Friday grab bag: Tourism and DMZ history
New Tourism opportunities:
Koryo Tours is offering new and interesting travel destinations in Northeast Asia. According to their email newsletter (slightly edited):
We are very excited to offer a brand new tour for 2011, a trip to somewhere that no other company can take you or would probably even think of taking you! To Magadan – the remotest part of Russia and known mostly for being the site of the most infamous of the soviet gulags, where countless thousands of prisoners mined gold in terrible conditions including -50 degree winters. Today’s Magadan city has a population of close to 100,000 and is the largest settlement in the infamous Kolyma area. A place of stunning natural beauty and stark desolation, the province remains one of the least-visited parts of Russia with no train connections to what the locals call ‘the mainland’ and a road that only exists for 4 months of the year and takes 4 days to travel to the nearest major habitation (Yakutsk). We will visit a local ethnic village (of the Evenk people), stay in the city of Magadan (the regional capital), and see what life is like in this distant and evocative place. We’ll visit the site of the gulag as well as seeing local sights and industry (gold mining was the reason for the prison being in this location).
But that’s not all! If being one of the very few westerners ever to get as far as Magadan is still not enough then we have a further extension on offer. An itinerary that offers an even more in-depth look at the lives of people in the area as well as travelling deep into the near-deserted inner reaches of Magadan province to the abandoned city of Kadykchan. A place no other tour company, even in Russia, takes people to. For some photos of the city we will spend a day exploring, click here.
Koryo is also repeating its innovative “Tumen Triangle” tour:
Join our Tuman Triangle II Tour – This tour, utterly unique to Koryo Tours takes in 3 countries, time zones, and cultures in some of the least visited parts of Asia, we go to NE China’s Korean Autonomous region to start, then drive to Rason, the North Korean free trade zone. After this we travel to Russia by train, first to the resort of Andreyvka and finally by ferry to Vladivostok. After the program ends with a couple of days here some of the group return to Beijing, others begin the first ever group tour to Magadan!
And for the DMZ history angle, here are a couple more interesting videos filmed by Czechoslovakians stationd in the DPRK in 1989-1990.
Repatriating remains from the ROK side of the DMZ to the DPRK side.
You can see all of the videos here.
