The border
Harm en Cindy op reis
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North Korea: The border
From Dandong we took the train to North Korea. At the train station of Dandong we had a lot of fun because of the checks they did: using a thermo-gun (pointing at your forehead) they measure your temperature; when you seem to have a fever, you are not allowed to enter North Korea! Harm's temperature was fine and Cindy measured 31 degrees Celcius (?) which apparently was fine as well.... wait, wait, wait and there we go! From China it took half an hour to reach the border. There (in the train) the excitement starten. Passports were taken en form had to be filled out. The train was overflown with guards, scans, checking of all (!) bags and cases... after three hours (!!!) we entered North Korea: what an experience. Since our travel agent told us that is was very hard to make pictures of local people, we started taking pictures like crazy. By the way, later we found at that this was nonsense...
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At a given moment, the guard at the train were spying on us, so we stopped the photographing. The first impressions were very possitive: reasonable houses, a beautiful surrounding... also, the North Korean man who joined us in our compartment seemed to be very friendly and helpful (as interpreter!).
Back to China
Also the way back to China was very stressful (although we were prepared this time); all bags were opened and searched and the pictures taken in North Korea were looked at and checked. It started getting thrilling when a guard took some of the cameras and left... Luckily, we got them back (have pictures been deleted?).
We cannot understand how isolated this country is. No information is allowed to enter the country (people are kept stupid, explanation follows) and no negative information is allowed to leave it. Pictures with poor people, collapsing buildings, military, polution, etcetera are strictly forbidden. Since we had a few of them on our camera, we were really stressed at the border. Luckily, the guard was very relaxed (he tried our caps and pretended as if he drank from our souvenir mugs) and Cindy had a brilliant trick to distract him. She showed him our Namibia pictures only :-) We still have a question:
Why is this country working so hard to keep information out of the country and why are they trying to prevent that a realistic (but negative?) view is pictured from the country?