.
The effigies were later cast on the ground and the children were encouraged to kick them.
At a circus performance in Pyongyang young pioneers, children with red scarves tied around their neck, sat quietly in their seats. They studiously ignored the foreigners that sat across from them while adults at the back grimly watch over their young charges.
North Korea offers outsiders few glimpses into its citizens' lives. The regime is happy to accept tourists paying more than $1,700 for a week of highly regimented travel. But it shows foreigners little more than a series of shrines to the ruling Kim family dynasty reinforcing an impression of a country that has been imprisoned in an Orwellian nightmare for nearly seven decades.
On Mayday, most of Pyongyang, it seemed, had left their homes and taken to the hilly parklands of the capital to enjoy food, soju and the company of family and friends.
Yet the atmosphere was not of gay abandon but of enforced frivolity.
Well past lunchtime, as some danced and sang, groups of North Koreans were eager to show off Korean dishes of “kimbap,” seaweed rolls, the national dish of pickled cabbage, “kimchee, and “kaibi,” specially prepared barbeque meat, to foreigners walking past them.
This food sat untouched. Chopsticks were not busily picking at the morsels, barbeques were lighted but only had a few pieces of meat on it. Steamed rice containers were unopened.
Foreigners were led by tour guides to an outdoor pavilion where a crowd had gathered. A kind of mobile disco was assembled. A man appeared playing a Korean drum that perhaps was a signal for the sound system to kick into life.
Foreign women and men were grabbed forcibly by the wrist or arm by middle-aged Korean men who began dancing with them amid a general frenzy of gyrations by young and old. It was a North Korean version of a rave, but it lacked a certain spontaneity.
I was encouraged to dance harder. “Get into it,” said my North Korean male dancing companion. He showed me what he wanted: a more vigorous movement of the arms and legs. He later passed me over to a woman who wore a self-conscious expression on her face.
After two songs I managed to break free but my original dancing partner was on the hunt for more foreigners. He pulled a protesting French woman toward the dance floor and into a hole of putrid water hurting her ankle and foot.
Members of the North Korean elite, trusted by the regime to handle foreigners as tour guides, have a whiff of duplicity about them.
On my tour two young women were guides, one 25 and one 23. On a bus they would sit by the foreign men, smile, touch their arms or shoulders, and ask questions about work, their impressions of North Korea and the other tourists. One young North Korean got so “chummy” with one Russian traveller that she held hands with him and slept on his shoulder during the long bus rides.
The women were not only flirtatious tour guides. They berated members of the group who lagged behind and laid down rules: the group must bow before statues of dead North Korean dictators Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, not take pictures of anyone in uniform – difficult as most of the country wears one in some form or another – and instructed those who wanted a morning jog that they were confined to running within the hotel car park.
Photographs of “badly dressed people in the countryside” were also prohibited.
These figures working in fields outside Pyongyang ran away from me when I tried to film them. Behind a concrete building they peered out every few seconds to check if I had gone away.
It almost became a game of peek-a-boo. Like those in Pyongyang, they showed no enthusiasm to reveal themselves.
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