North Korea is opening up to tourism by actively courting Western holidaymakers.

Bales Worldwide, one of Britain’s leading long-haul tour operators, has been approached by North Korean officials, who turned up unannounced at its offices in Dorking, Surrey, wearing grey suits and carrying briefcases.

The officials invited two Bales employees to visit the secretive communist country, which attracts only 1,500 to 2,000 Western tourists a year. The result is that Bales will be offering ten-night tours of North Korea from next April from £1,995pp.

“They had heard that we have a reputation for going off the beaten track,” said Mark Bennetts, planning manager and one of the employees to visit the country. “So they got our address and just turned up. It was quite bizarre.”

Bales is not the first British operator to offer North Korean tours — Regent Holidays has had trips for 21 years — but it is the biggest. Its tours will take in Pyongyang, the capital, plus Nampo, Kaesong and Hyangsan County, including a visit to the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) on the 38th Parallel.

When Bennetts visited the DMZ, he came across an unusual scene: “The South Koreans were blasting out Wham! from giant stereos, while the North Koreans were playing parade music from our side. The best word to describe the country is ‘surreal’.”

He said: “You don’t see a lot of people on the streets in North Korea. Those you do see tend to wear kind of Mao suits in greys and blues. There’s hardly any traffic. You whizz around. Hotels, big communist blocks, were about two fifths full.”

So far 15 people have applied for the tours, which have been on sale for a fortnight. “There are people out there who want to tick off a new country. We have loyal customers who are running out of places to go.”

Regent Holidays, which has eight-day tours from £1,220pp, sends 60 to 70 tourists a year. Carl Meadows, tours manager at Regent, who recently visited the country said: “The missile tests haven’t affected anything. It’s business as usual.

“People love it. Where else can you go where the locals haven’t even heard of the Beatles or Elvis?”

Details: Bales (www.balesworldwide.com), Regent (www.regent-holidays.co.uk). Koryo Tours (www.koryogroup.com) is run by a British man, Nick Bonner, and is a locally-based firm specialising solely in North Korea, and which escorted 60 per cent of all Westerners visiting the country last year.

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