Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  No, I had to get the confirmation printed. I dragooned an accommodating NGO guy who was staying at Mary’s, and he agreed to walk me over to his agency to see if they had a working printer. We had walked about 15 minutes to the center of Bairiki and were near his office—when the lights went out. All over the island. The second power failure since I arrived. The situation had become redonkulous.

  We lingered for more than an hour, but no power came on; I’d have to wait until morning and hope the hotel printer had ink by then.

  I spent a nervous and fitful night, sure that something would go wrong, as Murphy’s Law was ascendant. I was trapped on an undeveloped island with none of the amenities we take for granted in the States—working printers, fast Internet, reliable electric power, taxis, rapid transit, dependable airline agents.

  At 8:30 a.m. I was at Mary’s reception desk, which still had no ink cartridges. I called the agent at Air Pacific and she told me that my in-camera photo of my reservation to Seoul would not cut the mustard. I needed a printed copy of that ticket out of Fiji before Air Pacific would allow me to board their flight to Fiji. I raced to the office-supply store in town and, of course, they were out of the cartridge that fit Mary’s printer. Then I ran to the only other outlet in town, where I found the right cartridge, and ran back to Mary’s. It was now close to 11:00 a.m. We fired up the printer and it worked! Was Murphy finally giving me a break? I then went on Mary’s computer to bring up the e-mailed confirms of my flights to Seoul and Beijing so I could print them. But Yahoo Mail was unreachable. I tried for an hour, but the computer couldn’t connect. (I’d noted, when I first arrived at Mary’s, that I could most easily—i.e., in less than 30 minutes—get onto Yahoo Mail at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., but rarely before because of insufficient capacity.)

  I was frantic, and I’m sure my blood pressure was stratospheric. The receptionist told me that the Internet café in town had better connectivity, so I ran over there, but still could not connect with Yahoo Mail. It was now noon, the airport was almost an hour away, and the flight to Fiji closed for boarding at 3:00 p.m. I was close to a nervous breakdown.

  As a Hail Mary pass, I phoned the Air Pacific agent, explained my plight, gave her the number of my Air Korea reservation, and asked her if she could track down my confirmation on her computer and print it out. She had never done anything like that before but agreed to try. In the hope—my only hope—that she would succeed, I rushed to get Mary’s van to take me to her office and then to the airport. But good old Murphy was still doing double duty and had arranged that the van was being washed and cleaned—surely for the first time since Christmas—to pick up the arriving military personnel that afternoon.

  I ran to the van and grabbed a sponge and soaped and hosed like mad to get us on the road. By 1:50 we were in the airline office and received good news: The agent had been able to find and print my Air Korea confirmations from Fiji. All I had to do was pay her for the Air Pacific ticket to Fiji and I could be on my way. I gave her my AmEx card, which required her to contact her head office in Australia for approval, which took a half hour. And we did not get approval! Barclays bank, which serviced my AmEx account, declined the charge—despite explicit instructions I had given them before I left New York that I would be using the card in Asia. (I later learned that Barclays had lost those instructions, and since this charge was coming in at 5:00 a.m. EST, when fraudsters try to slip by, the banks assumed someone had stolen my card, and therefore had put a block on it.)

  It was now 2:20, leaving no time to send my Visa Card info to Australia for approval.

  I offered to pay for the ticket in cash, but they would not take U.S. dollars—nobody does in Kiribati—so I got back in Mary’s van—whose driver was beginning to lose patience with me despite the two fashionable New York T-shirts I had generously given him—and we raced to the ANZ bank—where the guard issued me a printed number indicating my position in the queue.

  Twelve numbers were ahead of mine, all, it seemed, with lengthy business to transact. And all the tellers but one were out to lunch. (Murphy works in unpredictable ways, but was covering all the bases.) I located the woman who held the next number to be called, bargained with her, gave her five dollars to exchange her number with mine, and shot to the head of the queue.

  By the time I got back to the Air Pacific office with the 764 Australian dollars, it was 3:00 p.m. By the time we got the airport it was 3:20 and the departure gate had closed.

  But the workers recognized me—the bearded American who had almost fainted the day before when he was denied boarding—and were sympathetic. They let me in and vocally cheered me on as they rushed me through the item-by-item big-bag inspection (no X-ray machines in this outpost), the luggage weigh in, the ticket check, the departure tax payment, the immigration exit stamp, and the search of my carry-on bag. I raced aboard the plane three minutes and 30 seconds before it took off for Fiji. And collapsed.

  I arrived in Beijing two days later, a sleep-deprived nervous wreck, five days off schedule, $6,000 poorer, 7,000 miles off course, and with no possible way to visit Nauru or East Timor on this trip. But at least I was no longer trapped on Tarawa. Big Al was back in the game.

  CHAPTER 22

  To the Land of the Great Leader

  In keeping with their secretive nature, the North Koreans refused to provide any hint whether I’d be granted a visa. They’d required me to travel halfway around the world to Beijing, surrender my passport, and not learn until the day before my tour was scheduled to fly to Pyongyang whether I’d be permitted to go. I was concerned about the ban they’d imposed on writers and journalists, and worried that some of the 250 magazine articles I’d written might come to their attention, although the most politically sensitive and inflammatory had fortunately been written under a pen name.

  The circumstances were not auspicious for a visit or a visa. During the week I waited in Beijing, North Korea made daily threats to protest the continuing exercises by the South Korean Navy close to the disputed zone between the countries. The North captured an ROK fishing boat that supposedly entered that zone and the North fired more than a hundred artillery shells near the disputed Northern Limit Line.

  My buddy Dennis Doran, his son Andrew, and my friend Svitlana, who were joining me for the visit to North Korea, had flown in to Beijing from the U.S. the day before, bringing the supplies that were too heavy for me to lug around the Pacific. Our foursome walked over to the North Korean Embassy at 2:00 p.m., as instructed. It was straight out of a spy novel, a full-block complex of sinister-looking, small-windowed, sturdy buildings, their roofs bristling with large antennae and communications equipment, mostly hidden behind a high concrete wall topped by broken glass and barbed wire. The main entrance was guarded by a squad of unsmiling, heavily armed soldiers who refused to let us enter. Every other embassy gives applicants their visas in its consular section, but not the North Koreans. No foreigners were allowed inside the walls. The guards directed us to the street corner at the end of the block-long concrete barrier.

  At the appointed time, a gaunt man in a threadbare suit emerged from the complex, looked about furtively, collected several hundred dollars cash from each of us, and returned our passports with visas and strict instructions to be at the airport early the following morning. We had made the cut! We had achieved what less than a thousand American civilians had in the 57 years since the cessation of open warfare on the Korean peninsula. We were on our way to the Hermit Kingdom, to the Land of the Great Leader.

  When I’d arrived in Beijing I’d received an e-mail from the foreign agency though which I’d arranged this tour. It was not your typical cheery predeparture best wishes, but a decree, a strict set of rules and regulations that provided a chilling foretaste of what I’d encounter in the Hermit Kingdom.

  I would not be allowed to travel or walk around by myself without a guide. I would not be allowed to bring a laptop, bring a cell phone, carry a camera having more than a 150mm lens, take any photographs withou
t permission of my guides or of any type of military installation. My camera flashcard would be checked, and all unauthorized photos deleted, which, the e-mail made it clear, would earn me the displeasure of my guides. I would not be allowed to refer to the country as North Korea, but only as the DPRK (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), and, if I had to mention it at all, I could only refer to the occupant of the other part of the peninsula as “the south,” never the ROK. I was warned not to talk about history or politics or sensitive issues, because what I had been taught in my society might not conform to what my hosts knew to be the truth, and a respectful guest did not want to upset his hosts, right?…

  I must never criticize the regime, or the DPRK, or Kim Il Sung, or Kim Jong Il. To the contrary, I would be required to pay my respects to Kim Il Sung at the Grand Monument and when viewing his body at the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where I would have to bow to him, and where I would have to wear a collared shirt and a tie.

  I was prepared for most of this nonsense, but the requirement of a tie and a collared shirt caught me off guard, and I was unwilling to buy them to honor the dead dictator. I e-mailed Dennis before he left home, and he promised to bring an extra tie for me, although I doubted it would accessorize well with my tropical shirt. My other wardrobe worry arose from the promise I’d made to my pals in the Gotham City Land Cruiser group to wear their club’s T-shirt, which features, in large letters, their slogan, GOT ROCKS?, which, to the Koreans, looks like ROK, the name by which “the south” calls itself. A ROKy start, you might say. Or you might not.

  The old Tupolev jet to Pyongyang had barely taken off before I was in much more serious trouble with the North Korean—oops, I mean the DPRK—authorities. Dear Dennis had, at the Beijing Airport, just before we took off, handed me a totally hideous, blue-and-purple striped tie from the early Eisenhower era that was not a sufficiently somber match with my red-green-and-white flowered Aloha shirt to placate my humorless hosts, even though I was technically compliant with their mausoleum dress code. But, far worse, Dennis had unthinkingly handed me a full-page article from a March issue of The Wall Street Journal to read on the plane. It was headlined NORTH KOREAN DICTATORSHIP TO COLLAPSE SOON, and featured a large photo at the top of Kim Il Sung, the DPRK’s dearly departed Great Leader. I knew this article was too blatantly inflammatory to bring into the DPRK so, as soon as I sat down in the plane, I tore off the headline and the picture, folded them to conceal their content, and put them on the vacant middle seat next to mine, intending to dispose of them after the seat-belt sign went off.

  I never got the chance. The guy at the window seat grabbed the papers in a paroxysm of rage, screaming at me. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, a tie, and a large flag pin of the DPRK, the standard uniform for government functionaries, and the passport on his lap identified him as in the diplomatic service. He jabbed at the crease I’d made through the center of the Great Leader’s face and did his best to uncrease it, while scolding at me in Korean as if I were a horrid barbarian imperialist. I then remembered one of the many rules of behavior in the DPRK: You never fold, crease, spindle, or mutilate a photo of the Great Leader. Never.

  I apologized profusely, in my best stupid-heathen-idiot routine, tenderly retrieved the offending paper from him, smoothed out the crease as well as I could, and lovingly and respectfully tucked it into the pages of my book, while he nodded approvingly.

  Later, 32,000 feet over the South China Sea, when the diplomat had fallen asleep, I made a quick trip to the toilet, where I put the Great Leader’s photo to proper use.

  I was not prepared for the modernity and wealth of Pyongyang. I’d expected a shabby, run-down town not much different than the capitals of many poor nations, so I was amazed to find instead a clean, modern, prosperous-looking, smoothly functioning, and livable city. It may be the world’s largest Potemkin village, but it more than did its job of creating a favorable impression.

  I saw thousands of trees bordering the streets, vast tracts of grassland, gardens, even vegetable farms, and was told that the city had more than 40 parks and the most green space per capita of any major city. The dozens of gleaming white 30-story apartment buildings I saw, home to the regime insiders, were unabashedly contemporary—cylindrical, curvilinear, or layered, most with terraces—each separated from its neighbor by a hundred yards of trees and carefully cultivated shrubs.

  I was taken to three immense arches, more than ten impressively powerful monuments and commemorative towers, many over a hundred feet high, and saw at least 30 gigantic public buildings of shining marble and polished granite. Each subway station (300 feet down in case the West tries to nuke them) was spacious and attractive, with cheerful art and colored lights, and not a speck of trash anywhere.

  And it was just as pristinely clean throughout the countryside that I was allowed to see. When we were driven two hours south of the capital and two hours north of it, all we saw along the new, treelined, eight-lane highway were tidy towns of neatly dressed people and peaceful cooperative farms, lushly green with ripening rice, corn, and beans. I knew that our hosts were not about to show us any poverty or shabbiness, and that their job was to make us disbelieve that this was a dictatorship in which famished citizens ate undigested corn kernels they dug out of cow manure and where more than half a million died of starvation in some years. We were never shown those skeletal people or DPRK’s A-bomb plants or the factories where they made Rodong medium-range missiles for Iran, Syria, and Pakistan.

  Only if we looked closely could we discern some implicit indications of poverty: Our bus drove for 30 minutes during which we did not see another car on the superhighway; half the people walked and the other half rode bikes, often two on a bike; every bit of land not used for buildings or green space in this 80 percent mountainous nation was given over to growing crops, as far up the hills as they could push it; everybody was quite thin; there were few streetlights, and other outdoor lights were kept low, except those illuminating the propaganda palaces; interior lights were frugally controlled by motion sensors, daylight sensors, and insert cards; in the hotel bowling alley, if I didn’t roll my ball within a few seconds, the lights illuminating the pins went out; restaurants used miniature napkins and stainless steel chopsticks to conserve trees; and our guides wore the same clothes four or five days in a row without washing. Ironically, the harsh heel of their dictatorship has generated one of the smallest carbon footprints of any nation.

  In six days I saw not a single dog or cat, because the people could not afford to feed them, or had eaten them long ago. In five hundred kilometers of travel through this meat-deprived land, I saw not one goat, sheep, or cow. In one residential park, I saw a man catch a squirrel, stomp it, cut off its tail, and proudly put it, still alive and quivering in its death throes, into his bag to eat for dinner, as he made clear from his joyful gesticulations. It was difficult to reconcile the gleaming apartment buildings with residents stomping squirrels for dinner, but such is the paradox of the DPRK.

  The tour was heavy on anti-American propaganda and nationalism bordering on xenophobia. We were taken to, and proudly told in fervid detail about, the humble home where Kim Il Sung was born, and then shown his awesome, four-story mausoleum, fronted by a plaza of one million square feet, surrounded by a moat, and reached though a marble hallway 450 yards long that I was allowed to enter only after my shoes had been dusted, disinfected, and blown clean. We were driven to the Workers’ Party monument, and the Martyrs’ Cemetery, and the 150-room International Friendship Exhibition, a repository carved into Mount Myohyang for the 90,000 gifts the Great Leader had received from other nations (mostly expensive and ornate, with only one from the U.S., a Wilson basketball signed by Michael Jordan and presented by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright). We were taken on a long drive to the DMZ (the four-kilometer-wide and 240 km-long demilitarized zone between North and South Korea), to Panmunjom (where the armistice ending the fighting of the Korean War was negotiated and signed in 1953), an
d to the Concrete Fence (a wall 250 km long, built by the South from sea to sea across the peninsula, “to keep our nation forever divided,” we were told, and behind which the puppets of the South were planning a new invasion since their earlier one had failed). The next day to the museums—the three Museums of the Revolution, and the War Museum (filled with U.S. planes, tanks, and guns captured in the Korean War during America’s “cowardly retreat”), and the Art Museum (featuring portraits of the Great Leader performing various heroic functions). Finally to the Juche Tower (commemorating the Great Leader’s Socialist/Confucian philosophy of government), the captured US “pirate-spy” ship USS Pueblo; and, everywhere—and I do mean everywhere—portraits, murals, paintings, posters, billboards, and signs exhorting the populace to struggle and strive, and depicting the Great Leader encouraging farmers to grow more grain, workers to produce more machines, miners to dig more coal and iron, soldiers to be prepared to fight their imperialist foe, and children to zealously guard and defend the future of the nation.

  Even the meals were part of the propaganda effort. Either because the North Koreans believe that all imperialists have ravenous appetites, or because they wanted to demonstrate that the claims of food shortages and starvation in their country were false, they sought to stuff us, at every meal, with three to four times more food than any human could possibly ingest at one sitting. Each meal, including breakfast, featured soup, at least five kinds of vegetables, a fish dish, a beef dish, a chicken dish, a pork or duck dish, plus a variety of other treats, from spicy squid to bean curd casserole, glassy noodles to scrambled eggs, frankfurters to potato pancakes, and on and on. This imperialist gained ten pounds in six days.

  Even the amazing Arirang Festival (aka the Mass Games) had a propaganda function, but it was, nevertheless, the greatest show on earth. It featured 100,000 students, soldiers, dancers, singers, acrobats, gymnasts, martial artists, and cutely costumed children, all performing together in absolute split-second unison. Twenty thousand students seated on the far side of the stadium, having practiced for three months, used colored flash cards as they are used nowhere else with such precision. In two seconds, a wave rolled perfectly from one end of the stadium to the other while, down on the stadium floor, thousands of brilliantly costumed dancers and gymnasts flawlessly moved as if one, and then instantly disappeared into the darkness. The true purpose of the Games, aside from impressing the crowds and bringing in lots of foreign currency, is to teach the North Korean people the power of the collective, to demonstrate how the discipline and surrender to the collective required by the Great Leader’s form of Communism can produce extraordinary results. It’s a performance where one small misstep or mistiming by even one performer could spoil the entire effect. Such mistakes are not tolerated in the land of the Great Leader—and there were no mistakes.