Gareth Johnson has been to North Korea over 100 times. He was also one of the first people to enter North Korea earlier this year, when the mysterious dictatorship briefly opened its doors. Writer Zanny Merullo Steffgen chats to Johnson about his take on travel behind the Iron Curtain.
Twelve months later, in February of this year, North Korea opened Rason, a port city in the country’s northeastern tip, to foreign tourism… before swiftly closing its borders again in March. Without warning or reason.
During that short window, a few tour operators managed to take groups into Rason, the first of which was Young Pioneer Tours, a company founded by Gareth Johnson. Johnson is no stranger to North Korea, since 2008—when he planned a trip for curious friends while living in China teaching English—he’s been to North Korea over 100 times, running tours that focus on interactions with local people.
Though there’s no official word yet about the country’s reopening, tour operators like Johnson are hopeful that tourism in North Korea will resume soon. To find out why, and what it was like to return to a slice of post-pandemic North Korea, I recently sat down with Johnson:
GJ: We visited the Taekwondo Center to see the kids do Taekwondo. We visited the Foreign Language School and got to talk to students. We ate a lot of good Korean food. The food in North Korea, while less foreign-influenced tends to be very fresh as it’s not mass-produced. We visited the tri-border area, which is where Russia, China and North Korea border each other.
North Korean beers are notoriously very good, and there’s a new beer made in Rason called Tumangang, so we visited there to see how the beer is made and talk to the brewmaster. Draft beer is everywhere—something not so common in Asia—with different restaurants brewing their own. National beers aren’t pasteurized, which makes them more natural, though also with a chance to go bad.
There are some quirky things, like you can exchange money at black market rates and open a North Korean bank account, which comes with a North Korean debit card that can only be used in Rason. If you were to do these things anywhere else in the world, people would go, ‘what the hell is this?’ But the stuff that might be considered normal in other places gets an extra sense of interest in North Korea.