Stephen Codrington

 

North Korea Travel Diary 2009

We all stayed up far too late last night, sharing experiences and reflections of the great adventure of the previous week. Thus, waking up this morning was not very easy, especially given the early hour of the morning call - 5:45 am. A quick look outside the window revealed a grey, overcast and wet day, the first rain we had seen in North Korea. If it had to rain on one day, then the day we were leaving was the ideal time. Without wishing to be melodramatic or excessively poetic, the grey weather matched our sombre moods as we were leaving an often misunderstood country that we hoped we had come to understand as much as was possible within the all-too-short period of just one week.

Each morning at the Yanggakdo Hotel, we had enjoyed a buffet breakfast in Dining Hall Number 2, a high ceilinged, cavernous cube of a room. We had come to know several of the staff, notably “Sales Woman No.6” (as she was identified on her name badge) who had learned that I liked my instant Nescafé with one teaspoon plus a bit of creamer (no milk was available, let alone decent coffee), and the older man (with no name badge) who I nicknamed Flipper (despite the unfortunate association with a dolphin) who cooked omelettes to order and served them onto a plate by flipping them high into the air from the frying pan to spin around and land on the plate in his other hand with perfect aim, followed by a glint in the eye and a slight grin that I translated as “I’m good, aren’t I!”.

There were no traffic jams on our 24 kilometre drive from central Pyongyang to Sunan Airport. Traffic jams are certainly rare in Pyongyang, but I have experienced them on previous trips, notably when large crowds of people are walking home from a mass practice for some political event in Kim Il Sung Square.

In our short time in North Korea we had seen and experienced many aspects of the country, learning as we did so that the image portrayed in the Western media was at best superficial and incomplete, and at worst deliberately distorted. The North Koreans have a story to tell, but it seldom reaches the outside world. Hopefully our students can provide the balance that is so often lacking - as I said to them, when they return home, they will be the most interesting people they know!

My students were sensational ambassadors for the United World College movement, drawing glowing comments for their politeness, perceptivity, and enthusiasm everywhere they went. I almost ran out of my name cards because so many people that we met from various countries around the world decided they wanted their children to apply for UWCs on the basis of seeing and talking with the students. Of course, the toughest breakthrough will be the DPRK Ministry of Education, but by the time you read this they should have received my written proposal to discuss establishing formal links. When, or if, I ever receive an answer to that letter is something that no-one knows yet, but when I began the initiative to establish links between UWCs and the DPRK in 2005 I knew it would be a long and slow road to travel.

And the encouraging signs are that North Korea is opening. This was my sixth trip, and every time I have visited things have been a little more open and a little easier. The restrictions on photographs this time were more relaxed, more people waved and smiled, and the general atmosphere was more positive and confident. There is a huge amount of renovation work going on in Pyongyang, presumably to spruce up the capital for Juche 100 (2012).

For the first time I actually saw several examples of the new cars being assembled in North Korea; they have been advertised since 2005 but I had never seen a real example on any previous trip. We were able to visit places that had previously been off-limits, such as the orphanage and the department store. Our guide even shared the story of how she and her husband met; she had us in stitches of laughter as she admitted she had only seen her husband for about 10 minutes, in the dark, in the months preceding their marriage. But, as she she said with a big smile and a shrug of the shoulders, “it is now ten years later, we have two children, and we are still married”.

Many people we spoke to were much more open than in previous trips about the difficulties they had faced in the 1994 to 1999 period, the so-called ‘Arduous March’. They openly acknowledged that “many” (no figures known) people starved and died because of the combined impact of the fall of supportive communist regimes elsewhere in the world, the US-backed sanctions and a series of alternating severe droughts and floods.

Rather than being an embarrassment as it is usually portrayed outside the DPRK, the Arduous March seems now to be seen as a triumph of self-reliance. While many commentators in the West predicted that the difficulties would bring down the regime, especially as it coincided with the leadership change following the death of Kim Il Sung, the Arduous March seems to have seen the regime emerge with its reputation for building ‘unity of will and purpose’ stronger than ever.

We even had the chance to discuss North Korea’s nuclear program. This was clearly related in the minds of those to whom we spoke to the real threat they feel from the stationing of US troops on their southern border. Many sincerely and ardently believe that when George W Bush was US president, labelling North Korea as one of the three members of the ‘Axis of Evil’ (the other two being Iran and Iraq), he would have invaded North Korea, as he invaded Iraq, but for the single fact that they possessed nuclear weapons. The North Koreans with whom I spoke about this subject believe that having nuclear weapons saved their country from a US invasion during that tense period.

Our flight to Beijing was on the same Ilyushin Il-62 that brought us to North Korea a week ago (P-881). As only a handful of Il-62s are still flying, it is inevitable that we will have experienced one of the last scheduled Il-62 flights in the world; time will tell how close it was to being the last. I was pleased to see that after last year’s absence, the infamous Koryo burgers had returned to the in flight menu. These are moist, almost soggy burgers with a thin slab of some kind of unidentifiable meat that have been famous for decades. And it was a great nostalgic experience to be rained upon during the flight, as the white clouds of cool air pumped into the cabin by the old Soviet air conditioning system condensed on the metal roof above my head.

We landed in Beijing right on schedule at 10 am, reversing the time change of one week earlier by advancing four decades in real time as we wound our watches back one hour.