August 2009 Archives

This is the first in a multi-part blog on North Korea...

Many readers have asked about my time in North Korea. Why did I go? How did I get in? What was I thinking?

I'll start at the beginning. It was August 2001, a month before 9/11 changed the world forever. I was living and working in Tokyo. Summer vacation was coming up, and I planned to visit a friend in Indonesia. The problem is, all of Japan goes on vacation at the same time. They're absolute workaholics, and if vacation time was individually scheduled (like it is in most countries), guilt would keep everyone slaving away. So for two weeks each summer the country shuts down, the freeways clog in 100-km traffic jams, and air tickets jump to five times their normal price.

Thanks to my company vacation schedule, I could get a ticket to Jakarta but I couldn't get back to Japan. Everything was sold out. I had purchased maps, I'd planned my route, I'd read and researched and I was pissed off. I looked at the map of East Asia with bitterness, scorning each country as dull and uninteresting. I finally decided that the only other place I wanted to go was North Korea. But of course that was impossible. I pulled up a web browser and punched it in, simply to prove myself right.

It didn't take long to find a British expat living in Beijing who had contacts with the regime and could arrange my visa. By some strange coincidence, he was sending six European guys in during the very week of my vacation. I wrote and he replied immediately. Time was tight--this was a week and a half before the trip--but his contacts were good and he thought he could speed me through the approval process. The only catch was that I would have to fly to Beijing. It was the only place I could catch a flight or train to Pyongyang.

I faxed him a long form that included information about my current job, every prior job I ever held, and my educational background. They also wanted a letter signed by my employer certifying that everything I'd written was true. I listed my company as my emergency contact. A week after I faxed the application somebody called asking questions about me. I said, "Don't worry about it. It's just the North Koreans." They didn't know what to make of it.

If you show up to the table with enough cash, the North Koreans will talk to you. Otherwise don't bother trying. Even with money it's difficult to get in. They cancel applications and tours arbitrarily, at the last minute, and with no refunds or rescheduling.

The cheapest way to visit is to go in a small group. It's possible to go alone, but much more expensive. You have to pay for two guides and a driver who are with you 24 hours a day. With a small group you still have the same number of watchers, so costs are slightly lower.

I met the other guys I'd be travelling with at the North Korean embassy in Beijing. It's a drab communist-looking building decorated in the usual battleship grey. The entrance foyer contains an enormous painting of Kim Il-Sung and Chairman Mao, standing arm-in-arm and gazing off into the horizon, presumably to the glorious future of communism.

At the embassy I had to fill out another visa application and hand over two photos and my passport. We waited for over an hour while the North Koreans checked our backgrounds once again. An Italian couple was asked to leave immediately, without explanation. They had travelled overland from Italy on the Trans-Siberian Express, and this venture into North Korea was the focal point of their journey. But it had all been derailed because of a small mistake on a document. We all sat up a little straighter at that point.

Everyone else checked out. We were each given a one-way ticket to Pyongyang and a tourist visa stamped on a little blue piece of paper which they stuck in our passports (it would be removed on the way out of the country). We were to meet up at Beijing airport the next morning for our flight.

I spent my last night of relative freedom at the Great Wall with some friends from the German embassy. We purchased a bag full of beer, crackers, and water, and we bargained with a taxi driver for a ride to the closest section of the wall, an hour outside Beijing.

In the daytime the place swarms with tourists, but in the evening the buses are gone, the souvenir stalls selling Great Wall hats and t-shirts are closed, and the site is empty.
We walked up the wall to the highest point, winding along ridges and over the crests of hills, to where the wall doubled back on itself several times before disappearing into the distance. We were completely alone. It was so peaceful up there compared to the smog, blaring horns, and shoving people of Beijing. The air was fresh and cool. The only thing missing was birdsong. I think the Chinese have eaten them all.

At the highest point we sat down and opened our beers. We drank and talked quietly as the sun slipped behind the hills, making its exit in a blaze of orange and yellow that trembled in the humid haze that clung like gauze to the peaks.

I wondered if there were sunsets in North Korea? Had the government banned them? What would they look like? Would they even allow us to see them? The week ahead was filled with uncertainty.

In the morning it would begin.

We'll get to North Korea soon, I promise. I'm in London at the moment and wanted to share something with you.

Spent some time searching for the tomb of one of my heroes. He's buried in a marble replica of a Bedouin tent in a little cemetery in Mortlake...

Captain Richard Francis Burton lived a life people today would hardly find believable. He spoke some 29 languages and dialects. One of the most prolific adventurers of all time, he was the first European to enter the Ethiopian city of Harare, was co-discoverer of the source of the Nile, and was one of the few foreigners ever to make the pilgrimage to Mecca in disguise. Burton was also a master of the sword. On one expedition he fought off an attack by Somali tribesman that saw him wounded through the mouth by a spear, the scars of which are visible in all his later photographs.

Burton's writings provide a fascinating glimpse into an age when we still hadn't come to grips with the limits of our known world. They contain a wealth of detailed observations about native peoples, plants, wildlife, minerals, ruins, and the etymology of place names, and yet are seldom dry. His sense of wonder at penetrating the unknown and the freedom of exploration are always present.

Burton was also a man ahead of his time. He translated the Kama Sutra when Victorian morals would rather have seen it repressed. He referred to native peoples as "intelligent and humane" when most regarded non-Europeans as "sub-human". He approached the world on its terms rather than his own. For the serious traveler, all of his works are worth reading.

Stay tuned for more notes from the road...

My latest magazine feature has just hit newsstands across Canada and select international magazine stores in the United States.

It's the main feature and cover story: an exploration of time, culture and change, and of two completely seperate worldviews which have coexisted in Egypt for centuries. Alexandria, a Hellenistic city, has always looked towards the Mediterranean, while the rest of Egypt has always looked towards the Nile.

What does this mean for the modern nation, and what does this mean for us as travelers? Pick up the September/October 2009 issue of Outpost to find out!

I'm just about to leave for London and Hamburg, but more blogs are on the way. Next up: a multi-part blog on my experiences in North Korea, the world's most reclusive country. Stay tuned!

Born in 1915 to great wealth in Seattle, Moritz Thomsen died miserably poor in the tropics, of cholera, in 1991. He served as a bombardier in WWII, farmed in California, and at age 44 gave it all up to join the recently-formed Peace Corps. His book about that experience, Living Poor, is ranked as one of the best Peace Corps memoirs ever written. When his service was over, he chose to remain. He started a farm with an Ecuadorian friend, but that too ended in defeat. By then Thomsen was 63, and his health was already in decline.

The Saddest Pleasure takes Thomsen from the tattered remains of his failed farm in Ecuador on a journey to Colombia and then Brazil, where he travels up the Amazon River. As he moves through scenes of desperate poverty, the author also journeys back through his own life and failures, reflecting on his struggles and emotional pain with brutal honesty. He spares the reader nothing--his most scathing observations on the places he journeys through, unapologetic assessments of his life, and beautifully rendered portraits of the land and people he has come to love. It's all in there: life stripped down to its essence, just as Thomsen lived it.

Like any great travel classic, the ground he covers is large: history, culture, human nature, autobiography, growing old, friendship, family, dreams and their dissolution. But what elevates his story to a classic of the genre is the beauty with which he tells it.

[I'm on the road in the United States at the moment--my apologies for the infrequent blog entries. Will be back to normal after 7 days]

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in the Peten region of Guatemala...

The light through the window lay across my chest in a square pattern, broken by the lazy sweep of a ceiling fan. It was a picture straight out of Joseph Conrad; a movie version of a malarial sickroom. I appreciated the exotic image and knew it would make a great story, but it wasn't so cool with no one there to see it.

I was hundreds of miles from home, in a backwater jungle town. No one knew where I was. There was no one to help me if I got worse, but I was too sick to care.

My room had been built inside a restaurant, facing directly onto the tables. It was as though they couldn't decide which to build--a guesthouse or a restaurant--and somehow ended up with both. There was no window to close, and music came in through the screen at full volume, torturing me with its relentless, insistent, empty-headed beat. I cursed the staff, damning them to a hell of foul hangovers, an eternity in a machine shop, or perhaps the ravages of tinnitus. But I was too weak to complain.

My illness intensified during the interminable rolling night. The fever's auguries brought on lifelike hallucinations that flickered across the overheated theatre of my mind. I saw the faces of people I hadn't thought about for a decade: people I'd gone to high school with, people I'd known as a child. I walked through old neighbourhoods and incidents, through expired hopes and dreams, seeing it all at one remove. Fitful dreams blended with disconnected reality, and I completely lost track of which was which.

Two days later, I emerged squinting into the copper twilight of Flores. After a bland meal of rice, vegetables, and water, I sat in the wooden chair in front of my room to write.
I put on my walkman to blot out the restaurant's background noise. I was still pissed off at the staff, still offended by their constant clamor that intruded upon the silence of my inner world. The memory of their shouting voices and my aching head was still a fresh offence.

A worker passed by my chair and noticed the empty tape case.

"You like Maná?"

I nodded. He launched into a heartfelt rendition of Rayando el Sol, looking me straight in the eye the entire time, obviously pleased with the clarity of his own voice. His directness made me uncomfortable, and it took all my effort not to blink and look away.

"Want to put it on the stereo?" he asked.

"Sure, if you want."

Soon all the workers were walking around singing the songs I'd been listening to since Nicaragua. It was like inhabiting the edge of a musical. The dam of reticence had finally burst--mine and theirs--and their curiosity spilled over. One by one they came over to talk to me, completely abandoning the customers on whose tables they were supposed to be waiting. They only went back with reluctance when the bartender hissed and jerked his head towards the patio, to be replaced soon after by another eager conversationalist.

The waiter who put on the music came back later to return my tape, and we talked until closing time. At one point I pulled out my wallet to buy a drink. It was a brown leather billfold, badly scuffed, the stitching held together with filthy surgical tape. I carried it on purpose, as a lucky talisman and as a bit of a ruse. It looked so bad it was beyond theft. That was my theory, at least.

"That wallet is very old," he said, frowning and shaking his head.

"Yeah, but it's okay. I'm kinda fond of it."

He pulled out his own wallet, emptied it carefully, and handed it to me.

"Please, amigo."

"I can't take that," I said politely.

"Please..." He pushed it into my hands with finality. I didn't know what to say. How could I explain that I had two brand new leather wallets at home, pushed to the back of a drawer, still fresh in their boxes? And how could I tell him I carried this beat up ruin because none of his countrymen would want to steal it?

I finally accepted it, with reluctance. I couldn't cause insult by refusing a gift that had been offered honestly, in comradeship. I was deeply touched by his generosity. In a country like that, in a poverty stricken jungle backwater town, a poor Salvadoran immigrant waiter pitied me and gave me the wallet from his pocket. It was the non-clichéd equivalent of offering someone the shirt off one's back.

I encountered such generosity everywhere I went in Central America. If people thought I was a rich tourist they sometimes tried to fleece me, but if they thought I was poor like them, or if they had established the slightest personal connection, they shared of what they had, freely and with no thought of reward or gain.

It was so far from the image of that place that existed in North America. Those who sat at home in their comfortable air-conditioned houses, filtering the world through the TV news, expected robbery, conniving dark-skinned locals, sneak thieves and revolutionaries. They couldn't imagine that these were people just like us. People with their own hopes and dreams. Kind, warm people who were always ready to extend the hand of friendship, if only you could summon up a smile. I've rarely encountered that sort of openness in the so-called First World.

All travelers agree that no trip has the same soul-shaking impact of that first time you set out alone on the road.

Looking back, I can see how necessary it had been for me to go to Central America. I had to leave home to acquire the necessary vision and experience, to come to an understanding of what it is to live for living's sake.

 There are times when we know that the way we are living is preventing us from truly living. It requires courage to take that first step, to follow your inner light when guilt, fear, habit, and other people are urging you to stay where you are. You must have great determination. That and imagination: the power to dream great dreams. As I learned during my first few days in Panama City, that first step is the hardest one of all.

Those who stay behind are forever bound by the box of their identity. It's possible to overcome it by remaining there, but the struggle is slower and success is more difficult.  As long as we continue to skim across the surface of our lives at high speeds, it's impossible to dig deeply. Clarifying your purpose takes time; quiet, uninterrupted time. That and isolation.