North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been on a diplomatic blitzkrieg lately, with a trip across the DMZ to meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and a summit with President Trump still in the works.
But while Kim has stepped out onto the international stage in his bid to make history, not much has changed in North Korea. VICE News spoke with two people who were in the country recently, and they both reported that aside from a few small details, the vibe in Pyongyang was basically normal, at least by North Korean standards.
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Despite the risks and ethical concerns of traveling in the Hermit Kingdom, a few thousand adventurous Western tourists visit every year, though most Americans have been banned since last September following the death of U.S. college student Otto Warmbier.
Photographer Pierre Depont, who has made several trips to North Korea, returned for 10 days in mid-April. During that time, North Korea celebrated a national holiday — the birth of founding father Kim Il-Sung on April 15 — and hosted a marathon that includes hundreds of international competitors.
“It felt more relaxed than previous visits and the people seemed pretty upbeat about the current situation in the country,” Depont said. “This may have been partly been due to the large numbers of foreigners there for the marathon and the international performance and arts festival which was being held at the same time.”
Depont said he noticed that the road from Pyongyang to the DMZ was busy with road work and street cleaners in preparation for the inter-Korean summit on April 27, but otherwise it was business as usual.
Another recent visitor, Adrian a guide for a Beijing-based company that takes Westerners to North Korea, was in the country when the summit was held and in the days following. Adrian, who asked that his last name be withheld because he plans to return soon for work, said that for the most part, things felt no different than they did on past visits when Trump and Kim were threatening to launch missiles at each other.
“The reality is tourism on the ground doesn’t really change that much based on the geopolitics,” he said. “The day-to-day of experience of being a tourist in Pyongyang was no different right now than it was at the end of last year.”
Part of that likely has to do with access to news. While the rest of the world watched the inter-Korean summit unfold on live television, North Korean’s didn’t hear about it until 24 hours later, when state media broadcast a carefully edited report about it. The country’s propaganda machine still hasn’t mentioned Kim’s planned meeting with Trump.
Adrian noted, however, that the guides seemed to have a sense that something big was happening, perhaps because they interact frequently with Westerners and could get a better sense of what was going on in the outside world. He mentioned how on a trip to the DMZ, a military guide who previously railed against American imperialists had dropped the aggressive rhetoric from his usual spiel. He also described how another guide told his group a joke about former President George W. Bush.
“One tourist said, Why don’t you update the material to Trump because it will still work, if not more so, because it’s about the stupidity of the American leader,’” Adrian said. “The guide said, ‘Well, we don’t know what Trump is going to do, he’s still in power.’ The guides know about Trump and the meeting, and they’re hopeful something positive is going to happen.”
But he added that while the conversations between tourists and their government minders may have shifted from something along the lines of “Are we going to war?” to “Are we going to have peace?” it’s still impossible to know what’s really going on in North Korea.
“The reality is nobody knows what’s happening in Pyongyang,” Adrian said. “Anybody that tells you they know what’s happening in Pyongyang is either a liar or a fool.”
Cover Image: Locals enjoying Pyongyang’s Munsu Water Park. Pierre Depont for VICE News.
