Visiting friends up north

That's two and a half million little tiles of Stalinist glory. Click to look closer and you can probably see it. Very, very beautiful.

However, that's the only propaganda photo we were allowed to take. You aren't allowed to take pictures of real North Korean people and there were certainly no souvenirs with anything to do with the Kims or the North Korean government in general.

Where I went is a mountain range on the eastern coast of Korea just past the DMZ. It's been a tourist resort since 1997 or 1998 when the CEO of Hyundai met with Kim Jong-Il and made a goodwill deal (which hemmoraghes Hyundai money each year, by the way).

This is the only place South Koreans can go in North Korea. I've heard other nationalities can tour Pyongchang and elsewhere on very guided tours, but you have to enter through China or Russia.

Anyways, it was fun to say I've been there, even if the passport stamp doesn't really say much and I've been almost nauseous from the horrible commute there and back, not to mention the exhaustion of climbing for a few hours a day downwind of China's fantastic industrial pollution. Yum, yum, sand and sulphur and silicon in my mouth for the past two months.

AND THAT'S TOO MUCH TALK! Here are some pictures.


As you might have noticed, there are a lot of rocks. Sadly, the most exceptional rock mountain, which looked like a cartoon drawing of a mountain, was in the DMZ itself, where we couldn't take pictures. (Little North Korean soldiers line the road and customs office with red flags. They signal to the others if anyone takes a picture and probably confiscate the camera... Some pretend-to-be-tough English teachers on the trip kept insisting they would take pictures anyway, but I didn't see any heroes actually try it.)

What you can't see, because I don't take very good pictures, is that a few of these mountains are very very high, which makes climbing them....


.... a little bit scary for Tim.


This is probably the worst picture ever taken on my camera. Let's just say that the photographer probably skipped Mrs. Pryjma's ninth grade lecture on photo composition. Yikes.


I like this picture much better. This is at the top of the tallest mountain we climbed, and you might wonder if it was windy at the top. It was. And scary.

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I already mentioned not being allowed to take pictures on the trip through the DMZ, which was too too too too too bad. That was probably the best part of the whole trip.

I'm thinking about making a mspaint picture of the DMZ from my recollections, to be posted later...