PYONGYANG The brand new international airport in Pyongyang is enormous. It was also empty, not only of planes – there were only two international flights to and from China that day – but also of people when our military history group and book club travelled there in September.
The trip took a military history perspective, which really only meant that we visited a number of lavish military museums. We spent eight days travelling by comfortable Chinese-made, air-conditioned bus on some terribly uneven roads (our bus never went faster than 70 kilometres an hour) from the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the south to some 300 kilometres north, passing a multitude of anti-tank obstacles hidden in the highway arches and columns along the way. We were stopped every few kilometres for inspection by military guards carrying big guns. Why? “To catch spies,” we were told.
Last week, the regime of Kim Jong-un announced that it had successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb. The country has been in a perpetual state of war since 1950.
There is little free time for North Koreans. They live as members of a collective. Everyone from students to old people must give an hour a day to “the state.” This involves a lot of cleaning of public places and statues. Sunday is usually taken up by community studies or volunteer work. Our guides told us that they, as students, had gone into the fields every spring and fall, living in tents, to work on state-run farms. Most farmers today use oxen rather than tractors. The few farm vehicles we did see were very old.
There are no stores or shopping centres, as far as we could see. The government distributes food and clothing. The stores we did visit were selling goods priced beyond the reach of local people.
Most of North Korea’s wonders were built in the last 30 years. The 3.5 million-strong city of Pyongyang is impressive, full of tall, clean-looking buildings (usually dark by 10 pm electricity is scarce), wide boulevards and an unbelievable number of impressive government edifices and sports palaces, including the largest arena in the world, the Rungrado 1st of May Stadium, which seats up to 150,000 people.
Private cars are forbidden. Most people use trolleybuses, streetcars and bicycles to get around. Public transit vehicles don’t turn on their lights after dark – not even headlights – to save on power.
There is an almost funny story about how the country was going to open up to the world in 1974, when it held a large industrial exhibition. Deals were struck, including one with Volvo of Sweden to supply 1,000 cars. They did, but North Korea never got around to paying for them. You can still see them here and there, often stopped with an open hood.
Pyongyang has an extensive subway system, built 100 metres below ground to guard against “atomic bombs,” we were told, but from what we could gather, no tourist has ever seen more than three stations.
Our tour of the city included a tribute to deceased supreme leaders Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il (current leader Kim Jong-un’s grandfather and father). Their 30-metre-tall copper statues stand side by side on a tall pedestal. Some of us were given flowers to lay at their feet. Then we stepped back, lined up and were told to bow. The flowers were collected for the next batch of visitors.
We bowed all the time during our stay, at paintings, at indoor statues and at the enormous mausoleums where the two lie in state. They are gods. The North Korean calendar starts in 1912, when Kim Il-sung was born. Little children go to bed asking Kim Il-sung for a good night’s sleep and the next morning thank him for the breakfast he has provided.
The country runs on the “juche” philosophy, which focuses primarily on patriotism and self-reliance. A 125-metre obelisk honours these principles, insisting that nothing is beyond man’s abilities.
But the country has not seen the glorious results of that vision. As recently as 20 years ago, as many as a million North Koreans died from lack of food.
The country actually lives by another rule: “military first.” North Korea has the fourth-largest active army in the world after China, the United States and India. Military trucks are a common sight but one that we were forbidden to photograph: “No photo.” Along with “No go” and “Forbidden,” these were the English words we heard most often on our visit.
Oh, the stories we were told. The best was that Kim Jong-il was born on Mount Paektu in 1942, when there was a double rainbow, a star over the mountain and the cranes flew in circles. Actually, he was born in Siberia when his father was there commanding a Russian company.
Also, Jong-il is a great maker of “internationally acclaimed” films. We probably saw them all on TV in one week, a lot of black-and-white movies about war showing men and women singing in front of a background of shooting cannons, flying warplanes or running soldiers. The government sends out inspectors to make sure you’re not picking up any South Korean or Chinese channels.
But the weirdest moment of all came when we had to empty our pockets and were given a once-over with a vacuum cleaner before entering a huge complex devoted to 243,000 gifts received from adoring world leaders. I wonder which world leader donated the doctorate degree from Kensington University, California, 1973?
It took five minutes to enter the country (“Any movies in your iPad?” “No.”) and two hours of scrutinizing our luggage and inspecting all cameras and smartphones before we could leave. “Illegal, erase.”
The bulk of my photos were on picture cards hidden in my socks.
We left North Korea on a train that never went faster than 40 kilometres an hour.
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