Kaesong, October 12, 2008, Sunday

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  Kaesong, Korea Dem Peoples Rep
Sunday, July 12, 2009

You would say that when you travel in a group, with everything planned and organised well in advance, when your only duty is to follow somebody else's lead and there are absolutely no worries for you about anything – you would say that it is easy. Well, it is in organisational sense of the word. But then bundle the people into the bus for a two-hour ride right after lunch on a sunny and warm early autumn afternoon, and in just a few minutes every conversation dies down and everyone tends to turn to themselves. And that in many cases meant simply dozing off.

I felt the same. It would have been easy to nod off, lulled by a steady trundle of our comfortable and air-conditioned bus, but I fought off the urge to sleep, knowing full well that we wouldn’t have too many chances to see North Korean province. I took out my mp3 player, held my camera at the ready and struggled to stare through the window

01 Hwangju

.

Gently rolling country moved before my eyes, fields alternating with low mountains – or sizable hills. Every once in a while there was an unnamed settlement somewhere in the distance off the motorway and Mrs Lee never offered an information as to which particular town, or village, we were seeing. She too quieted down. Roads connecting those settlements with the motorway were usually unpaved and only occasionally I could make out an odd person, sometimes on a bicycle, but more often merely on foot. From our bus, for all the houses in those settlements we were passing by, North Korea seemed largely underpopulated.

And if roads leading off to those places looked mostly empty, the Pyongyang-Kaesong motorway was outright deserted. It seemed that most of the cars in North Korea were concentrated in Pyongyang. And the capital wasn’t exactly famous for traffic jams. We had the motorway for ourselves, indeed.

Half an hour or forty minutes into a completely uneventful ride we passed a town on our left which looked bigger than the rest of the places we had seen earlier. From a tourist’s point of view it didn’t seem to have much to offer

02 Pyongyang-Kaesong motorway (photo by Pim Seuren

. Unless you kept in mind that you were in North Korea where in a quirky way everything had something to offer, no matter how drab or inconspicuous it may appear on the face of it. But that fact aside, this town, nestled in a valley surrounded by some grey, grim mountains, wasn’t exactly looking like the most inviting place on Earth to stop by and have a drink before you moved on. A few communist-style three-storey apartment blocks, a building or two obviously belonging to a communist enterprise, and a number of small houses beyond, that was all. A few lonely characters slogged up the paved road towards the town centre, along what looked more like a broad ditch than a rivulet. But North Korea could have had a hot summer and maybe the watercourse flow simply hit its seasonal low. Either way, from the bus I saw a woman or two sitting by this trickle of water and washing their laundry. I snapped a fast picture and even if from the moving bus, it came out well. And then I asked Mrs Lee in her seat before me:

„Mrs Lee, what town is this?"

„Hwangju,“ she said.

Maybe half an hour later, we had a stop. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with no explanation

03 Gomcheon (38th parallel)

. Except for the fact that the place where we pulled over was a North Korean-style motorway service area, complete with a restaurant, a tiny refreshments shop – or rather an indoors stall – a loo and an outdoors souvenir stand. So I guess that whoever had put together this tour for us really hoped to cash in a bit more, and that was why they had arranged for this less than necessary fifteen-minute stop-over. No one was in a shopping spree mood, but many welcomed the chance to visit the loo. Which got us an opportunity to have a look-see in the restaurant up there. There were two young and pretty waitresses inside, probably boring themselves to death as there was absolutely no one at any of the tables. When we entered, apart from giving us a curious look, they hardly moved. They knew exactly that we were not going to stay.

Outside, James, Joseph, Chris and Eddie were discussing large concrete pillars they had allegedly seen lining the motorway, the defensive measures against the feared invasion from the south. I must admit I hadn’t noticed them, but truth to say, I hadn’t been looking for them, either. My attention was focused on entirely different things. Anyway, James claimed they were placed at regular intervals along the road, with weakened wedge-shaped sections at their bases which presumably contained explosives.

04 North Korean countryside

„They would just collapse them and the pillars would fall across the road to impede the enemy’s progress,“ James said.

But this four-lane motorway also had better things in store than those pillars I had not seen. Not entirely surprisingly, it was completely devoid of any motor vehicle traffic. The only traffic it served while we were having our break was a lone cyclist in the Kaesong direction and two pedestrians in the Pyongyang direction. But something told me none of them went all the way and would rather swing off a bit further up – or down – the road.

So James took out his ball and we put the motorway probably to its busiest use for quite some time – a game of football. It wouldn’t last for too long, a few minutes only, but who would ever want to pass up an opportunity to kick a ball few times smack in the middle of the carriageway on the main intercity road in North Korea? It was a luxury we could afford nowhere else in the world.

And then it was time to move on. This stop-over awakened most of the people and very few of them went back to sleep again

05 colonel Kim Chang Jun

. But it didn’t mean that the trip itself changed much. Same seemingly forsaken country, only occasionally dotted by an isolated village and that was all. Until Mrs Lee at one point briefly called for our attention:

„What now you can see on your left is Komcheon,“ she said. „The city of Komcheon. It is located on the 38th parallel.“

And that was all. Until some half an hour later we reached Kaesong.

In this reclusive country most of the settlements are off bounds to visitors. Or at least it’s an impression – not entirely unwarranted, I would say - a would-be traveller like me gets once they start entertaining an idea of visiting there. One of the few places outside Pyongyang they let you come to is Kaesong. Actually, so much so that for under a year now, they’ve been letting people in from the southern side of the border on one-day excursions from Seoul. At the time of my last visit to South Korea this thing was not available yet. They obviously had it in the making, but no one as much as mentioned it back then. Now, however, Kaesong was open for the tourists from the south, no nationality excluded, unlike our tour.

As for Kaesong itself, Mrs Lee asserted that it was the only town in North Korea that had not been bombed flat in the Korean War. If that is true, then for some reason that eluded me they must’ve deliberately spared it then. I doubt it was by pure chance. Maybe the reason for it was the fact that at first it belonged to the southern side

06 North Korean countryside

. I mean, after the World War II. But during the Korean War it hopped the borderline and ended up on the northern side, where it is now, of course.

Other than that, it still carries the title of „historical capital of Korea“ as for four or five centuries, during the Koryo dynasty, the one that lent its name to what the modern country on either side of the border is called internationally today, the emperors had their court here. But that was back then. During its glory days. Kaesong today is something else.

Anyway, before we had time to contemplate Kaesong to any further extent, the bus stopped briefly while we had not entered the town yet properly, and we were joined by a North Korean Army officer. Mrs Lee introduced him on the mike:

„This is lieutenant colonel Kim Chang Jun. He is joining us on our visit to the Demilitarised Zone, where we are going now, and he will also be our guide there.“

Lieutenant colonel was a tiny guy in his late fifties or early sixties and whatever he may have lacked in stature, he generously made up for in the size of his cap

07 North Korean countryside

. He smiled and nodded towards us all and I smiled and nodded back. I suppose the most of us did the same. He settled in the seat next to Mr Lee and our ride to the DMZ went on. Mr and Mrs Lee started chatting with him and he chatted back. He smiled more than you would expect from someone who comes to you in the capacity of an officer in the army of a country like North Korea. Both Mr and Mrs Lee seemed at a reasonable ease.

But his sudden and unannounced presence clearly cast the pall of silence over the rest of us. The atmosphere of quiet and unease was almost palpable as no one initially knew how to behave now that the officer was with us. After a few days with our guides we had more or less sized each other up and felt the limits of how far we could go without really pushing it too far and bringing anyone to an unwanted situation. But this lieutenant colonel was now a new factor and he changed the equation.

The day was beautiful. Kaesong was awash in sunshine. On a much smaller scale than Pyongyang, the town looked cosier than the monumental, seemingly underpopulated capital. There was a fair number of people in the streets, some of them riding bicycles, but majority was on foot. Houses, mainly residential, same as the whole settlement, were routinely smaller than those in Pyongyang and almost all were painted in clean white

08 North Korean countryside

. No wonder. There were hardly any cars around to bring down any pollution on the façades. With its broad avenues where we had played street football whenever given a chance, next to Kaesong, Pyongyang looked as suffering from a choking traffic jam.

Lieutenant colonel soon revealed his true character. Shortly he started turning back and casting an eye on the lot behind him in the bus. Smiling all the time, we soon realised that the guy was in good humour and well-natured. It was clear he couldn’t be bothered with sowing fear and intimidation around. On the contrary, the longer we were together aboard the bus, the clearer it was that he was just cherishing yet another opportunity to share a ride with another group of people from all over the world. Consequently, the atmosphere in the bus relaxed back to its usual mode. And whoever had been in the business of secretly taking pictures from the bus the day before, or earlier today, comfortably reverted to it. I even decided to take a picture of lieutenant colonel himself, without being terribly worried what would happen if he saw me, much as there was an unspoken understanding during this tour that photographing police and military was prohibited. I gave it a go, it worked, and that was all there was to it.

The bus just whizzed through the town and moved on through the countryside

09 North Korean countryside

. And that was a show for everyone, both us in the bus and peasants out there. Even Pyongyang is like a flashback to the forties or fifties of the last century. If you take away those few oases for westerners and state-of-the-art stuff serving the maintenance needs of the personality cult, Pyongyang now is in many ways like what communist capitals of Europe must have looked like before I was born. But if Pyongyang is a trip back in time for half a century, then Kaesong is a trip back almost an entire century. And the surrounding countryside a trip to the eighteenth. Were it not for the bicycles, you’d be tempted to bet your money that those guys have never seen a wheel. Soil still tilled by a wooden plough pulled by an ox, women washing laundry in a roadside ditch, or a brook at best, people waving at a bus with fourteen western tourists until we disappear out of sight like we’re a weekly show in a thirty-second run time, that’s North Korea outside Pyongyang. And I could only imagine what it would be like in the deep province where we foreigners can have no access.

That was the country we were passing through on our way to the DMZ.

Once there, some twenty five kilometres or so down south, the bus stopped on another of those empty car parks and lieutenant colonel Kim led the way up a steep, narrow and twisting walkway/stairway squeezed between walls through some baby-size woods, to a sort of small museum or large display room which emerged on a terrace with a view over the border area between two Koreas

10 Kaesong

.

We were first given another one of those run-of-the-mill lectures about the Korean War, revolution, sacrifices and achievements of the present-day North Korean state, this time with a large and detailed painting on the wall of the scene we were going to see outside. If I was not getting the wrong end of something or other, lieutenant colonel Kim seemed to be claiming there was some kind of wall out there, built by South Koreans or Americans, apparently vertical on the north side, and gently sloping on the south side, grass covered and camouflaged. Which would imply that it had been meant to be disguised so that the South Korean people would not know that their government had allowed the Americans to build a wall to divide their country.

And then, after they had first given us a theoretical prep lecture, they led us to the viewing platform. To see the wall, I gather. Because apart from the green, rolling, hilly countryside there was nothing else to see from there. At least with naked eye.

But there was a number of scopes on the platform, all mounted on stands, aimed at the contested area of the demilitarised zone. Lieutenant colonel Kim was kind of giving us leads and pointers as to where best to aim those scopes in order to catch a glimpse of that borderline concrete division

11 Kaesong

. Some of us claimed they had seen the wall. I did not. I don’t mean to imply the wall is not there. I just say I couldn’t see it. I guess I didn’t know how to look properly. Anyway, as previously said by the indoors wall map of the area, this wall was once more singled out as a proof that the southern side is more bent on keeping the country divided as it was now than on reunifying it one day.

However, other than that, lieutenant colonel Kim didn’t waste his breath on lecturing us any more. He cheerfully answered our questions, which were not always referring to the north-south issue, but also on his own role in the army and other, more informal things. So he said that it was now his permanent post, guiding foreign tourists to the DMZ zone. When I asked him how many tourists were coming here he said:

„About forty to fifty a day on average.“

All of us were quite surprised by this answer. But speaking through Mrs Lee, he didn’t budge:

„You are the third group today.“

Fourteen of us, not counting Simon and our Korean hosts, took turns at viewing the zone through the scopes and then taking pictures with lieutenant colonel Kim

12 Kaesong

. He happily obliged, seeming every bit as entertained as any of us. There were loads of smiles and handshakes going on and, all in all, we had a great time there. And when all the pictures were taken and every stone of the DMZ zone that could be seen from there inspected, we headed back to the bus.

I happened to walk back with Mr Sung.

„You visited the south before, right?“ he asked, just wishing to confirm what he had already known.

„Yes, eight times.“

„And what do they say about the division there?“

Of course, what they say in the south was probably not something Mr Sung would be too happy to hear. Or so I assumed. On account of that I sought to waffle on the topic and said:

„You know, when I was last in South Korea - it was in April last year - I visited the demilitarised zone from the south.“

„Yes? And what did it look like?“

„Well, it’s different, for sure

13 Kaesong

. I have a feeling they take it much more seriously, security and everything, you know. But anyway, they never told us about this wall.“

„They didn’t?“

„No, they didn’t. I don’t know if they keep it a secret or what, but I never heard of it before.“

Mr Sung reflected on it. However, I had an impression I had just given him something that he might use in terms of „you see, they are lying to people“ or a thing along those lines. And I didn’t want that. Not that I wanted to side with anyone along this divide. If I wanted anything for the people in the two countries, then it was that they unify one day, on whichever terms they agree. I just didn’t want to appear as taking sides. So I added:

„But you know, they offer different tours there to the DMZ. And you can’t possibly see everything. I myself chose to get as close to the border as I could, but you can also visit other things like barbed wire, the tunnels and so on. So maybe there was this wall, too, and I just didn’t notice.“

However, something else caught Mr Sung’s attention

14 Kaesong

.

„What tunnels?“ he asked.

„The tunnels,“ I said „that they discovered and say that people from the north dug underneath the borderline with the south.“

„There are no such tunnels,“ Mr Sung said offhand.

„Well, I don’t know,“ I tried to be diplomatic. „I wasn’t there, but some people in the tour I took were there. They claimed they’d seen the tunnels.“

„That’s a lie,“ Mr Sung dismissed it out of hand again. I just shrugged. The way things looked to me, it was clunkingly obvious that both sides could take a step or two towards setting their respective records straight. At least in terms of telling the whole truth.

And that’s what I told lieutenant colonel Kim later in the bus. Not in as many words, of course. I again tried to be diplomatic and avoid hurting anyone’s sentiments. As a matter of fact, it turned out that for some reason he liked me. So he initiated a conversation through Mrs Lee. First of all he expressed his welcome and wished me a pleasant stay in Korea. I gave him my thanks. Then he marched on. Mrs Lee translated:

„Mr lieutenant colonel would like to know about your opinion on North Korea.“

„It’s still a bit early to say,“ I tried to avoid a direct answer

15 Kaesong

. „We’ve been here only a few days so far. But maybe Mr colonel would like to know that I visited South Korea many times before. And I like the people there very much. I even have some friends there. So as this is basically one people, I decided to come to the north and see what it is like here. I thought the best way to form an opinion would be to visit here and see for myself what the life is like in this part of the country.“

Lieutenant colonel Kim nodded in approval. Looking at him, you’d be tempted to say that he held with my view of hearing and seeing both sides. He even said so:

„Yes, it’s best to see for yourself.“

Now I nodded, too. And in order to play a grateful visitor, I added a sweetener:

„But as for me personally, I’ve been enjoying my trip here so far very much.“

Which was true. I didn’t have to lie there

16 Kaesong

. And Mr lieutenant colonel Kim was happy. In fact, North Korea might not be the best country in the world to live in. But in its own way it’s certainly a dream country to visit.

On our way back through the same countryside we were again watching people and fields. An odd peasant worked the land, but most of the fields were empty. Some skinny cattle tardily mooched around, maybe in search of food to fill the empty space between the ribs. A woman or two washed laundry in the roadside ditch. Occasionally, a piece of rusty machinery lay apparently discarded by the road, as if local agriculture couldn’t currently find any use to put it to right now. No electricity pylons in sight. Not even those ubiquitous, wonderfully colourful billboards. And at one point I saw a lorry some way off the road, out in the field, smoke coming out of all its holes.

„This one’s in trouble,“ I said, not too loud, almost more to myself.

But Mrs Lee heard me, turned around and asked:

„Who’s in trouble?“

I pointed at the truck and said:

„The truck over there.“

„Why?“

„Well, the smoke and everything.“

„Oh no!“ she corrected me

17 Kaesong

. „It’s a steam truck.“

„Is it?!“

Now that was a throwback to at least hundred years ago. Steam truck. Do they use them in the country?

„Oh yes. They are quite common here,“ Mrs Lee said seriously.

„Wow! I’m a big fan of steam trucks!“ I heard Mathew say behind me. I really had to put a serious effort not to burst into laughter. I knew I had better not as our hosts might get offended. After all, do you rate a country by what kind of cars they use? Of course not. But Mathew’s remark sounded to me like the funniest josh I’d heard in a while. I turned to him, he smiled and gave me thumb-up and that was it.

Anyway, with this steam truck in the field, which by the way wasn’t in trouble, I learned one more thing about North Korea. In my eyes this country now looked another bit less ominous and climbed down another notch on the danger scale. No matter what media in the rest of the world may say.

When we returned to Kaesong, the afternoon was really going late and the shadows lengthened considerably. There were still no cars in the streets apart from one or two military vehicles and one or two public buses. Only cyclists and pedestrians. But our sightseeing for the day was not done yet. There was one more thing to see. It was King Gong Min’s tomb.

Of course, lieutenant colonel Kim wouldn’t accompany us there, so we dropped him off in the town, and proceeded without him.

King Gong Min’s tomb is located just a few kilometres outside Kaesong and according to my understanding it’s the only site in North Korea on the UNESCO cultural heritage list. This king Gong Min, or Gong Min Wang in Korean, was the guy who had thrown the Mongol yoke off the Korean back and restored independence to the kingdom of Koryo. He did spend considerable time at the Yuan Court in China as a youngster, as was customary back then for every prospective ruler of Korea. I suppose that way the Mongols tried to imbue every new Korean ruler with values of loyalty to their court. Each one of them would along the way marry a Mongol princess to boot, and cards dealt Princess Noguk to the Gong Min.

However, once back in Koryo and up on the throne, conveniently helped by the crumbling of the Yuan Dynasty over there in China, Gong Min Wang kicked the Mongol guys out. That said, he still loved his Queen Noguk, which may sound like a fairy tale, but even historical sources claim that they were actually in love with each other. So even if they failed to conceive an heir for many years, he wouldn’t hear of suggestions to get himself a second wife. Well, as ever in life, hard work and tenacity eventually pay off and Queen Noguk became pregnant in 1365. Their bliss was short-lived, though, since, sadly, she died during the child birth. In short order it led to the King’s depression and mental instability. He became indifferent to politics and state affairs, and the only mission left in life for him now was to find perfect location for the Queen’s tomb. For this he naturally employed the services of local geomancers. However, the local geomancing university was either below standards or it had a bad luck to churn out one or two consecutive generations of quacks, so a lengthy line of geomancers failed to locate a spot to meet King’s requirements. The whole show didn’t sit well with king so at one point, evidently less than amused, he ordered that the next one to try would be given anything he desired if he succeeded. But if he failed, he would have him killed right where he stood.

And so one day one young geomancer told him to review a spot outside Kaesong. Already with a short fuse by now, Gong Min Wang secretly told his advisors that if he waved his handkerchief from up there, they should top the guy. While the geomancer took the King’s subjects to the spot where the tomb is now located, Gong Min Wang clambered the one opposite to review the site. The day was nice and sunny, and the King, not in the best of shapes after his wife’s death, and a bit short of breath by the time he had reached the top of the mountain, stopped to wipe the sweat off his brow and survey the area.

It turned out the place was perfect and exactly what he had been looking for. So the Gong Min Wang rolled downhill, preparing to personally congratulate the young man. However, upon climbing down the mountain he found that the poor sod had been done in. The King’s entourage had seen him wipe his brow and simply followed through on his orders. Hearing of his foolishness, the King exclaimed "Oh, my!", or whatever they used to say for “oh my" in Koryo back then. Well, it was a bit too late for the poor youngster, and all he got was the fact that from then on the hill in front of the tombs was dubbed „Oh My Hill“.

Not much of a consolation, really.

We climbed up the hill ourselves, in a tranquil, wooded area with no living creature around but us. Apart from three goats and a few birds, that is. Goats either belonged to no one (less likely) or their owners hid from us (more likely). Birds definitely belonged to the Government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea only. At least while in North Korean air space.

Well, Gong Min Wang Reung, or King Gong Min’s Tomb – or should it rather be called his wife’s tomb?... anyway, this tomb is a collection of two large, dome-shaped grass-covered mounds (at least I don’t remember seeing more than two) and a number of statues depicting both people and animals. This was obviously the first spot in North Korea so far that could be transferred south and nobody would say it was out of place. For the first time during our stay here, we were treated to something that wasn’t a direct result of a word or action by the Great Leader Kim Il Sung.

The place was great and we all liked it. However, the sun set and soon the darkness would be total. It was time to go back downtown, have dinner and go to our sleeping quarters.

And back in town centre we were reminded of what total darkness really looked like. Or on the brighter note, what a town entirely without the light pollution looks like. Our driver steered our bus slowly down empty Kaesong streets with no traffic whatsoever. Residential blocks were nearly impossible to make out in this by now all but pitch black night. In Pyongyang, tower blocks and most of buildings gave out that pale, cold greenish light from apartments. Here in Kaesong there was no light at all. Neither street lights, nor house lights. Nothing. Darkness. No TV watching in the evening. Maybe not even radios. A perfect setting to increase local population, a cynic might think.

They brought us to Folk Village. A set of traditional, low houses like they often have them down south, this was obviously the place they bundle foreigners in for the night in Kaesong. We had been warned by Simon that this wasn’t going to be the best accommodation ever, but none of us was making a thing of it. Judging by the looks of people in the group, all of us were independent travellers. Which meant that most of us were at one point or another – some maybe all the time – backpackers. Maybe with the exception of Gul who didn’t have to travel around on a shoestring. The guy who can spend thousands of euros just for stamps probably doesn’t cut corners on sleeping quarters. And Pim – being a KLM pilot – wherever he takes his planes to, probably doesn’t stay in 16-bed dorms. I would suspect that the KLM provides its staff an accommodation a notch or two up the scale. But both of them knew where they were and this all was a part of North Korea experience.

Each house inside the Folk Village had three or four rooms. And miraculously, electricity, too. Even if Mrs Lee warned us that the supply might be quite erratic. We shouldn’t rely too heavily on it. Anyway, I was given a house with Michael and Nicole, each one of us having their own room and bathroom, and James and Joseph getting a double room. Inside the house there was a rectangular-shaped courtyard, with a tree, dry fountain and several stone benches. On a sunny day it might be even pleasant there. During the day, of course.

The rooms were Spartan. There was a Korean-style mattress on the floor, a chest with extra blankets, then another one next to it, somewhat smaller, with non-functioning TV on it. And in the opposite corner, next to the door, there was a tiny table with a candle and matches, just in case, and a crooked and teetering wooden pole with short branches, or rather outsized pegs, to hang things on. I tried to hang my jacket, but in short order the leaning tendency of the pole turned into an outright keeling over. So I gave up.

After we had unpacked, or at least left our stuff in rooms, we had a dinner, sitting Korean-style on the floor around low long table in the light which was even by standards of North Korea rather dim. For the good measure, it went out twice, too. I suppose so we could enjoy the intimacy of our ever more closely knit group. Because no matter what, the people in the group were turning out to be a really great bunch.

„We somehow fit together very well,“ Nicole said. „I was afraid before the trip everybody would be so young here. But this turned out to be much better.“

Back in the room, I went to the bathroom to possibly take a shower before the bedtime, only to discover that there was no hot water at all. And cold water, a cold water indeed, only trickled from the tap. There was definitely no 2.5 bar minimum water pressure in the pipe there required in my country for domestic water supply. So I settled for what I could do in such circumstances.

And then, the moment I stepped back in the room, the light went out. Now I could see for myself how handy that candle in the corner was. I groped for it, lit it and set about doing those few things you need to do before you tuck yourself in bed in what was just a bit above total darkness. Then after a while light returned, so I snuffed the candle flame and even managed to write my diary entry for the day. Once I was done with it, already in bed, or on the mattress, rather, I grabbed the next copy of „TIME“ magazine wishing to read some before the night. But the light wouldn’t let me through to the end of the first article. It went out again and I decided not to wait for it any more tonight.

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