Monty Anderson got word that the trip was on two weeks after rushing home to California from Ukraine for emergency open-heart surgery. He didn’t ask his doctor if it was OK to take another trip so soon. He told him he was going. Eighty-year-old Joan Youmans heard about it when she picked up her phone messages after a trip to Indonesia. She cancelled a few doctors’ appointments and booked immediately. When Joe Walker learned the trip was a go, he said he ‘‘just gave them my credit card number and told them to fill in the amount.’’ Cost him $7,000, he figures. Such is the allure of North Korea to the ‘extreme traveler’. ‘‘It’s the hardest place to get to,’’ said Bill Altaffer, who should know. Altaffer is the world’s most traveled man, according to the mosttraveledman.com website. North Korea was the only place on the globe that had thwarted his attempts to visit. Like the other Americans, Altaffer had a standing order with California-based Travelers’ Century Club to go should the chance ever arise. So this fall, when the North Korean regime decided to issue a handful of visas to Americans for reasons it typically never bothered to explain, Altaffer, Anderson, Youmans, Walker and globe-trotter Don Parrish found themselves on a rare adventure for Americans. The desire to poke their noses into unusual spots drove them to board an Air Koryo flight from Beijing to Pyongyang, buckling up on a creaky, Soviet-made Ilyushin 62 for the 90-minute trip. The airliner has averaged a crash every two years since coming into service in the early 1960s, a safety record that might explain the exclamation mark on the glowing red ‘‘Fasten Your Belts!’’ light above the seats. They saw monuments to Kim Il Sung, the founder of the North Korean republic and still officially its leader despite his death in 1994. They went to a model school and to the war museum, where ‘‘evidence’’ of American war atrocities is displayed. None of the five was showing any ‘‘been there, done that’’ nonchalance about finally getting a peek behind North Korea’s curtains. Nor did they appear concerned about visiting a dictatorship that is a sworn enemy and demonstrates an almost pathological paranoia about Americans. ‘‘Totalitarian governments take care of you,’’ said Altaffer, who lives in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., when he’s not traveling. Being the visiting ‘‘imperialists’’ in town was the least of their worries. Walker was sick for three days after eating something that fought back, although the food reviews were generally good. But the biggest problem, all five later agreed, was the inability to go anywhere without being shadowed by their government-appointed minder. ‘‘I knew it would be regimented, but I had no idea just how much,’’ Parrish said. They were treated to the standard North Korean greatest hits package tour. They saw monuments to Kim Il Sung, the founder of the North Korean republic and still officially its leader despite his death in 1994. They went to a model school and to the war museum, where ‘‘evidence’’ of American war atrocities is displayed. There was a bus excursion to the North Korean side of the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, and another to the Pueblo, the American naval vessel captured by the North Koreans in 1968. The first stop on the tour was the towering statue of Kim that overlooks this city. Every visitor was lined up at the base and was expected to bow in homage. All five Americans bowed. Walker felt uncomfortable, he said, paying even perfunctory homage to the man who created the police state and cult of personality that are widely blamed—outside North Korea, at least—for the country’s poverty, hunger and international isolation. ‘‘It felt a bit like being a Jew visiting Hitler’s Germany,’’ Walker recalled as he headed back to his home in San Diego. ‘‘But I think it’s your obligation as a visitor, and as an American, to leave a good impression,’’ Walker added. Only Youmans appeared unperturbed by what she called the ‘‘unrelenting’’ propaganda. North Korean officials called her ‘‘Grandma,’’ and when the group was told to line up by age to walk to the edge of the DMZ, she was at the head of the line. Youmans found the North Korean attitude at the border to be fairly casual and said she loved the ‘‘orderliness’’ of Pyongyang. People were ‘‘well dressed and healthy,’’ she said. ‘‘This is definitely the weirdest trip I’ve been on,’’ Altaffer said as the Ilyushin headed back to Beijing. ‘‘I would love to go back for another five days. I want to get into the mausoleum to see Kim’s body. Everything else is anticlimactic after North Korea,’’ he said with a sigh. Perhaps only people as widely traveled can understand the appeal of a city as austere and superficially joyless as Pyongyang. Each of the five understands the instinct to see something different in a world that keeps shaving the edges off its differences and variations. (Los Angeles Times)
