Of those I know, there are 3 types of Americans that have visited North Korea: Spec ops guys who won't talk about what is national security, Hollywood previleged that tout NK as paradise on earth, and merchant mariners who deliver US food aid to the starving N. Koreans.
All of the mariners I've met who visited NK, NONE would ever return...except one who is a born again Christian.
There are interesting and horrifying things about this small and peculiar country: dock strikes and labor violence, rampant homosexuality, family blood feuds, and the obvious corruption for survival. I suppose that North Korea is the worst it can get for humanity. I've met quite a few folk from former communist nations. None of their experiences matched (not even the worst cases for Romania). The short book "Aquariums of Pyongyang" is a real eye-opener and I highly recommend it.
I've searched for this article and was able to find it after a good hunt:
North Korea
By Christopher Gasiorek '95
(Third Mate, M/V JUDY LITRICO, May-July 1997)
Where to begin? There is no other place like this on earth. We arrive in fog and wonder whether it’s a Government Plot so we don’t see anything. As we approach the country, still about 6 miles away, the navy questions us. Harbor pilots do not understand why we cannot approach through the channel in the fog and continually want our ETA even though we’re just waiting until the fog clears.
After we anchor at the foreign vessel waiting area #1 we are instructed to wait until the next morning for the pilot to board. I took a few pictures of land so I would have at least a hazy picture of North Korea from a distance. The next morning comes the small tugboat, the engine of which sounds as if were running on three of eight cylinders. Two pilots, two army immigration officers, and a quarantine officer board the vessel, all wearing uniforms or some shade of off-green. Standard issue Kim Il Sung pins on every chest. We exchange initial formalities. The immigration officials and the quarantine officer set up to check crewmembers against their passports. Included in this process is taking everyone’s pulse--I understand that it is illegal to enter the country if you are dead. The immigration officers declare that they must secure the depth sounder and all long-range radio equipment, as well as locking up all cameras and binoculars. Once all this is accomplished we are ready to enter the port, but not until the North Koreans have their fill of lunch, soda, and cigarettes. Our limited chatter with them includes their ensuring that all Americans live in fear of North Korean missiles.
The port of Nampo is about 12 miles up the Taedong River, which has a huge dam built across it to prevent the tide from affecting the port. The vessel enters a lock to go from the sea to the river. The pilot informs us that the tower in the middle of the lock is where Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter danced during their visit to the country. A huge monument to the army workers who built the dam sits next to it. All is constructed of low-tech concrete and the ten-year-old dam and locks are crumbling, but Nampo doesn’t look too bad from afar. We are shoehorned in behind an idle North Korean freighter. Several pieces of the dock crumble into the harbor when I heave up the stern lines.
After our vessel is all secure we undergo the search. I accompany three North Korean officers to inspect the house and crew quarters, a two-hour process. All rooms and spaces are thoroughly included--insides of books, entire content of wallets, and anywhere else imaginable. The inspectors are most interested in how much money each crewmember has. The chief engineer has $125 more than he declared and is forced to turn it over to the authorities.
Three cranes do unloading with buckets into three bagging units. From the bagging units the cargo is turned over to the Koreans for transportation to the famine-stricken areas. This transport includes trucks (ancient Chinese and Russian things that must often be push or tow-started), barges, trains, buses, and even tank train cars, which are loaded one bag at a time through the small loading hatches on top. Trains are pulled by coal- and wood-fired locomotives. Approximately fifty workers man the dock at all times. Brainwashed is not a strong enough word to describe them. The high officials and ship agents have some rather warped idea of the outside world, but the rest of the people seem to have no knowledge at all. The exceptions to this are: South Korea (the enemy) and the United States (of which they know nothing other than that we are also the enemy). The unfounded hate in these people’s eyes amazes me. From the bridge it is at all times possible to observe at least four military guards with machine guns, including young women with machine guns nearly as long as they are tall (including the attached bayonets).
I have just realized that in every other country in the world you see people reading the newspaper. The reason this stuck me is that I have yet to see a newspaper, let alone someone reading one. All of the mid-level and above officials, as well as all military personnel, wear a pin on their breast with a picture of the Great Leader centered on a red flag. In the Soviet Union pins such as these, featuring Lenin, were everywhere and were given to us freely. When we asked whether we might be able to get some of these Kim Il Sung pins we were initially given hostile looks. It was later established that only people who have the Great Leader "strongly in their heart" may have these pins--these people actually believe this stuff. Richard, an AB, saw a fight between two truck drivers that was explained away as great socialist workers teaming together to make the Great Leader happy.
The barges that are loaded have families living aboard them. The water that we are in is fresh, although not particularly clean. Still, I’ve observed cooking water being taken from one end of a barge while a man urinates from the other. The North Korean ship moored ahead of us departed, hitting our bow on the way out. No damage other than some scraped paint. Earlier in the day we were told that we would have to shift aft one hundred feet, but this request quietly went away after the collision.
It is interesting that in the port area where we were allowed to go freely there were no obvious signs of starvation. On several occasions I observed young boys stealing corn from the warehouse where our cargo was being stored. They did it as a group and were chased, and, when caught, beaten by the numerous guards. Fortunately none of the multitudes of machine guns were used.
A few notes on politics: The North Koreans would prefer to handle our corn in bulk. The U.S. government, however, wanted the cargo put into bags, bags they have the large letters u.s.a. written on them. When the North Koreans saw the bags they refused to accept them. Hearing this, the U.S. government said it would not give the food without the bags. The North Koreans relented and accepted the bags; I can see the people who receive the cargo having it explained to them that the food was intended to go as aid from North Korea to the United States to help the starving Americans. We had been scheduled to discharge at a second port, Chongjin, on the eastern side of the Korean peninsula. We were to take a very small amount of cargo there, from only our government. Because we were to "show the flag," however, this has now been changed. A North Korean ship will take the cargo for Chongjin.
In talking with a Washington Post journalist who is on assignment with the World Food Program I was able to learn a bit about the conditions outside the city. (We are not able to see any sign of famine in the immediate area, the 4 acres our travel is limited to. Whether this is by design, so that we do not see, or if conditions here are better than elsewhere, is impossible to know.) The journalist had traveled—travel that was by no means free—to areas that had been prepared for her arrival, but she still told stories of schoolchildren dying at their desks.
We are granted the opportunity to tour Pyongyang, the capital, with our agents for about $50. Imagine being shown all of the monuments in Washington, D.C., on a private tour with no one else there. Imagine visiting the Washington Monument (they have something very similar) on any day of the year and not seeing a single other person. The official explanation for this was that all the people have jobs at which they were working. That’s commonly heard in Russia, too, but Red Square is never empty. We were allowed to take only one camera for our group of six people. (We soon learned that if we wanted to take ten cameras to anything, we must ask permission, in writing, to take twenty.)
The drive to Pyongyang from Nampo initially transited the port and then the town of Nampo itself. My initial impression was that the architecture was very similar to that in Russia—Early Stalinist Revival might be a good description. But the quality here was worse. At least in the Russian capital and in many other cities the Soviet-style architecture was interspersed with the existing buildings, except in the case of collective farms and such. Here I see no "existing buildings." General living conditions appear to be quite horrid. From what it was possible to tell from a moving van, the apartments were considerably smaller and in much worse shape than their Russian counterparts, and the North Koreans would not have allowed us to drive by anything of which they were not proud. It was clear that there was much that they were not proud of that we were not to see. Also along the 37-mile drive into the capital we passed several large industrial complexes, possibly steel mills and large manufacturing sites. They were all closed down and appeared to have been so for a while. It could have been their "rust belt" for all I know--they wouldn’t tell us much--but it didn’t look like the country was producing anything. The only export that I saw was that of zinc ingots. This is interesting as it is what Cargill had hoped to trade for grain.
The roads are huge. Nearly all main roads are at least four lanes. They have interchanges with on-ramps, exits, and so on, but very few cars. We passed many of the trucks that we had loaded parked on the side of the road, broken down. We also saw quite a bit of military traffic, and I’d estimate that about half of the men we saw in the capital are in one uniform or another.
The first site we are taken to is the Great Leader’s birthplace. As our guides told us, we were among very few Americans to have ever been there. The Great Leader’s birthplace has been preserved in its "original state"; whether this included the thirty or so North Koreans scrubbing the granite walkway by hand was not entirely clear. From the looks of the workers, we were more on display than the birthplace of their Great Leader. The kimono-clad women who gave us a history of the leader’s family were pleasant and informative. One described several times "the ruthless occupation by the Japs," very harsh feelings for a country that now appears to be one of North Korea’s largest trading partners (our tour van was a Nissan). This feeling would show continually throughout the day. The Great Leader’s birthplace is in a park that is kept up and very pretty. It also includes a small, deserted amusement park with two halfway decent-looking roller coasters that are a bit worse for the wear. In response to our question of when the amusement park is open, we were told "everyday." I would guess it hadn’t been open for a while.
Next was a tour through the sporting area. Here there was a giant building for each of many sports, including swimming, tae kwon do, ping pong, bowling (huh?), soccer, and others. All of them are empty--no people, no cars. Again, everyone was at work.
We then went to pay our respects to the Great Leader at a huge monument on a hill overlooking the capital. The monument itself is a multistory bronze statue of Kim Il Sung, arm raised, with a wall of huge soldiers in battle on either side of him. Loud patriotic music played from large speakers behind the statue. We were instructed to stand in a line as our chief mate, Dave, laid flowers before the statue. There were other people here, and just before Dave laid the flowers an announcement in Korean came over the loudspeaker that seemed to announce our presence to the other visitors, making us a great propaganda tool. This was not the first time we were so used.
Having paid our respects to the Great Leader we were taken to a store in order to fill the Great Leader’s pockets with foreign currency. The store was similar to a Russian beriozka. Only foreign currency or Korean blue currency could be used. (Regular Korean currency is brown but foreigners cannot use this, and Koreans can not use the blue.) The guides worked their way around answering the question of who was allowed to shop in the store, which was about the size of a large drug store and had a stock including radios, TVs, liquor, clothing, souvenirs, and a motorcycle. We also went to a four-story "department store" with a similar but more spread out inventory.
Lunch was in the basement of a hotel restaurant. It was an indoor barbecue. Each table was the size of a normal booth but with a gas grill inset into the middle. We were given marinated beef, squid, and cucumbers that were slightly spicy. When barbecued and served with large quantities of Chinese beer it made a very good lunch.
After lunch we went to a 170-meter-tall monument presented to the Great Leader for his seventieth birthday. Again we were the only people present. The monument was impeccably clean and well constructed, in contrast to non-memorial buildings. Throughout the city are many smaller reminders of the greatness of the Great Leader. It seems impossible to not be within sight of his picture. Looming over the Pyongyang skyline is a 105-story hotel under construction. It is pyramid-shaped and is visible from almost everywhere in the city. While riding around town we once got within about 200 yards of the monstrosity. It was in terrible shape, with the prefab concrete at the bottom crumbling. It is my impression that construction has stopped and that the building’s structural integrity is in question, but this was not mentioned on our tour and our guides would say nothing about it.
We then went for a ride on the Pyongyang subway. Judging by their reactions, very few of the people we encountered on the subway had ever seen a foreigner. The subway was in very good condition and ranks among the nicest I have seen. It was very deep, seemingly built to the same specs as those in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Our guides denied it but there were the telltale huge doors at the bottom of the escalators to seal the system as a nuclear shelter. The walls were covered with every sort of socialist art, all of very high quality.
We were then taken to another store followed by dinner and drinks at a Tavern on the Green–like restaurant located on a pond in a park. It was quite drab inside, however. We had a few more beers and Korean spicy noodle soup that was very good. We had a good talk with our agents over this meal, and I thought that we had made some progress toward understanding each other’s ideas. Unfortunately, a few days later, this turned out to not be the case. We then made our way back to the ship with a short break on the highway for a rest stop and a beautiful double rainbow.
We were in North Korea for the third anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s death. (That’s correct: the revered Great Leader has been dead and not officially replaced for some time.) We were initially invited to a memorial ceremony for foreigners to be held one day before the anniversary. At first we were just asked to attend, but later our invitation was extended to include a special dinner after the ceremony. I was anxious to go even though it was only about 5 minutes from the ship, still further than our usual limits. About two days prior to the event we were told that we were expected to give a short speech. Dave wrote a very short speech saying that we understand the grief that the Korean people must have. The next day the agents returned, said that the speech was unacceptable, and gave us another to read; they also wanted us to sign it. It was a page-long speech that basically said that Kim Il Sung was the greatest leader that the world has ever known and how we Americans believe this and wish Korea to be united under the rule of the North. We refused to read this or sign it, and our invitation to attend the ceremony was rescinded. The statue of the Great Leader at which the ceremonies for foreigners and for Koreans were to be held was very close to the ship.
Early in the morning of the anniversary loud patriotic music began to play over the whole city. On the various tugboats and North Korean vessels in the harbor we could see people getting ready for the ceremony. This included bathing in the harbor. Bathing in general seemed to be done only on special occasions. From the flying bridge of the ship I could see the statue and the square around it. Unfortunately our binoculars had been locked up. I could see columns of people dressed in dark pants, white shirts, and dark ties marching toward the statue from different parts of the city. All marching, like some great army. I would guess that there were 25–30,000 people in the square with the statue. This would constitute nearly every one in the whole city. All work in the harbor had stopped. The ceremony went from 6 am to 11 am. We were required to sound the ship’s whistle for three minutes to commemorate the three years since the death of the Great Leader.
The long trip home let much of this culture sink in. A lot of the things that we saw did not register in our heads, but through conversations on the way home they slowly came out. What everyone in the crew agreed upon was that this was by far the most foreign place that they had ever been to, and that North Korea does pose a threat to world security---the leaders of this country are strongly determined to keep their country the way it is, and more miraculously, the people are enthusiastic to follow. I can compare it only to Russia, which I visited before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The difference being the people. In the USSR the people were aware of outside events, and their part in them. The North Koreans are so brainwashed as to believe that they are the luckiest people in the world.