This is the fifth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here After another horrid hotel breakfast we were taken to visit a Buddhist temple in the mountains. It was said to be very old, but detailed questioning revealed most of it to be a concrete reconstruction. According to the North Koreans, the original temple was destroyed by the “American imperialists”...
This is the fourth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here One day I took an overnight trip from the capital of Pyongyang. A field trip of sorts. It was the only time we were permitted to sleep someplace other than our hotel, locked down on an island in the city. We drove on a smooth, wide multilane “tourist highway” that begins in Pyongyang and ends at Mt...
This is the third in a multi-part blog on North Korea. I’ll begin by telling you a little about our hotel: our posh 5-star jail-away-from-home, the site of our evening house arrest, an excursion into the surreal side of tourism at the edge of the map. First, the food. Despite the high price we paid to get into the country and the constant reminders that we were getting luxury class...
This is the second in a multi-part blog on North Korea. I flew to Pyongyang on Air Koryo, the North Korean national airline. It was an old Russian jet with a rate of climb of about 2 degrees. It felt like we’d never get in the air. Surprisingly the flight was full. There was one flight a week into North Korea from Beijing—its only contact with the outside world. Most of the passengers on...