North Korea, Made Easier

This Year, More U.S. Groups
Can Go to Mass Games;
The Food? 'Not Too Good'

By HANNAH KARP
March 10, 2006; Page W10

This year, it will be easier for Americans to travel to North Korea.

In what Korea-watchers see as a bid to gain grass-roots favor in the U.S. -- plus foreign currency -- Pyongyang has extended invitations to several U.S. tour operators to bring Americans into the country. Operators say the planned visits will run from August to October, the months of the Mass Games -- athletic events that feature 100,000 gymnasts and dancers, all North Korean, with heavy participation from spectators in the stands.

If the trips fill up, they would represent the largest contingent of U.S. leisure travelers to North Korea since the Korean War. Tour agencies say the country has issued U.S. passport holders visas to enter during other Mass Games -- in 2005, 2002 and 1995 -- but the agencies say that often, by the time they learned about the offers, they didn't have time to organize trips.

Getting Permission

But this year looks different. San Francisco-based Geographic Expeditions will run two 10-day trips in August, its first group tours to the country, for $5,190 per person. Universal Travel System, a small Santa Monica, Calif., agency, says it has permission to take 250 Americans on eight-day tours ($3,460 a person, excluding air fare). Poe Travel of Little Rock, Ark., is planning to take a small number of clients into North Korea for the first time as well -- leading them to China, where they will join a Beijing-based tour group that specializes in travel to the region. All the tours had spaces as of yesterday.

Until now, booking a North Korea trip has been anything but easy: While there's no U.S. law against visiting, Americans have often gained entry by traveling to China, applying for visas in Beijing and traveling with China-based companies such as Koryo Tours. Last year, Universal Travel visited with 46 members of a private travel club, which is led by Universal's director and whose qualifications for membership include visits to more than 100 countries.

Extreme Effort

Still, getting there may not be easy. North Korea has told travel companies it won't grant visas to journalists, Korean-Americans and Israelis. And Pyongyang has extended invitations before, only to rescind them. The country issued a batch of visas to Universal Travel in 2004, then revoked them amid escalating political tension, says the firm's director, Klaus Billep. North Korea has been boycotting six-party nuclear disarmament talks since November, after the U.S. threatened sanctions against a bank in Macau that was allegedly helping North Korea launder money and pass counterfeit currency. North Korea has denied the accusations.

Traveling there brings challenges, too, with food ranging from "not too good to not too bad," says Koryo's co-founder Simon Cockerell. (Expect mostly cold noodles, barbecued meats and pickled cabbage, agents say.) The U.S. State Department adds its own warnings: North Korean security personnel may monitor hotel rooms and telephones, search bags in hotel rooms, and confiscate cellphones on arrival, according to a travel advisory on the State Department's Web site. The department also advises people with medical problems not to travel to North Korea, as hospitals in Pyongyang and other cities often lack heat, food, medicine and basic medical supplies. (The U.S. has no diplomatic representation in Pyongyang, but the Swedish Embassy there provides basic consular services to U.S. citizens.)

Don't Forget Guide

Mr. Cockerell, who has led tours to North Korea for years, says the Americans his agency takes to Pyongyang have proved that they're "worldly enough" for the trip by managing to get to China on their own. Nobody can walk around North Korea without a guide, he says. Tourists are expected on various occasions to bow to statues of the "Great Leader," the deceased founding strongman Kim Il Sung, and dress respectably in places of Korean national importance, so as not to get the guides in trouble. Thankfully, Mr. Cockerell adds, North Korean beer is exceptionally delicious and brewed in-house by Pyongyang's two main hotels.

Besides the games and three days of sightseeing in Pyongyang, Geographic Expeditions will take travelers to the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas, a no-man's-land of barbed wire and pillboxes marked by a 6-inch-thick wall watched by soldiers from both sides. GeoEx says travelers will fly on a private charter to the pilgrimage site of Mount Paektu, the highest mountain on the Korean peninsula. Then they'll go to Mount Chilbo in the northeast, hike through forests and rock formations and spend the night with a North Korean family.

GeoEx isn't promising "a gin and tonic at the end of every day" or even hot water at every hotel, says its president, Jim Sano. But he says Americans will see more of the country than many of their foreign tours have in the past. Guests of Poe's tours, meanwhile, will spend four nights in the capital, watching the games at night and sightseeing by day, and then will travel by train back through a mountainous landscape to Beijing.

For some travelers, the hardship and uncertainty don't matter. "It's the first trip to North Korea that I have seen available -- I try to get into these countries when there's a brief window," says Sharen Rozen, a 57-year-old Boston tax accountant and archeology buff who's already checked Libya off her list. She signed up with GeoEx as soon as she got the announcement. She adds, "You never know when you'll get in again."

Write to Hannah Karp at hannah.karp@dowjones.com

(Copyright (c) 2006, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)