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Hrm, that's the not impression I tried to give in my comment. Obviously I was in a dystopia, and it was made very clear that we were being handled - not even the guides tried to pretend we were being shown the North Korea that civilians see. The guy who sat in front of me on the bus was literally arrested on the way out of the airport and is still stuck there! I'm pretty aware of the situation. The way the North Korea tours work is as following: 1. The government-run North Korean tourist organization partners with foreign tour companies (all based in China, AFAIK). There are several foreign tour companies (Koryo Tours, Young Pioneer Tours, etc), which all cater to different segments of the market and advertise their services differently. 2. Every tour goes to the same locations and in theory gets the same commentary, but the various tour companies can send different foreign guides, and have some power to get different Korean guides. This, combined with the different sections of the market, has a pretty huge effect on your experience on the tour. I went with YPT, which is why it was a party with a bunch of mid-twenties Americans/British Commonwealth guys. If you go with, say, Koryo Tours, you're signing up for what I referred to as the dystopia experience where it's an older, primarily continental European crowd and the guides yell at you for taking pictures. I personally think that this is what the people taking the dystopia tours are looking for - they want to go home and talk about how they braved the tyranny of the government minders and snuck pictures of random rice fields. On a personal note, I've been to some of the worst places on Earth by most objective and subjective measures, and digging under the skin (and into the dumpsters) of dysfunctional places is a hobby of mine. It's always a little funny to me that if you try to humanize the North Koreans a little (not even trying to make excuses for their government!), the default assumption from people who've never been there is that you're a rube who has been taken in by obvious propaganda. |
Also, in regards to the prior post you were responding to, did you consider that your drunken tour group was targeted by the government? If I were looking to get a hostage by getting someone to step over an invisible line I might give the group free booze and make the environment seem relaxed till it wasn't relaxed any more.