Recently in Travel stories Category

As I wrote in the prior blog, I still don't know how I found the "guesthouse" where we spent that first night in Rangoon.  At first it seemed like a great value. But in the end we got more than we bargained for...

It was a small place owned by Indian traders, on the second floor of a decrepit colonial building lost down a forgettable side street. We had to trudge up a dark stairway full of auto parts and then walk through some sort of machine shop to get to the door. I struck a deal for a tidy little room with a shower for less than ten bucks -- not bad given how overpriced rooms in Rangoon were at the time.

It was only later that night I realized what a shithole it was.

The wooden walls of the room didn't extend all the way to the top. There was a one-inch gap opening onto the hallway. Unfortunately the wall at the end of the hallway that separated these concrete cells from the lobby wasn't a proper wall either. I think it was made of plastic painted to look like fake wood. The lobby seemed to be some sort of social hub for other Indian or Pakistani traders. They sat there past midnight drinking tea and chattering like old ladies in shrill voices, and they resumed their discussions once more as dawn broke. Their conversation reverberated down the hall and funneled through that gap at the top of the wall, amplified to a volume that had been precisely calculated to shatter sleep.

I don't know if the mosquitos were pushed through by the sheer acoustic power of the gossip or if they fled to escape the noise, but as darkness fell the room was infiltrated by a plague of buzzing misery. Malaria was rampant in the region and all we had were pills purchased over the counter at Hanoi -- who knows what they contained. 

We burned mosquito coils until our eyes and lungs ached in a futile attempt to choke the bastards out, but I was tormented all night by a fresh assault each time a coil ran down. Any bit of flesh not covered by blankets was stung grievously, and by morning the bed was surrounded by the bodies of those slain in single combat.

I thought the mosquitos would be the worst of it, but that was yet to come. I had just finished writing my notes and was reaching for the light switch when I noticed something moving beneath the shower door. Now, the "shower" was just a dank concrete cube with a hole chopped in the floor for a drain, and a cold water pipe sticking out of the ceiling. It actually looked as though it had been built in the space between the walls. Anything that crawled out of the dark corners and moldy shadows of that place couldn't possibly be welcome.

As I got up to investigate, a giant cockroach crawled out through the gap in the shower room door and approached me with it's guard up. The hideous creature was nearly the size of my palm. 

I grabbed a hiking boot and wasted no time taking the fight to the enemy. I feinted with the left and dealt the beast a mighty blow with the heel of the boot, but it had absolutely no effect on the carapace of this freak of evolution. The son of a bitch came straight at me again like I'd blown it a kiss. I hit it a second and third time in rapid succession, and only then was it reeling enough for me to deliver the shell-splitting blow that finished the fight. 

I'd just scraped the thing into the trash when a second and then a third slipped out from beneath the door. I picked up the other boot and laid waste to my 6-legged foes with a matching pair. Before reinforcements could enter the field again, I yanked down the faded curtain that tastefully hid the entry to the shower, and I shoved it beneath the door, filling the space and bracing it with a stack of books.

We wouldn't be menaced by any more insects that night, but when I woke in the morning and went in there for a shower, I found that half my bar of soap was missing. The remainder was covered in tiny teethmarks. A rat had evidently eaten it in the night. 

I reached back out for my knife, whittled away the chewed sections, and finished my shower. I was perfectly content with this, but my girlfriend insisted we find new lodgings the next day. She said the place didn't meet her standards. But what did she expect for seven dollars?

Of all the places I traveled in Southeast Asia, I liked Burma the best.

It was by far the most traditional country in the region. It was free of Thailand's 7-11's, paved roads and fast food. Free of Vietnam's scams. And it lacked that uncomfortable undercurrent of violence and broken psyches that seemed to blight Cambodia. 

Burmese people were quiet and kind. Old men in the highlands lamented the fact that young people had begun wearing pants in Rangoon, but I never once saw a pair of jeans, only the traditional wraparound longyi.

Burma kept its traditions because its paranoid military dictatorship shut the world out to keep the people down. They even changed the country's name to Myanmar in an effort to hide the past and duck an accountable future. If they just pretended hard enough, would the outside world think they were someplace else?

Visiting such a country brings with it the risk that the money you spend will go towards supporting the regime. But I believe it's a risk you must take. For many Burmese, independent travelers are their only bridge to the outside world. And their stories deserve to be heard.

I spent a month in Burma back in 2002. At that time visitors were expected to change a set amount of foreign currency -- I believe it was $300 each -- into "Foreign Exchange Certificates" (FEC's) on arrival. It was illegal for Burmese to possess hard currency. And of course the FEC's sent that money directly into the rotting pockets of the military. 

The FEC policy was suspended late in 2003 and no longer exists. But at the time I went there, dodging it was a bit like stepping into a Cold War film.

The foreign exchange counter at Rangoon airport had been placed squarely in the middle of the arrivals hall, just before the customs post. It was impossible to bumble past while feigning preoccupation with your luggage. That was my first ruse and it didn't work.

The woman at the counter shouted and waved me back. "You must change $300!" she said. "Each." 

I lowered my voice, leaned on the counter and said, "But I don't want to change $300. Do you think you could help me out?"

She took a quick look over her shoulder at Immigration. "How much do you want to change?" she asked, leaning towards me with her voice pitched low.

"I was thinking.... $50" I said. That would be just enough for a pair of train tickets north, which had to be purchased from the government office anyway.

She took my money, counted out 50 FEC's, stuffed them into an envelope, sealed it, and wrote "$300" on the outside. "Show this to the customs officer," she said, licking her lips and leaving a thin coating of spittle. "And now... do you have a present for me?"

"What would you like?"

"Ten dollars!"

I burst out laughing and gave her $5. 

That solved the problem of keeping as much of my hard currency as possible out of the hands of the government. But I wasn't in the clear just yet.

Burma is subject to international sanctions, so credit cards and ATM's wouldn't work there. Cash is king, and I was carrying a month's worth. But I still lacked a way to turn it into the local currency, which would enable me to put money in the hands of those who needed it most. 

FEC's could only be spent in certain places -- at government approved hotels, on taxis, and on railway, bus or boat tickets. I used mine to get a taxi into town. On the way there I consulted a guidebook for a list of official "hotels." I wanted to avoid those because they'd be overpriced, and because that money would make its way to the bastards in power.

I still don't know how I found the "guesthouse" where we spent that first night. It was a small place owned by Indian traders, on the second floor of a decrepit colonial building lost down a forgettable side street. We had to trudge up a dark stairway full of auto parts and then walk through some sort of machine shop to get to the door. I bargained for a tidy little room with a shower, and told the owner I'd pay him as soon as I got my hands on some cash.

"How do I go about getting money anyway? Can you change it for me?"

"Oh no!" he said. "That's illegal." And then he leaned closer. "Just go for a walk. Someone will find you."

My girlfriend and I dumped our packs in the room and took a stroll through old Rangoon. Sure enough, we'd only made it halfway down the first block of old colonial buildings, their white facades faded to the colour of limburger cheese, when a man slid up beside me.

"Change money?" he whispered from the corner of his mouth.

I looked him over quickly. "Yeah, okay."

"How much you want to change?"

"A hundred."

"Big head or small head?"

That made no sense at all until I realized he was talking about the bills. Was it a new US hundred -- the big head president -- or an old one? They got different rates on the black market.

"Big head." 

He offered me 1150 kyat to the dollar and I accepted.  

"Good. Please follow me." I moved to walk alongside, but he held out his arm and barred my way. "Stay a bit back."

The man walked half a block ahead, taking several turns and sometimes doubling back. He never once turned around to make sure we were there. I kept him in sight but maintained that same distance. Eventually he walked into a small tea shop on a side street. I looked around and followed him in. 

"Please sit," he said, gesturing to a nearby table and ordering coffee for the three of us. "Now, show me the money you wish to change."

I slipped a hand into my pocket, palmed the hundred dollar bill and showed it to him. His eyes widened slightly, and he darted a quick look around.

"Okay, wait here."

He got up and ducked out the door. I wondered briefly if it was a trap, then went back to sipping my coffee. Either way, it'd be interesting to see how it played out.

Five minutes later he was back, followed by another man who looked colder and more businesslike. This was obviously the one who carried the cash.

We went through the routine of me showing them the hundred dollar bill in my palm again. The new man was satisfied. He reached into his shirt and took out a large roll of kyat, made a show of counting it, and then passed it to me under the table. I began counting it carefully in my lap.

"Give me your hundred," the original man said. "I can hold it for you while you count."

I shook my head and kept counting. They kept looking over their shoulders and making gestures to leave. 

As I expected, their stack was a bit short. I tossed the pile onto the table in front of the second man. "That isn't right," I said, pushing back my chair and moving to stand up.

"Okay, okay," he said, covering the cash in a panic and gesturing for me to sit down. He added several bills to the roll without looking -- he'd obviously slipped them aside intentionally -- and passed it to me under the table again.

I took my time, counting it all once more from the beginning. This time it was correct. I shoved the entire roll into the waistband of my pants and passed him my hundred under the table. Both men got immediately to their feet and rushed out the door, turning down the street in opposite directions.

"I guess that's our cue to leave," I said. We downed our coffees and struck a casual pace to a busier street, losing ourselves in the crowd.

Back in our room, I realized that the stack of kyat was so large I'd have to carry it in a plastic bag shoved into the bottom of my backpack. I don't think I'd ever held such a large pile of cash before. And so I did what any self respecting traveler would do. I spread it out on the bed and I rolled in it.

I read a fascinating book last week called Pan American Clippers: The Golden Age of Flying Boats by James Trautman. It's about a forgotten age of air travel, when men were men, adventure was waiting around every corner, and the world was a much larger place.

It was the decade before World War 2, the early days of aviation. Air travel was still a luxury within reach of a select few. Crowds turned up to watch the big planes land and take off. And routes over both oceans were only just being pioneered.

All of this would change and commercial aviation would take an amazing leap after the war years, but for one brief decade the skies were a truly romantic and adventurous place to be.

Nothing symbolizes this era like the giant flying boats. Passengers were used to traveling by ship -- they liked to get up and walk around, to dine at tables in a special salon, to sleep in fold-down bunks, and to have a stand up cocktail at a proper bar -- and these enormous flying boats were designed with that in mind. Every customer was a first class customer. No one was herded about like a sheep.

Flying boats filled a niche at a time when airstrips were uncommon, and the vast empty stretches of the Atlantic and Pacific could not be crossed in a single bound. Flying from San Francisco's Treasure Island to Manila on the China Clipper was a 5 day journey, with refueling stops in Honolulu, Midway Island, Wake Island, and Guam. From Manila passengers could take connecting flights to Macao and Shanghai. Luxury hotels were built in each of these remote outposts, treating overnighting Clipper passengers to a level of service they were accustomed to back home.

The war years changed all that, of course. Runways had been built all over the place, and larger planes capable of much greater ranges -- including trans-Atlantic flights -- had been developed. Speed took precedence over comfort; the destination trumped the importance of the journey. The world no longer needed these giant flying boats, and they quietly drifted off into the haze of memory and black and white films.

But at their height, the Clippers seemed to be everywhere, appearing on posters and in luxury ads for everything from cigarettes to Goodyear rubber, and touted as "the most romantic planes ever built." You could be forgiven for thinking the skies were full of them. In actual fact, only 28 had ever been built (the best remembered being three Martin 130's and the twelve Boeing 314's that are the most widely depicted face of the Clipper). Despite their cultural importance, not a single Clipper was saved for an aviation museum. Nothing remains of this golden age, save for a few precious memories on newsreels and fading photographs. It's a romantic era of our past that we'll never get back.

My own obsession with flying boats began in 1982. I was 10 years old, and a short-lived television show called Tales of the Gold Monkey had just hit the airwaves. The story was set in 1938, in a South Pacific rife with intrigue between colonial powers gearing up for war. Each episode focused on a little twin engined Grumman Goose flying boat based on the fictional backwater island of Bora Gora. There was an ex-Flying Tigers pilot called Jake Cutter, a drunken mechanic, and a one-eyed dog, backed by supporting characters that included an American spy posing as a lounge singer, a French territorial administrator and bar owner with a checkered past, and a German spy posing as a missionary priest, who spent most of his time "blessing" the island girls. Jake's nemesis was often a Japanese princess and her fierce samurai henchman. It was fun, the characters were stock and one-dimensional, and it brought to mind old-time serials and cliffhangers. It also made me realize, at 10 years old, just how cool it'd be to get a Goose of my own and fly around the South Pacific having adventures.

The series was released last month on DVD after 15 years of lobbying by a core group of obsessive fans. I'm 5 episodes in and, yes, it's as cool as I remember.

By some strange coincidence a company called Antilles Seaplanes has also resurrected the Grumman Goose. They've taken the original design of that amphibian workhorse, installed new turboprop engines, composite materials, and advanced avionics, and are about to start selling this plane again. A new era of flying boats is pretty unlikely. But it does resurrect my old goal...

I think flying around the South Pacific having adventures is a rather worthwhile dream, don't you?

I'm alone in my compartment as the train leaves Slovenia and enters the broad rolling fields of Hungary. The dark blue seat upholstery smells of dust, and the nautical gloss of the walls have faded to matte.

I see "Magyar" go past on a rusted sign, and I'm reminded of a stamp collecting album someone gave me as a child. It was filled with names like "GDR" and "Magyar Republic", names I couldn't find on a map. Names that sounded so strange. Now here it is outside my window. Did I ever imagine I would see such places? Or did I ever doubt that I wouldn't?

Deeper into Hungary, the train to Budapest keeps changing directions. One minute we're traveling forward, and half an hour later we're going backwards. An hour later it will change again. It feels as though we're tacking like a sailboat into the wind, approaching our destination obliquely. Or perhaps they just keep forgetting things and have to go back?

Hungary is a country where the people look just like the etchings on their money. I see that crazy looking guy from the 1000 forint note walk past my compartment again and again. I slip a few notes from my wallet to compare. He's dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket, but otherwise the same.  

There's something about a train that never fails to fuel my writing. I don't know if it's the way a train snakes across vast open land, the metrical clack of the wheels or the grinding of the steel. It's all right there before me in a gently rocking panorama, and all I have to do is take it all in.

The land as it unrolls like a film matches my thoughts, and I roll back through them, peeling away years to connect events into patterns and condense thoughts into notebook words.

I watch the rain bead on the glass and roll down the pale reflection of my face. As I stare through this transparent counterfeit of myself, I realize that I've always lived my life in compartments, with walls of various types and thicknesses, a variety of opacities and stained-glass stains. It began as an antidote to the fatigue that comes with always being the odd one out. But now I contain so many compartments it's become difficult to recognize my core. Which one is truest? Are any of them real? 

I uncovered that core once in Central America, and I managed to free it for a brief period of time. But now it feels like I'm living two types of life: the ideal sort of world that I would like to experience, the one I express in my writing. And the quieter, lonelier life I actually lead in between. 

I begin to wonder if, the more I write and the better I get, if I'm putting the best of myself into my writing, and if what's left over is what's left for my day to day life?

These are the kinds of things I like to think about on trains.

I was digging through my files the other day, looking for the seeds of a new blog story, when I came across my first magazine assignment.

I had just sold a major feature to Outpost on an expedition I'd done in the Taklamakan Desert. The story was getting good feedback, and when an opening came they asked me to travel on assignment to South Dakota with photographer Jason George. I was given complete freedom to come up with my story angle, and I worked with our contacts on the ground to arrange the trip.

It seemed funny to me at the time. I was quite poor back then--living in a one-bedroom apartment, working temp jobs during the day and writing late nights at a narrow table in the living room, sitting on the cat's house. I didn't even have a proper chair.

I'd spent so many years working shit jobs and saving every penny for travel that I couldn't believe someone was just going to send me there for free. And what did I have to do in return?

"Tell me a story."

Are you serious?

Don't get me wrong--it's a real job filled with tight deadlines, time pressures, and hard, detailed work. But after so many years of temp drudgery that first magazine assignment felt like an incredible dose of freedom.

That old South Dakota feature isn't up on the Articles page of my website, so I thought I'd share the first couple pages with you. A bit of a blast from the past, from 2005. Hope ya like it:

 

To the uninitiated "South Dakota" is prairie-flat and prairie-dull. I expected cowboys and Indians; dude ranches where big city office managers dress up and play Old West. I was apprehensive. I just couldn't imagine writing a cool story about that.

Standing on the Pinnacles Overlook at Badlands National Park I was forced to rethink my position. Beyond the metal railing the ground dropped away to a convolution of eccentric geology - the bones of the Earth laid bare. The spiny vertebra, the dried up veins and the land's wrinkled skin were worn open, exposed for all to see on God's dissection table. Crumbling formations striped with alternating bands of lavender and mud-brown soared into buttes and pillars and plunged into ragged bluffs split by the fissures of dry creeks. From above it's overwhelming. There's too much detail; the colours and shapes and the cacophony of crazy angles are too bizarre to process. It doesn't make sense topographically.

The Sioux called the area 'mako sica' - 'land bad'. The first white men to bump up against it on their way across the prairies, French fur trappers, called it 'les mauvaises terres à traverses' - 'the bad land to cross'. It was always an obstacle, a trap, a place you stayed away from.

"Ready?"

"You betcha."

I threaded rope through my carabiner and kicked off in a clattering crumble of dirt. Caleb Gilkerson of Dakota Adventures followed me down. We'd tied on to the railing of the visitor overlook. Fat RV tourists in Bermuda shorts watched us with incredulity. They couldn't imagine why anyone would want to go "down there."

* * *

Millions of years ago, after the vast inland sea receded from the centre of the continent, the Badlands were part of an enormous marshland. Dinosaurs and other beasts wandered the heartland of North America in tropical heat. They died and were gradually covered by sediment. Other creatures came as the centuries wore on, including three-toed horse, a variety of small camel, and saber tooth tiger, and their bones too were entombed for the gratification of present-day fossil hunters.

The marsh eventually dried up and the prairies of the Great Plains emerged. Over the course of about 5 million years streams carved into the soft prairie soil and harsh western winds chiseled the soft rock into fantastic spires, turrets and pinnacles. Today clumps of withered grass on the tops of these buttes and pinnacles serve as a reminder that those distant tops were once part of the smooth alluvial plain. Contrary to popular belief the Badlands, inhospitable and barren as they appear, are not desert but prairie.

The Badlands that we see today are mostly composed of mudstone (the dark bands laid down during dry times) and siltstone (light bands, the product of wetter eras), with the occasional tough sandstone outcropping, all on a base of shale. It's a surface that's hard to the touch but it's easily broken up by water. It's being cut down at a rate of about 1/2" per year. Like the sea and the swamps before them, The Badlands too will one day vanish in deep rivers of time -- but thankfully not for several million years.

Down on the Badlands floor our boots crunched across a hardpacked flat that looked like frozen mud. Heat waves shimmered from the field-of-Mars landscape. An unbreachable wall towered into a bristling mountain range beyond the flats, and brown-baked Tahitian-island clumps sought sudden elevation in the middle of a frozen mud sea.

Those were my favourite bits of badlands topography. The walking was easier than in the twisting dry gulches. Grim formations menaced overhead with Mordor-gloom. The land held a heavy silence. You could come face to face with a buffalo without ever hearing a warning sound. The visual was even more disorienting than the atmosphere. To walk across such bizarre terrain was to be dwarfed by a sense of total dislocation. There was nothing to give it human perspective or scale. It didn't relate to anything I'd ever seen before, and so it took me out of myself. We'd been dropped into a sci fi novel, a dimension of the imagination.

We followed animal tracks - mule deer, buffalo, coyote and elusive bobcat. We scanned the ground for fossils and petrified wood. We scrambled up twisted formations just to see what was up there. More often than not we had to run back down, hopping from side to sloping side, laughing uncontrollably at the exhilaration of letting instinct choose our footing. It was too steep and crumbling for a safe slow descent -- once begun better to continue, lest a long mudcrumbling slide flay you alive.

Hours later we sat sweat-soaked and dry-throated on the edge of a high plateau that we'd climbed through will of tooth and claw. Behind us the badlands wall plummeted sheer to the swaying green expanse of Buffalo Gap National Grassland. Far to the right a desiccated brown finger poked out into the veldt.

We chose the other view, across the tortured ground we'd covered: canyons and dry gullies, shale falls, mushrooms of scoriascious rock, shadowed cliff side wedges and windswept tops of buttes. As the sun slid across the gunmetal sky the colours and the shapes of the badlands changed. It was a constant transformation from hour to hour. The way out could never look the same as the way in. All sense of perspective was skewed. It's difficult to get your bearings there, and where your directional bearings are shaken loose your mental bearings, those that shape your life's orderly direction, are soon to follow.

 

(photos © Jason George 2005)

 

 

Scenes of natural disaster and human suffering have filled the television screens of the western world for the past week as rich countries band together to offer assistance in the aftermath of one of the worst humanitarian disasters since the Asian tsunami of 2004.

I visited the northeast of Haiti in December of 1998.

I remember the border checkpoint with the Dominican Republic, its more prosperous neighbour. The Haitian side of the bridge was blocked off with a fence of slatted wood. A Dominican solider trained a machinegun and an uneasy eye on the shouting people crushed up against the fence by the sheer weight of desperation pressing in behind them. Each time the gate was opened to admit a new entrant, several more tried to shove their way through, only to be beaten back by men with clubs.

 I remember how the climate changed the moment we crossed the border. It was as though the world really were divided by a line on a map. The Dominican side had been lush and green, but the land on the Haitian side was burned yellow by the sun. The vegetables in the markets were shriveled and stunted compared to the rich bounty of the country next door. There were hardly any trees. Even the temperature was ten degrees hotter. The man beside me said, "They even cut down the fruit trees to use them for cooking fuel." Such was the poverty that the short term benefit of a few twigs for a fire outweighed the long term benefits of a mango tree which would produce a lifetime of fruit.

I remember roads so corrugated that it took over an hour to travel less than 15km. The car lurched and rolled like a ship under heavy seas, and several times I was pitched completely off my seat.

I remember visiting a two-room home in a village, where the parents slept in a bedroom closet and the 5 children slept on a bare dirt floor. The walls were made of sticks plastered with mud, covered by a palm thatch roof. The man smiled and said, "At least we have a house."

I remember a small market in a village, where the road was lined with squatting people selling piles of food from blankets spread on the ground. No one had any money, so every transaction was a trade. There were herbs, dried rice, grains, and fish smoked so thoroughly even the flies refused to land on them. That and peanuts, piles and piles of peanuts. A man told me the ground in Haiti was so bad in places that only peanuts would grow there--the last crop to take hold before the land became completely sterile.

  I remember a disposable cup filled with the worst rum I'd ever had. It was poured directly from a red gasoline container, and it tasted of hot plastic behind the alcohol's harsh burn. It had been brewed in someone's back yard. I sat there waiting to see if I'd go blind from a bad batch. And then I accepted a second cupful rather than turn down their sincere offer of hospitality.

Finally, I remember a voodoo ceremony. The pounding of drums and rhythmic movements that drove the dancers deeper into trance. The smell of sweat and swirling bodies. Strange tricks of the light, and an old man who held flames against his face, licking the burning torch before biting the end and spitting out the embers.

Haiti is a country where life is hard and mercy is scarce.

It is by far the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and it's sitting just outside our back door. It's been that way for a very long time but few people bothered to notice.

Will the massive global media coverage in the wake of this latest disaster do something to change that?

 

 

This is the ninth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here

 

One of my creepiest experiences in North Korea was a tour of a primary school.

Our bus pulled into an empty, cheerless concrete schoolyard, and we were marched up to the principal's office. I had immediate flashbacks of all the times I'd spent in the office as a kid, and the string of suspensions I earned. I wonder how I would have fared in Pyongyang?

  We sat around a large conference table, where the principal told us about the North Korean school system and how her school is run. In primary schools, morning classes are devoted to Communist morality, revolutionary history, Korean language and arts (with revolutionary themes), and the study of the lives of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader. I suppose leftover time must be allotted to math and science. Afternoons are apparently free leisure time. Students can go home and do their own thing, or they can voluntarily study such things as traditional music or dance. We would learn more about what "voluntary" meant that afternoon.

While we were talking one of the guys asked if he could take her picture. She nodded yes, but as he began snapping photos she stopped in mid-sentence and pointed to the wall above her head, at the ever-present framed pictures of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. "Please be careful not to cut the Leader's photo in half," she said.

I later discovered that it's a crime to do so. It's also a crime to tear a picture of the Leader in half, even if it happens accidentally.

(I heard a story about a German who visited North Korea on the same sort of trip as me. He was smoking in his hotel room, and he butted out his cigarette on an old newspaper. He didn't know there was a photo of the Leader on the other side. The cleaning staff found it and reported him. Armed men burst into his room, threw him on the floor, and shoved guns in his face, screaming in furious Korean. The situation was eventually calmed down, and he was immediately deported to China, his trip at an end. The punishment for locals is time in a concentration camp.)

After our brief talk with the principal, we were given a tour of the school. We were told that unfortunately it was summer vacation and the students were away. We'd seen kids all over the city wearing school uniforms, but apparently they were involved in "voluntary extra curricular activities." I wonder if the kids are always on vacation when groups of foreigners come to visit?

Despite that warning, when we toured the classrooms we discovered some children had been brought in for our benefit. The girls were dressed in frilly white dresses and traditional Korean gowns--hardly the kind of thing you'd wear to school.

The hallways were silent, but just as we were about to step into the science lab the room broke out into animated voices. We walked in on the teacher in mid-lecture, as one eager boy was offering the perfect answer to her question. The noise died moments after we left the room.

 

In another classroom I saw a picture of Kim Jong-Il as a child sitting on his father's knee. I asked our minder how old the Dear Leader would have been in this photo. He said about 10 years old. I then asked him the date. It corresponded exactly to the date when the military museum guide told us the child prodigy General Kim Jong-Il was leading battles and planning military strategy against American and UN forces during the Korean War. The official propaganda is full of such contradictions, but everyone ignores it as though their life depended on it (it does).

  Those first two classrooms were weird, but they had nothing on the art class. We entered the room to find that the kids had just finished drawing perfect copies of a bird. They were just setting down their pencils as we walked in. Tacked up on a bulletin board were other samples of their work. One showed a ship being torpedoed, with "USA" written clearly on its side. Another showed an American soldier being stabbed in the throat by a schoolgirl with a giant pencil as great gouts of blood spurted from the wound. This isn't something they dreamed up on their own. Everything about their upbringing in North Korea has been carefully calculated to indoctrinate such hate.

Our last stop was the music classroom. The students struck up a well-rehearsed concert just as we walked through the door, but the effect was calculated to seem like they'd been "practicing" all along. They played for 20 minutes, accordion, guitar, traditional songs and dances.

They were really quite good, but I didn't get the impression that they were enjoying it. Their faces were frozen in fake smiles, and they all swayed back and forth in the same zombie-like fashion. When anyone made a small mistake, they snuck fearful glances at the stern-faced teacher like a pet cowering in anticipation of a kick.

When the concert ended the children set down their instruments and rushed towards us in a group. They simply wanted to grab and shake our hands, but all I could think about was that drawing of the American soldier being stabbed in the throat--I covered my neck and almost recoiled in horror.

 

Here are a few more photos from the school visit, because you really have to see it to believe it...

Studies in the lives of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader, one of their core subjects:

 

This is the eigth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here

 

Any trip to Pyongyang involves extensive tours of the city. It's North Korean's showcase, a vast stage set carefully designed to promote the myth of the Fatherland and the success of Kim Il-Sung's Juche philosophy.

Our first stop was a house said to be the birthplace of Kim Il-Sung. It was a poor little dwelling on the outskirts of the city, set amidst vast manicured lawns and flowerbeds. As I walked through the grounds the shrubbery startled me by playing military music, and trees burst into exuberant flurries of recorded birdsong as I passed.

The site guide told us how the Great Leader had been born into poverty. His parents were tenant farmers or gravediggers or something along those lines, and the Great Leader's childhood experience was one of toil, hunger and good old fashioned character building--it sounded very much like the typical North Korean experience today, but if it was good enough for the Leader, who are they to complain?

The entire site was of course a reconstruction. The tools leaning against the wall were unscuffed, and the pots and pans in the kitchen had been blackened with paint. Each item had been carefully placed to look as though it had just been set down. The result was a little too good to be true.

As I walked through this scene, trying to block out the ceaseless flow of propaganda which accompanied every stop, it struck me that the entire setup looked suspiciously like a manger. With that thought, so many other disconnected images fell into place.

The Kim cult has co-opted Christian mythology--why reinvent the wheel when you can simply mimic a successful design? They've created their own version of the Trinity: the Father (Kim Il-Sung), the Son (Kim Jong-Il), and the Holy Spirit (the Juche philosophy). The third pillar of the Trinity is alternately formed by the mother of Kim Jong-Il as Mary figure.

The cult of the Leaders is the state religion. I wonder who taught them this? (No need to answer, it's a rhetorical question.) A rich Hong Kong businessman owned the 42-storey hotel we were staying in, but American evangelist Billy Graham reportedly owned the city's other big hotel, and he's made no secret of the fact that he's a great friend of the regime. Look it up for yourself, there are plenty of web links and photos.

It seemed the primary purpose of the visit to Kim Il-Sung's legendary birthplace was to cement the idea of the "Jesus story"--a prophet who will save the Korean people, a humble child born into obscurity but predestined for greatness.

With the foundation of the Great Leader's childhood firmly in place--the crucible of poverty that forged his iron will and his compassion for his people--we were taken to the next stage of the myth: Kim Il-Sung's defining moment, when he led his people in overthrowing the Japanese occupiers during World War Two. 

The Korean War museum (or The Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, rather), like all public buildings, was an elaborate marble edifice, something you'd expect to find at the height of the Roman Empire. Its lobby was of course dominated by an enormous painting of Kim Il-Sung in military uniform, leading a group of smiling soldiers and children.

Our site guide, a stern woman dressed in military uniform and carrying a long white pointer stick, led us briskly through the museum, delivering an angry tirade about "the American imperialists and their South Korean puppet stooges", all of it in clipped one-way English--"one-way" because she could deliver her memorized propaganda clearly, but she couldn't seem to understand our questions. At least, her evasive answers made us think so. 

She spent the bulk of the tour explaining what she referred to as Phase One of the conflict. The North Korean version of history is unique, and worth repeating. At the end of WWII the Korean peninsula was divided at the 38th parallel, controlled by America in the south and Russia in the north. The two countries withdrew their forces at the agreed time, but things remained unstable. After endless provocations and cross-border skirmishes initiated by the South Koreans, North Korea was forced to invade to defend itself. The Great Leader masterminded one brilliant battle after another and quickly pushed the South Korean forces down into a little corner of the country near Pusan in the southeast. It was a brilliant and decisive military victory. 

She summed up the rest of the Korean War in about seven minutes. The Americans, hiding behind the flag of the United Nations, along with their 15 Satellite Countries, invaded in overwhelming numbers. The Great Leader decided that even the mighty Korean people would be unwise to face such numbers, and ordered a "strategic retreat" (this was repeated four times) to the Chinese border. Then, after marshalling his forces and planning strategy, he single-handedly pushed his enemies back to the 38th parallel. The Americans and their puppet stooges were forced to bow down on their knees before the might of the Korean people and to sign an armistice.

This was of course all total bullshit. When we asked specific questions the guide either didn't answer or repeatedly gave us the answer to a totally different question.

For those who don't know, in brief, the actual undisputed history of the Korean War is as follows.

After Japan was defeated in the Second World War and its overseas territories had been liberated, Russia occupied the north of the Korean peninsula and America occupied the south. When they withdrew as planned, Russia left most of its military hardware behind. America left nothing. Kim Il-Sung, placed in charge of the North by Russia, wanted to reunify Korea by force (under his leadership, of course). After repeated armed incursions into South Korean territory, he invaded with a huge army and quickly pushed the ill-equipped South Korean forces down to the area around Pusan.

In response, the United Nations forces, led by American General Douglas MacArthur, invaded at Inchon. They liberated Seoul within a week and quickly pushed the North Korean forces all the way back to--and across--the Chinese border. The Chinese entered the war on a pretext and the UN forces were in turn pushed back down to the 38th parallel, only a little farther north than where they started. And that's where things remain today. The peninsula is still divided, and a peace treaty has never been signed.

Despite the pivotal role played by Chinese forces in recapturing the North through sheer force of numbers, the North Koreans refuse to acknowledge China's help in the war. There was absolutely no mention of China in the museum or in their history books, which greatly angers China to this day--the two countries are supposed to be allies, and China lost approximately 300,000 soldiers in the conflict. China is also one of North Korea's only supporters.

The Chinese are right to be offended, but they shouldn't be surprised. North Korea also refuses to acknowledge the Pacific War between the United States and Japan. That's right. World War Two in the Pacific never really happened. Official North Korean histories state that their territory was liberated from the long Japanese occupation not when Japan surrendered to America, but when Japan surrendered to the rather insignificant Korean resistance forces. Kim Il-Sung is said to have led the resistance army, but outside sources suggest he only commanded a small group of soldiers from an insignificant faction.

 

This is the seventh in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here

When I got back to Pyongyang it was gray and overcast and just beginning to drizzle. I shook of my bus daze as we drove through the city's silent streets.

Our minders took us directly to the circus.

Outside our private entrance, a group of Koreans practiced marching in the empty parking lot. Drill instructors ran beside them, yelling to get their legs up higher, and sometimes hitting them with sticks.

 

We had a brief encounter with the North Korean elite while we waited to go inside. It was the only time we would come into contact them. A black Mercedes slid up to the side entrance and the driver jumped out to open the rear door. A couple stepped out, dressed in designer clothes and carefully made up, seemingly more at home in the fashionable streets of Beijing than in the coarse sackcloth of labourer's Pyongyang. But what struck us most was the child. He walked by with his nose in the air, reeking of superiority, as though he didn't notice us at all. Contempt had been bred into his bones, and it oozed from him. Next to the Lacoste crest on his shirt was the pin of the Leader that every North Korean must wear. They were immediately whisked inside, no doubt to an elegant private box. These are the people who are soaking up the aid money the Dear Leader accumulates with his nuclear blackmail schemes, while the rest of the country starves.

 

In the basement of the building I found a large washroom with marble walls and shiny chrome fittings. When I went to wash my hands no water came out of the taps. Our minder didn't look surprised. It was a metaphor for everything I saw in Pyongyang: surface elegance, but underneath it's all broken down. An empty façade, like the false front of a main street Old West town, but concealing a more sinister illusion.

When we finally walked into the crowded circus to take our seats, every single head in the place turned to stare at us, and conversation completely died out. Each scuff of our shoes or squeak of our seats seemed to carry through the entire building. It was a reminder of exactly how isolated we were in the country, and just how rare our visit was at the time.

 

I was fascinated to watch the reactions of the audience to the performance--it was as mesmerizing as the show itself. I got the sense they'd all been there many times before and knew exactly what to expect. They laughed uproariously in all the right (acceptable) places, and many of them even seemed to be relaxed. It was such a contrast to the dour unsmiling faces I saw in the streets each day. Perhaps in the anonymity of the circus they could let their guard down, if only for a while.

 

Besides going to the circus, it seemed there was very little for people to do in whatever free time they might have had. There was a theatre, and North Korea makes movies, but the themes were invariably about the revolution or the Korean War. There were also two state television channels, but when there was anything on it tended to be the same sort of thing, or rebroadcasts of famous speeches by Kim Il-Sung. Not exactly the best way to unwind from a day of hard labour.

Then again, unwinding didn't seem to be a priority. When the work day ended, the North Koreans were obliged to attend things like mandatory marching practice, militia training, self-criticism groups, or ideological study groups. There was no relief from the constant indoctrination. Brainwashing was a way of life, and it formed the totality of their world. It even started getting to us.

 

This is the sixth in a multi-part blog on North Korea. You can find the others here

 

The International Friendship Hall is one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen.

It's an enormous marble Korean-style building constructed to house all of the gifts given to Kim Il-Sung, from almost every country in the world. Many of these gifts were from heads of state (the most elaborate being from fellow dictators), but the majority were from Communist parties and Juche philosophy study groups in different countries.

 

At the entrance we were instructed to hand in our cameras and pull large cloth covers on over our shoes. The temperature was maintained at an artificially controlled chill, somewhat like a morgue (I imagined it held the rotting remains of the North Korean people's hopes and dreams).

Inside, gilded ceilings soared above us as our feet whispered across polished marble, shattering the glittering reflection of cut-glass chandeliers. A large part of the building seemed to extend into the mountain behind it. Like Dr. Who's tardis, its inside was much larger than the exterior would lead one to believe. There were straight hallways so long I could barely see the end of them, with doorways on each side opening into gift rooms organized by country and region of the world.

We were told we didn't have nearly enough time to see it all, which according to the official guide would take about a week. We decided to view the gifts from Western countries, curious to see what might have been sent from our homelands. (For the record, Canada's section was quite small, four or five modest gifts including a small soapstone carving and a Group of Seven art book--it felt diplomatic, an extension of the barest courtesy.)

 

The most extravagant gifts were of course from fellow dictators: a bullet proof limo from Stalin, luxury railroad cars from Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, a stuffed alligator waiter holding a drink tray from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, an enormous sailboat intricately carved from a single massive block of jade from China... It went on and on. There was even something from North Korea's great enemy, the United States--a basketball brought by Madeline Albright on her visit during the final months of the Clinton administration.

As we made our way through this vast treasure house, the contents of which must surely have been enough to feed the starving country for years, we met up with a group of touring schoolchildren. The regime extracts full propaganda value from the place, telling its people that North Korea is looked up to by the rest of the world, and that the Great Leader was loved and respected so deeply that other nations showered him with presents.

 

The tour finally culminated in the epitome of ghastly hagiography. We were ushered into a dimly lit room with bird calls emanating softly from the shadows. I glanced around walls lined with a few important gifts, until my gaze reached the far end and I gave an involuntary shudder. Tastefully lit from below by spotlights was a very life-like wax figure of Kim Il-Sung standing in a forest setting. It was apparently sculpted soon after his death, and I have to admit he looked rather fresh.

We were told that in this room the Great Leader lives on for the Korean people. We were then "encouraged" to line up in front of it and give a "one-time bow" to show our respect. The bowing was just a motion, it meant nothing to me, though some of my colleagues were visibly uncomfortable at being made to perform this gesture. In my opinion, by far the worst part of it was that Ol' Wax Kim looked like he might break into a smile and start giving "on the spot guidance" at any second.

After touring the Hall of Gifts we were led to an outdoor terrace on an upper floor for a rest. The view over the valley and surrounding mountains was indeed quite beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that our guide told us "when the Great Leader was here he was so inspired by this view that he composed an on-the-spot poem." She then passed us a copy in English, and one of the guys was obliged to read it aloud. We all expressed polite appreciation over the Great Leader's way with words, but jeez, it didn't even rhyme.

To me the most appalling thing about the Hall of Gifts is that it had been built during Kim Il-Sung's lifetime. He willfully participated in the elevation of himself as a living god. And of course the official myth has been extended to the next generation.

There was another hall of gifts across the parking lot from the main one, this one housing presents received by the (current) Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il. It was much smaller than the father's repository, with many empty, sealed rooms. Our guide explained this away as foresight: enough rooms had been built to anticipate all the gifts the Dear Leader would receive in his lifetime. No one pointed out the fact that, well, Young Kim's getting up there in years, and that place is an awfully long way from being full.

 

The entrance to this treasury was guarded by soldiers cradling silver-plated, engraved Kalashnikovs. As we walked towards it, the heavy stone doors slid apart automatically in true James Bond fashion. I expected to see Blofeld roll up in his chair, petting a white cat and leering through a monocle.

The guide insisted we didn't have much time--there was clearly a tourist backlog waiting behind us--and that we could only see a few of the rooms. She took us through the section containing gifts received by Kim Jong-Il over the previous two years (you'll recall that the gifts in the other hall were organized by country). Two of the rooms were mostly filled with modern crap sent from South Korea--furniture, big screen televisions, VCR's, and computers. For all I know, these may have been leftovers from one of his houses.

I'm pretty sure that what we saw in the second building must in truth have been all the official gifts Kim Jong-Il has ever been given. He's reclusive, he seldom receives visitors, and he's only ventured abroad a couple of times.

It must be lonely being a dictator, spending all your time running the country (into the ground), writing books, and warding off enemies.

Come on. What are you waiting for? Send the guy a birthday present.