Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  A disturbing aspect of the trip was that Dennis and I and the other American tourists were treated as carriers of an infectious disease—a disease called information—and skillfully prevented from having any contact with ordinary citizens, lest we contaminate them with our Western ideas and knowledge of the outside world.

  North Korea is the most closed society on the planet, ranked 196 out of 196 by the annual Freedom of the Press survey. All access to information from or about the lands beyond its borders is rigidly controlled by the government—no Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, only Bright Star, which links to official documents and censored news. Of its 25 million citizens, only a few thousand, all members of the hardcore elite, are allowed access to the Internet. TV sets only receive the government stations, which feature slanted news and patriotic propaganda. Personal radios are illegal, but the government jams international broadcasts just in case. Incoming travelers are searched for subversive literature and CDs, and their cell phones are confiscated for the duration of their visits. Private ownership of fax machines is prohibited. Copiers and printers are closely guarded to prevent the dissemination of unauthorized information. Six months before we arrived, a factory worker was publicly executed by a firing squad because he’d spoken by phone to someone in South Korea about the price of rice.

  I was taken to see an orphanage in North Korea, where the children had been taught to perform a song to charm visitors and prospective adoptive parents. But few people outside the party elite can afford to adopt an orphan in a land where hundreds of thousands starve.

  The regime tightly controls information because they don’t want their citizens to understand the benefits of democracy: to become aware how badly off they are and how poorly they live compared to much of the rest of humanity, to realize that their cousins in “the south” were not really rummaging through garbage dumps and eating rats for dinner, as they had been taught, and that the world regarded their revered leader as an unpredictable cross between a spoiled child and a dangerous nut case.

  How did they prevent us from saying even a single word to an ordinary North Korean in a week? By constant isolation, assiduous observation, and attentive minding.

  From the moment we went down to breakfast in the morning until we finished dinner, we were rarely out of sight of our two guides and their two blue-uniformed assistants. We were accompanied, closely, everywhere we went, even to public toilets. At the Arirang Festival, our group of 20 tourists were seated together, in a section set aside exclusively for foreigners. If any of us had to use the restroom, one of the minders went with us. As we were exiting the giant stadium, I lingered back, attempting to mingle with the crowd, hoping to chat with a local for a minute, but one of our minders was soon at my side, politely, but firmly, pointing out that “Our bus is that way.”

  When I was doing laps in the hotel pool one night, a group of four regime stalwarts and their families were granted special access. I tried my best to be friendly and chat with them, but they acted as if I wasn’t there.

  When my friend Svitlana needed to get some socks, the guides offered to purchase them for her. When she told them she preferred picking her own clothes, they put us in the tour bus, drove us to a special department store where only regime loyalists were allowed to shop, accompanied her to the hosiery counter, and supervised her purchase. She was not able to exchange a word with the salesgirl. And when she went to the pricey hotel spa for a massage, she was assigned a masseuse who spoke not a word of English.

  Our Yanggakdo International Hotel—which accommodated only foreign tourists and diplomats—was built on a small, unpopulated island in the Taedong River, completely cut off from the city. It was brightly lit and carefully designed and groomed to prevent concealment, with a narrow access bridge that was policed and checkpointed 24/7. And every door leading out of the Yanggakdo was guarded.

  On my fourth night I found a way out: On leaving the basement pool, I purposely took a wrong turn, innocently wandered down several deserted underground corridors, and came upon a small unlocked exit door way in the back of the hotel. I cautiously pushed it ajar and found it opened on a small, vacant parking lot. I stepped out. No one was there. I was free! I sauntered away from the hotel in the direction of the fog-shrouded bridge. I’d gone about 40 feet when a police officer materialized beside me and suggested that it might be dangerous to wander about so late at night. Much safer I should return to my room. Now!

  The sole instance in which the ban on communication was lifted was when we were taken to a restaurant and allowed to personally inform the waitress whether we wanted “tea” or “beer.” (Things do not go better with Coke in the Land of the Great Leader.)

  As pervasive as the surveillance was the cult of personality, the near-deification of Kim Il Sung and his progeny, the only hereditary rulers to govern a Communist country. I don’t profess to understand this adoration, because I was barred from asking the locals about it, but I got the impression that the majority of North Koreans actually did revere their Great Leader. Everywhere we went—to his birthplace, to his monuments, to the building displaying the presents he’d received, to his mausoleum—hundreds of DPRK citizens, wearing either their best clothes or their newest uniforms, were paying him homage, usually in groups of ten to 50 brought from their school or factory, all silent, solemn, a few even crying, all exuding sincerity, although I could not be sure.

  The DPRK does not deny that Kim Il Sung died, but neither does it quite treat him as dead, more like immortal. It’s not just his memory that lingers on: It is his essence. His birthday is the state’s highest holiday; his words its Bible. He remains their “eternal president.” His son, Kim Jong Il, was their General, but the post of president is eternally occupied by his father.

  How I wish I could have gotten into their minds! As an outsider, I could not tell if they were befuddled or brainwashed, pretenders or true believers in the regime’s rash promise that, in 2012, the 100th birthday of the Great Leader, their wretched, resource-poor land would at last become a “great and prosperous nation.” The one thing I could clearly ascertain was that the thousands of stony-faced, somberly attired locals emerging from their visit to his sacred tomb to the martial strains of “The Song of General Kim Il Sung,” who passed ten feet from me on a parallel people-mover inside the immense mausoleum, did not think that the tie Dennis had lent me worked well with my Hawaiian shirt.

  It was equally easy to discern that Americans were not generally held in high regard inside the Hermit Kingdom, which perhaps explains why, aside from our paid-to-grin guides and greeters, we saw not one smile or friendly face all week. The attitude of the regime toward America was well summarized in a pamphlet they sold us, which begins by referring to 9/11 as “an attack on the nerve-center of the Evil Empire.” The broad thesis of the pamphlet was that “In its very origins the U.S. was a state founded and expanded by means of terrorism, which has always gone hand-in-hand with the U.S. policy. The U.S. emerged as a nation above the sea of blood of indigenous Indians and expanded ten-fold in westward wars of conquest…”

  Our use of “terrorism” culminated in the way we allegedly mistreated the North Koreans:

  shooting, suffocating by poisonous gas, hog-tying before drowning, burying alive, burning to death, throwing down into mine pits, tearing the body limb-from-limb using oxcarts, sawing off faces, hammering nails into the forehead, gouging out eyes, cutting off ears and noses, hacking off women’s breasts, disemboweling pregnant women, trampling fetuses, and driving pointed sticks into vital parts.

  (I’ve been meaning to scrutinize the Pentagon budget to find out how many of my taxpayer dollars they spent on those limb-sundering oxcarts.)

  This visit was a fascinating peek at a totally bizarre and topsy-turvy world, unlike any other on the planet, but it was a great relief to get out and breathe free.

  About a year after I left, Kim Jong Il died, and his regime passed into the hands of his third son, Kim Jong Un. Hope that this Swiss-educat
ed young man might liberalize the dictatorship was quickly dashed by an announcement from the DRPK news agency that “To expect ‘reform and opening’ is nothing but a foolish and silly dream, just like wanting the sun to rise in the west.”

  CHAPTER 23

  In the Steppes of Genghis Khan

  When was the last time you gave some serious thought to Mongolia?

  Don’t feel ashamed; you are hardly alone. Modern Mongolia has no impact on our daily lives. Yet, for more than 200 years, Mongolia ruled most of the known world and established dozens of the institutions that have become essential parts of contemporary civilization.

  Some of us remember, from a brief mention in some ancient-history lecture, that Genghis Khan—his name means “World Emperor”—and his sons, and their Golden Horde of hardy, ruthless warriors, swept out of the wilds of Mongolia on their sturdy ponies, and between the years 1150 and 1300 overwhelmed and conquered the lands we know today as China, northern India, Pakistan, Persia, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, the rest of Eastern Europe, and most of Russia, reached the gates of Vienna, Cairo, and Constantinople, and created the largest empire in history. Had the Mongol general, Prince Batu, not been called back home for consultations in 1242, he would have reached the Atlantic with his army, and we might today all be speaking Mongolian and eating horsemeat.

  What we were not taught is that the Mongols, aside from rewriting the rules of warfare, also ushered in the modern age and some of its principal principles and practices. Genghis Khan consolidated many smaller states into large countries to create Russia, China, and India. He overthrew a feudal system built on aristocratic birth and privilege and replaced it with one based on individual merit and achievement. Although his warriors slaughtered the soldiers and leaders of the lands he conquered, he did not treat the vanquished inhabitants as slaves, but accepted them as valued citizens of his realm—as long as they paid their taxes. He vastly increased trade between nations, reduced tariffs, and established a rule of law applicable to all, even to the rulers. At a time when almost every nation adhered to just one religion, he enshrined religious freedom and tolerance (although his descendants converted to Islam and spread the Muslim faith). He abolished torture in his realm, invented diplomatic immunity, sought a universal alphabet, instituted the first inter-nation postal service, and eliminated bandits throughout his territories so that travel and trade could flourish.

  This sparsely populated nation, a mere one million people then, with only 100,000 warriors, did far more than any other to shape the modern world. To unite their holdings, they built more bridges than any conqueror in history, and then passed, from one end of their empire of 12 million square miles to the other, from the heart of Europe to the shores of the Pacific and back, the knowledge of architecture, agriculture, metal casting, pottery, poetry, and literature that they had accumulated from all the lands they had conquered. They created and instituted paper currency, an accurate calendar, multinational maps, and free primary school education for every child.

  Their empire fell apart after two centuries because of squabbling among the various grandsons and great-grandsons of Genghis. His heirs had intermarried with the Yuan Dynasty when they moved their capital to Beijing to more centrally control their empire. In 1368 the Yuan and the Ming Dynasty took over and pushed the Mongols back north. All they had left in the end was a relatively small land and a reputation for brutality and destruction. Their very name gave root to the pejoratives “mongrel” and “Mongoloid.”

  Mongolia was closed to travelers until recent times. In 1924 it became the second nation to install a Communist government and was thereafter, until Gorbachev and glasnost, tightly controlled by Russia. The Communists, who believed that religion was the opiate of the masses, campaigned to eliminate Mongolian Buddhist Lamaism (which had largely supplanted Shamanism when it arrived from Tibet in the 1600s). To achieve this goal, from 1937 onward the Soviets burned or blew up 767 temples and monasteries, murdered 30,000 monks and thousands of political dissidents and intellectuals, sent thousands more to Siberia, and took steps to eradicate Mongolian customs, culture, and national identity. It was only after the dissolution of the USSR that Mongolia began the long and painful process of rebuilding its culture and finally fully opened itself to tourists.

  I was curious to see what these people were like 700 years after ruling the world and then being swept into the dustbin of history. Because theirs had always been a nomadic culture—save for a brief period, during the height of their powers, when they settled down and ruled first from an ornate city they built called Karakorum, and then from Beijing—a nomadic journey across the steppes seemed like the way to go. I had planned to do this with Steve, but he was gravely ill, so Dennis and Andrew Doran joined me.

  Mongolia does not allow foreigners to rent cars; you have to hire one with a driver. The vehicle we ended up with was a 13-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser 80 that had been ridden hard and put away wet, sporting shocks that were shot, springs that barely functioned, seats whose padding had been compressed to the consistency of concrete by a decade of bouncing butts, windows that would not roll down, and a steering wheel on the wrong side of the car. The driver we ended up with was a stubborn jerk who lacked the most rudimentary knowledge of how to use a gearshift or a compass, had no sense of direction, and was generally a total asshole. Other than that both car and driver were fine.

  The Mongolian transport infrastructure had not changed much since the days of Genghis Khan. There were only 600 miles of paved roads in a land twice the size of Texas, forcing us to bump, buck, and bang the Land Cruiser across rivers, streams, mudholes, and the timeless tan dirt trails traversing the vast seas of grass toward the low hills on the horizon that enclose the hundreds of picturesque valleys in the center of the country.

  Here and there we’d see a few gers, round tents that Westerners incorrectly call “yurts,” because that is what the Russians, who were trying to abolish Mongol culture, called them, based on the Russian word yurta, which means hut. Not far from the gers, we’d see herds of livestock: 10 to 50 horses, or 50 to 300 cows and yaks, or 200 to 2000 sheep and goats, rarely comingled beyond that. Some changes had occurred over the centuries: Most gers now had a wood-burning iron stove in its center, one of every ten sported a satellite dish, and a good number had a 4 × 4 parked out back. And a few herders now ride motorcycles instead of horses to keep their herds on the move.

  Mongolia, with its boundless steppes, high mountains, inhospitable desert, poor infrastructure, and small population, is (along with Dominica) the most unspoiled nation on earth. A typical nomad family lives in a portable ger heated by dried animal dung as they seasonally move their herds to greener pastures. But a huge new copper mine and the first paved nation may soon change that way of life.

  The population had risen, but only to 2.9 million, a third of whom lived in the capital of Ulan Bator (UB). A quarter were still nomadic shepherds, moving to greener pastures at least four times a year; another quarter were seminomadic, roving during the warmer months, settling into their base ger for the punishing winters. But their days as a peripatetic people may be numbered because of impending disruptions, both meteorological and mineralogical. Climate change may cause such deadly winters and parched summers that itinerant animal husbandry will no longer be viable, while the recent development of the earth’s largest copper mine in the south Gobi Desert, which will eventually account for 30 percent of Mongolia’s GDP, will entice nomads to settle in mining and smelting jobs providing secure wages.

  Of all 196 countries, Mongolia appeared to me the least spoiled (with the possible exception of Dominica), 80 percent untouched by man, like taking a time machine across centuries. The endless clear blue sky and lush wide valleys were similar to the Montana of 1840. I felt as if I were riding through an old Western, and expected to see the Lone Ranger galloping across the unbroken plains shouting a hearty “Hi-yo, Silver, away.” With fewer than three million people in a land a
s large as Britain, France, and Germany combined—giving it the lowest population density of any country—and with 34 million head of livestock, it’s a sublime pastoral experience, unlike any elsewhere. (Other parts of the country, while also mostly unspoiled, are topographically different, with the giant Gobi Desert in the southeast, forests and taiga in the north, and large, rocky mountain ranges in the far west, including at least 20 eternally snow-capped peaks.)

  Because the Mongolians have been dependent on nature for their personal survival and the nation’s advancement, they seek to live in harmony with the land and not defile the environment. When they moved a camp, I saw them even fill in the holes they’d dug for tent poles. They showed a reverence for nature that derived from shamanism, a spiritual practice whose believers seek to reach altered states of consciousness to interact with the spirit world and channel its transcendental energies to this world. Some of this will change as they shift into the modern era, burning wood in their stoves instead of dried cow patties, soon completing an east-to-west artery across the nation that will triple its miles of paved roads, ramping up the gargantuan Oyu Tolgoi copper mine, and increasingly moving from the wide open spaces to UB in search of the good life. But, for the time being, earth has no unsullied place like it.