THE journey to Mt Kumgang in North Korea, perhaps the world’s most bizarre mini-break, begins at dawn in an atmosphere of menace and confrontation. Electric fences and tank traps line the road on the South Korean side of the border, and the forest on either side is strewn with mines.
Travellers are given stern instructions about conduct on the far side. Don’t take photographs from the coach windows. Don’t speak to the North Korean officials at immigration. Whatever you do, don’t talk about politics.
Passports and bags are scrutinised and X-rayed, and one by one we are admitted to the world’s most impenetrable country, a rogue state notorious for oppression, xenophobia and most recently, for nuclear proliferation. And there among the granite-faced soldiers, waving his paw in cheery welcome, is a man dressed as a giant brown teddy bear.
As the two-day trip began, so it continued — a unique cocktail of the cosy and the frightening, the cute and the sinister. In every way, Mt Kumgang is a contradiction — an international holiday resort in a closed and xenophobic country, a multimillion pound business that has no prospect of turning a profit, a hand of friendship at a time when the rest of the world is doing its best to cut off North Korea altogether.
To its supporters – above all its founders, the South Korean Government and the massive Hyundai corporation – it is an essential effort to engage the North and draw it out of its 60-year isolation. To its detractors, chief among them the Governments of the United States and Japan, it is a reckless undertaking which funds the nuclear ambitions of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il. For two days, accompanied by 2,000 middle-aged South Korean tourists, I explored the only place in the peninsula where North and South Koreans meet.
Kumgang-san, or the Diamond Mountains, is the Lake District of Korea, a place of poetry, contemplation and natural beauty. With its spiky peaks, fluffy pines and reddening maples, it looks like the landscape of an old ink painting. For South Koreans, one of the tragedies of their country’s Cold War division is that the Diamond Mountains ended up in the Communist North. So eight years ago when Hyundai negotiated tours to the area, the demand was overwhelming.
First by ship, and later by road, a total of 1.4 million visitors have crossed the fortified border between the two states to enjoy the deluxe hotels, noodle and barbecue restaurants, hot spring baths, souvenir shops and an astonishing circus of acrobats from the capital Pyongyang. “From the end of the Korean War until this place opened, only 5,000 South Koreans entered North Korea,” says Kim Soo Hyun, of Hyundai Asan, the company which operates the tours. “Now 1.4 million have come here. That makes a difference.”
Hyundai Asan has invested $942 million (£500 million) in Mt Kumgang — last year it saw its first profit, a modest 800 million won (£443,000). But rather than a moneymaking exercise, this is an undertaking of high idealism, intended to promote peace and reunification through face-to-face contact between ordinary Koreans on both sides.
As well as 290 South Koreans and 700 ethnic Korean Chinese workers, about 1,200 North Koreans work in the resort. The waitress who serves your lunch of cold noodles, the trapeze artists who hurl one another through space in the circus, even the emergency rescue workers who deal with the inevitable twisted ankles — all of them are North Koreans. All their lives, they have been brought up to think of South Koreans as decadent capitalist demons. Now they find themselves confronted by the reality of the average Mt Kumgang tourist — a kindly, giggling, middle-aged lady whose hiking boots alone cost several times a monthly North Korean salary.
The expression for this is “information contamination” — the idea that by exposing North Koreans to the reality of life outside their regime, they will eventually revolt against it. “The Government thinks of Mt Kumgang as a sealed area, a special economic zone separate from the rest of the country,” says one South Korean who works in the resort. “But I think it has the potential to affect the whole society.”
The North Korean authorities go to paranoid lengths to prevent this from happening. The roads used by tourists are fenced off, and villages directly alongside have been cleared of their inhabitants. When the buses pass by, all locals are required to hide indoors, apart from the green-uniformed soldiers who stand sentinel every few hundred yards. From the higher hotel rooms you can see the situation starkly: the Mt Kumgang resort, a bright bubble of comfy beds, delicious food, well-heated coaches and comical men in bear suits. Beyond the fences is the North Korean reality — shabby grey houses, a few rice and vegetable fields, and small figures visible in the distance.
The North Korean workers in the resort are immediately recognisable by the lapel badges they wear bearing the image of North Korea’s founder, the late “Great Leader”, Kim Il Sung. They always move around in pairs, presumably to spy upon one another and discourage impure thoughts and actions. Every night, they hold a meeting at which the events of the day are discussed and the party line disseminated.
Most are happy to talk, even to journalists, although the answers they gave to questions were identical. They spoke warmly of South Koreans (“Very nice, for we are all one people”). They were cock-a-hoop about North Korea’s nuclear test. “It’s not that we want nuclear weapons — we want peace and negotiation,” said a female restaurant manager. “But now we have shown that a small country like North Korea is the equal of the US.” Large numbers of tourists have cancelled their trips since the nuclear test, but still the money flows. A one night, two-day tour costs $300 per person, $80 of which goes to the Pyongyang Government. On top of this are the extras — $30 for the circus, $10 for lunch, $25 for dinner, $2 for the toilet. South Koreans, at least, don’t seem to worry about paying their earnings to a regime which is building a bomb that might one day be used against them. “The income from here is a drop in the ocean,” a man told me as we prepared to leave Mt Kumgang. “If they want to build a bomb, they’ll get it from somewhere. It’s the ordinary people here I worry about. It’s terrible to think of them sacrificed for political reasons.”
And this remains the biggest mystery of North Korea — the true feelings of its own people. From the window of the coach I glimpsed a young man carrying an old man on his back across a river. The sun was setting and it was becoming cold. What do they make of the strange experiment being conducted on their doorstep? The question is never put to them, of course. Even if it were, it would be far too dangerous for them to tell the truth.
