North Korea sells itself as vacation destination

MOUNT MYOHYANG, North Korea — When it comes to untrampled corners of the world, few options are left for getting off the beaten track. Cuba? Not what it once was. Burma? Basically open. Syria? Well, that’s out for now.

But for travelers with an Indiana Jones streak, the one place often considered impossible is becoming increasingly possible: North Korea.

A growing number of Western tourists — called “Europeans” in North Korea, even though they more and more often include Americans — is coming here to see whether this last remnant of the Cold War really is as bad as it’s made out to be.

“I wanted a new experience and wanted to see this place with my own eyes and to form my own views,” said Victor Malychev, a Russian-born telecommunications expert who has lived in Washington for 13 years.

“And I guess I wanted to have a kind of check mark next to it, too,” he conceded while on a tour organized by Young Pioneers, one of the newer travel companies operating in North Korea.

The handful of tour operators here are offering an increasingly diverse array of experiences — including skiing, cycling and golf. But tourists should be prepared not only to have government minders at their sides continually, but to traipse around monuments to the Kims and their communist dynasty.

Take Mount Myohyang, a beautiful hiking spot about a two-hour drive north of Pyongyang. The main attraction here, a regular stop on the tourist trail, is the “International Friendship Exhibition” — a six-story marble-floored building constructed specifically to house the 100,000-odd gifts given to North Korea founder Kim Il Sung, who remains its “eternal president” even two decades after his death.

It’s a real rogues’ gallery: Stalin, Mao, Assad, Gadhafi, Castro and Tito, and the tchotchkes they gave Kim. All of them show how much the world adores Kim and his heirs, or so the official tour guides say.

Many more people could soon be marching through these long, pristine halls, their shoes encased in special covers so they don’t come into contact with the hallowed floors.

Under a new policy, North Korea has set a goal of luring 1 million tourists to the country, although it has not set a time frame for doing so.

But even those working with North Korea’s tourist industry say this number is “aspirational,” estimating that the country has 100,000 outside visitors a year. The vast majority of them are from neighboring China, which has the advantage of being not only geographically close but also not far removed from communist ways.

Furthermore, tour operators report that the number of Americans visiting the country has dropped noticeably since two American tourists, Jeffrey Fowle and Matthew Miller, were detained in April. Both have been charged with “hostile acts” and Miller is set to go to trial Sunday.

But even if North Korea does not achieve its goal of 1 million, it certainly is receiving many more tourists than it was even a few years ago.

Simon Cockerell, the British general manager of Beijing-based Koryo Tours, one of the first Western travel companies to start tours to North Korea, estimates that 5,000 to 6,000 “Europeans” a year are now visiting North Korea.

Tourist numbers for Young Pioneer have been doubling every year, and the company now brings almost 1,000 people annually into North Korea.