Around the World in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh

Author:Monisha Rajesh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

8

Keeping Up with the Kims

Shortly after arriving in Seattle, our Amtrak passes expired and we completed our American circuit with a flourish, threading in and out of bays and islets up the coast on the Amtrak Cascades back to Vancouver. There, we discovered that Sarah and Scott were now Sarah, Scott and Stella – who had arrived a week after we boarded The Canadian. Eric the cat was ambivalent towards his new flatmate, picking his way round the room, as we sat on his sofa having cold feet about the next country on our route.

‘What do you think? Are we mad?’ I asked.

‘I think you’d be mad not to go,’ said Sarah.

‘Really?’

‘Definitely. When are you going to do something like this again?’

I watched Sarah rocking the little bundle, and realised that I had a finite window of opportunity for taking such risks.

‘But what if something goes wrong and I get detained?’

‘You’re not going to be detained,’ said Jem. ‘And if you are, I won’t let anything happen to you.’

‘I’m not sure you’d have much say in the matter.’

‘Unless you do something really stupid like steal stuff or sneak off to the fifth floor of the Yanggakdo, there’s no reason why anything should happen. Thousands of people visit every year and they’re fine,’ said Jem.

On this point, Jem was right. Until recently, I was unaware that tourists have been allowed to visit North Korea since 1953, when an armistice ended the Korean War. However, until 1988, tourism was restricted to visitors from fellow communist countries, or ‘friendly’ countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, which included India, Egypt, Indonesia, Yugoslavia and Ghana, among a handful of developing nations that refused to identify with the collective ideologies of the Western and Eastern blocs. Getting there isn’t as simple as booking a flight and turning up with a Samsonite in one hand and a Lonely Planet in the other; independent travel is impossible. But more than 5,000 Western tourists – and almost 100,000 Chinese tourists – visit North Korea each year through privately run tour companies that offer everything from cycling tours into the countryside, and hiking trips up Mount Kumgang, to running the Pyongyang marathon, or travelling around the country for ten days by train. It was this final itinerary that had piqued my interest. Beginning in the capital city of Pyongyang, the chartered train travelled up to Hyangsan before turning east to the cities of Wonsan, Hamhung and the port city of Chongjin – the last of which had only recently opened to foreigners. Pyongyang is depicted in the media as North Korea’s showcase city, where a carefully choreographed performance is put on for tourists. Whether or not this was true, it was certainly less easy to frame and control what tourists could observe outside the capital, particularly along the train routes. The trip also included a visit to the mausoleum to view the embalmed bodies of both President Kim Il Sung, and his son General Kim Jong Il, and the final day of the itinerary coincided with the seventieth anniversary celebrations of the Workers’ Party.

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