North Korea – A tourist perspective

Part 1 – Preparation, Visa admission and arrival

North Korea – Who hasn’t heard news about the warmongering regime or watched a documentary about how badly the people are doing there?
But who has actually been there to see for themselves?
For my part, I wanted to know what it’s really like.

After I finished my studies in the Summer of 2015 I wanted to travel the world for several weeks as a reward for my hard work for the past 4 years. Many of my former fellow students went backpacking to South East Asia or made a road trip through Europe. Personally, I thought this to be quite boring since you could do this anytime throughout the year.

Back in 2015, going to North Korea was typically only offered on several dates per year, e.g. the birthday of the eternal leader Kim Il Sung on April 15th or the anniversary of the founding of the Worker’s Party of North Korea (WPK) on October 10th.
I chose to go there for 7 days on the occasion of the 67th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of Korea on September 9th.

Did you know? The people and the government of North Korea always refer to only “Korea” and on the weather broadcast the map shows the two separated states as one.

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Preparation

“North Korea? Since when can you even go there!?” – That’s reply I mostly get from other people when I tell of my journey. With all bad news coming from the western media it’s no wonder that people are quite astounded that it’s a quite easy ride.
In fact, there are several travel agencies that organize guided tours to this country. I’m living in Germany where you can choose from three different travel agencies to book your trip. I went with http://www.nordkorea-info.de/index.html which is lead by Manfred Schneider, a very kind elder man who unfortunately didn’t attend our trip.
As with booking a regular guided tour, you choose the date you want to go there and apply for the visa.

Visa Application

This is the part, where the process of booking the trip differs from regular tours. Normally, when you apply for a visa for going to China e.g., you fill out a form on the official homepage of the respective national consulate, send them the signed admission and your passport via mail, they stamp it in your passport and you’re good to go.
When applying for a North Korean visa you won’t get a stamp in your passport, instead, you will only receive a signed and stamped letter of invitation which works as a visa for the duration of your trip.

But who would invite me to a country that I’ve never been before and most certainly don’t know anyone over the internet? It’s simple: Since the owner of the travel agency of my choice acts as an agent and has some sort of deal going on with the North Korean government, he is the one to “invite” me to the country.
You will receive a draft of the invitation letter from the agency, fill out some personal data (Name, Birthday, Place of residence e.g. and most importantly the name of the agent) send it to the nearest North Korean embassy and receive a tourist card some weeks later. Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of it back then but you can see what it looks like here: https://goo.gl/B5r4FO

Arrival

With all the required documents in place, now the question arises, how you can actually go there.
Entering North Korea is possible by train or by plane. The trains start several times per week from the Beijing Central Station directly towards Pyongyang but the trip lasts 12 hours or so, which I didn’t feel like doing back then.
Since I went to Beijing the week before, I chose the latter and took the plane, starting from Beijing Airport.

As you can see, North Korea does in fact have an official airline called “Air Koryo”. Our mean of transport was a Ukrainian An-148-100. You can read up more on the airline on the respective Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Koryo
Have you heard the horrific stories of how bad the food on the airplane tastes like?
For my part, I completely disagree with this accusation. The food that was handed to us tasted very well. We were offered a regular bun with ham and cheese and even North Korean beer, which I objectively evaluated to be very refreshing and tasteful.

On arrival, we were lead towards the passport and security control like on every other airport in the world. The staff there though we’re several elder military officials that checked our luggage only sporadically and not very thorough. Afterwards we were brought to our two tour guides, of which one spoke German quite fluently and taken to our hotel by bus.
Because it was very late and dark already I didn’t take any pictures of the ride.

Upcoming:

Note: Since this is my first post on Steemit, I would really appreciate some criticism from you guys. What do you wish to have more of in the next part? There will be definitely more pictures the next time, I promise :)
Which questions would you like to have answered?

Kind regards,
Lars