CNN (Hat tip to D”S”B)
Adam Levine
5/22/2007
Hiking on North Korea’s Mount Kumgang gives you the uneasy feeling that despite the majesty of the natural scenery, even nature cannot escape politics in one of the most closed-off countries in the world.
The four-hour walk to Kuryong Falls is the centerpiece of the Mount Kumgang resort in southeastern North Korea. The trail winds along a river with glistening pools of water and picturesque scenery all around.
But you never escape the country’s dictatorship — there is the propaganda carved into the mountainside and rocks by the North Koreans, and the Chinese before them. There are also the North Korean employees working as vendors and rescue workers on the trail. They are always in pairs, and always seem to be watching you.
Kumgang is a popular tourist destination for South Koreans, for whom the mountain holds spiritual allure, and it is one of the few places in North Korea that Americans can travel relatively easily.
Hyundai Asan, an offshoot of the Korean car company, built the resort. It paid the North Korean government US$1 billion for 50 years of exclusive rights to the region and other business interests in North Korea. It spent an additional US$400 million to build the five-hotel resort, which opened in 1998.
More than 1.5 million visitors have made the trip to Kumgang. Most visitors are South Koreans; less than 8,000 visitors are from 48 other countries. Hyundai Asan spokesman Dan Byun says a majority of the 8,000 are South Korean ex-patriots.
Despite the western style hotel accommodations, American money changing hands and duty free shop selling Johnny Walker and Marlboro cigarettes, you don’t forget that you are in North Korea.
Just getting there involves busing through the demilitarized zone, where we are constantly told “no pictures, no pictures” by our guide and informed that aside from the road we are on, the entire area is filled with land mines.
After going through North Korean immigration we are herded back on a bus and reminded again that we cannot take pictures until we get inside the resort.
The 4.5-mile trip moves through southern North Korea, which the guide says is all a military base. Soldiers appear ominously standing at attention along the road. Each carries a red flag, which, we are told, will be raised if any soldier sees one of us taking a picture. Tanks and what appear to be anti-aircraft weapons are hidden in bunkers in the hills overlooking the roads.
The actual resort area looks no different than any typical tourist destination with a welcome center, hotels, bus parking and retail stores. North Korean folk songs blare from overhead speakers in the parking lot. But surrounding it all is a fence to separate tourists from the North Korean village of On Jung Li.
A two-night, three-day tour can cost as much as US$490. There are five hotels to choose from including a beach-side hotel and floating hotel and one that used to be the vacation home of Kim Il Sung’s wife.
There are 11 restaurants, including a branch of a North Korean noodle restaurant that is an exact replica of its counterpart in Pyongyang. An 18-hole golf course is opening in the fall and there is a Korean acrobatics show that performs each night at the theater.
The government has gone to extremes to accommodate the resort, even tearing down a village and moving it and its inhabitants to make way for the welcome center and shop.
The company defends its $1 billion payment to the North Korean government as economic revitalization. Hyundai Asan built a railway and border station to allow trains to travel from Seoul, South Korea, into North Korea. After refusing to let the trains through for a long time, the North Korean government finally allowed the first train to cross the border last week.
Hyundai is also building a reunification center to allow families from both sides of the border to hold reunions when allowed.
Some North Koreans work at the resort as waiters, vendors, rescue teams and maintenance. Most wear a pin of their president on their lapel.
Most refused to be photographed, cryptically saying “no pictures while I am working.” All but a few will refuse to talk to you. The ones that did talk to us offer some glimpse into their thinking.
One rescue worker told us that the only reason President Bush has not invaded North Korea is because Bush is afraid of Kim Jung Il. A vendor told us that she likes Americans, but hates the American government.
The resort is surrounded by a fence, through which you can see villagers planting in the fields and walking down the roads. They are forbidden to come to the resort or talk to the tourists. Not that they appear to be trying.
Ashley Moore, from Oklahoma, remembers North Koreans ducking behind trees and plants.
“We weren’t allowed to speak to any of them,” Moore said.
Moore, and her boyfriend Zac Gambill took a trip to Mount Kumgang when they lived in South Korea last year.
She and Gambill went from being a bit frightened to be in North Korea to surprise about the unabashed consumerism at the resort.
“Seeing the commercialism at the resort was a real shock,” Moore said. But she never felt totally at ease.
“We got a sense of the North Korean government’s determination to convey a favorable image to the outside world and a small sense of what it feels like to be constantly under surveillance,” Moore observed.
