The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  After a few days at sea, when the North Atlantic swells measured 4 to 5 meters, I had assorted lacerations, contusions, and boo-boos on my arms and legs from being hurled willy-nilly into things. My balancing abilities had been reduced to those of a drunk wearing reading glasses while descending a staircase during an earthquake. I spent a lot of time in my cabin, occasionally venturing into the cold and windy outdoors to pass time on the deck, which was furnished with four old plastic chairs roped to a pole. From there, if I was lucky, I could observe a handful of crewmen throwing scrap wood overboard. A chart posted in the bridge states what can and can’t be dumped. If you are at least 12 nautical miles from shore, you can toss any sort of food waste except animal carcasses. You must refrain from dumping synthetic ropes, fishing gear, incinerator ashes, and clinkers.

  I also sometimes strolled along the ship’s flank, past bins of orange chains and green ratchets, spools of thick aqua nylon rope, large burlap sacks brimming with cast-iron thingamajigs, barrels of lubricant, nooks begging for stowaways, a miscellany of green-painted steel structures with names like Void Vent and Cargo Hose Drench Connection, and the four mighty cranes, the winches, and the other things you pray to Neptune don’t fall on top of you, until I reached the bow, where—holy moly, could this be?—only a 42-inch-high rail separated me from Davy Jones’s locker. I visited the bow of the ship regularly, even though Paul, the chief mate, told me that nobody goes there—“only the passengers, to recreate the scene in Titanic.”

  I haven’t introduced you to our captain, Florin Copae, or is it Copae Florin? To be safe, I’ll call him captain. Originally I’d been booked on a different voyage, but I jumped ship when my travel agent told me it would be helmed by a man classified “not passenger-friendly.” The captain of the Rickmers Seoul, a 61-year-old Romanian with a beard, waxy silver hair, a missing tooth, and a convex midriff, is not passenger-unfriendly, but neither would anyone place him in the “palsy-walsy” category. He, like the other officers, usually sat alone at the dining-room table and ate with dispatch. When we were dockside, he wore a khaki shirt with epaulettes and matching shorts or a pressed orange jumpsuit embroidered with the word Master. He is all business—in Antwerp, where we were loading 260-ton friction winches, I said hello to him in the stairwell, to which he replied, curtly and justifiably, “I am fully busy.”

  On the open sea, he wore a T-shirt, shorts, socks, and sandals. From 7:30 in the morning until 1 or 2 a.m., he is bogged down with administrative concerns and e-mails (yes, he had an Internet connection and I did not), but, if you are lucky, you can catch him with time to talk, and here is what you might learn: that he’d had his heart set on being a captain since he was a little boy (“I was reading too many books about Magellan when the teacher asked us what we wanted to be”) but didn’t see the ocean until his twenties, when he was a student at the naval academy; that he rarely gets seasick but when he does he likes to eat greasy food; that he hasn’t read a newspaper for five or six years (“fed up with politics”); that he is on the ship four months and then at home four months; that his wife is a doctor and his daughter is in medical school; and that, with regard to the few females in the business, he has “nothing against women captains and pilots but when the situation is getting hard they are getting lost.”

  Does he like his job? “I wouldn’t do it if I was starting now. Now it’s a dog life. I am always doing accounting and paperwork.” The combination of the Internet and scads of new environmental regulations, such as a rule that requires vessels to change from high-sulfur fuel to low-sulfur fuel when they are within certain distances of U.S. shores, has made it dreary work. What cheers up the captain? Plants. When we reached Hamburg, a friend delivered a cutting from the captain’s garden in Romania, along with a package of soil, so that he could transfer his Red Lucky magnolia to a larger pot.

  On Day 5—or was it Day 500?—I found, tucked in a niche, four life-sized wooden dummies standing at attention and looking like G.I. Joes, or perhaps Safety Patrol Kens. They wore orange nylon vests over blue down jackets and had handcrafted Elmer Fuddish toy shotguns tied diagonally across their chests. The faces of these inaction figures, partly obscured by cinched hoods and ski caps, were drawn on with Magic Marker, except for the noses, which were plywood wedges nailed on by someone who clearly was heavily influenced by cubism.

  Is this the juncture at which our story takes a kinky turn? No. Pirates, please don’t read this: when the Rickmers Seoul traverses treacherous zones, such as the Gulf of Aden, the Strait of Malacca, or the Indian Ocean, the mannequins are propped up on the bow like scarecrows. In the event that the bad guys are not stupid enough to fall for this ruse and try to climb aboard, they might be thwarted by the razor wire and electric fencing that surround the ship, not to mention crew members spraying them with fire hoses. If these defenses fail, the plan is for everyone but the captain and one able-bodied seaman to hide out in the Citadel, a panic room in the nether region of the vessel that contains a couple of mattresses, two benches, a primitive toilet, and rations. Passengers need not worry about this contingency, because since 2011 they have not been allowed on any Rickmers ships sailing between Genoa and Singapore. This ban was put in place because certain travelers, according to Cruise People, an agency specializing in sea travel, “ignored officers’ instructions to stay off the decks in areas where pirates are active.” Partly because so many vessels now carry armed security guards when traversing treacherous waters, the worldwide incidence of pirate attacks is on the decrease (439 in 2011; 297 in 2012; 264 in 2013, which does not include the Tom Hanks movie). Benjie Monana, the messman, told me that the previous ship he was on was fired upon in the Gulf of Aden by pirates in three small boats, satellites of a mother ship. “The captain was going crazy,” Monana said, “so the chief mate took over. We escaped, but they found a few bullets on the bridge.”

  Before long—I mean, after long—it was Saturday night. Everyone not on duty was whooping it up in the Blue Bar. The crew had been preparing for the bash all afternoon. Jell-O molds were jelled, sheet cakes baked, fruit cup dumped into a punch bowl of condensed milk to make a dessert that looked like a polluted pond, Romanian sausage concocted according to a special recipe from the captain, and chicken legs grilled over a fire while, nearby, a pig spent hours being turned on a spit as if it were taking a Pilates class. Throughout the night, the Seoul Mate band—second officer on drums, AB on lead guitar, and bosun playing rhythm guitar and singing—performed “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Yellow Submarine,” and “Jamaica Farewell,” among other songs. The captain, sitting well apart from the crew, drank and smoked and smiled at the musicians as if he were a father at his child’s recital. The passengers occasionally danced, one of them because she had given her word that she would.

  A week later, we were in Antwerp, where I said hello to some more steel products and goodbye to the Neaums and Roland Gueffroy. Three days after that, I disembarked in Hamburg. This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you that, after an inauspicious beginning to my aqueous venture, ultimately I became one with the universe and also finished Moby-Dick (don’t tell me how it ends). Unfortunately, when there is very little to do in a day—and you have no Wikipedia—you get very little done. When I set foot on land again, I was reminded of Robert Louis Stevenson’s line. “Old and young,” he wrote, “we are all on our last cruise.” I couldn’t have said it better.

  TIM NEVILLE

  The Great Pleasure Project

  FROM Ski Magazine

  TO GET TO the world’s most exotic ski resort you must first get to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, where, after the People’s Army checks your papers and records your smartphone’s serial number, you will end up at the Yanggakdo, one of perhaps eight hotels in this city of 2.5 million people where foreigners are allowed to stay. The hotel is grayish blue and lords over a horn-shaped island. It has 47 floors and 1,000 outdated rooms. About 30 of those rooms are occupied today.

  It is mid-February, the yea
r Juche 103. The frozen Taedong River that flows around the hotel is corpse-gray, stiff and riddled with abandoned ice-fishing holes that look like bullet wounds. Few lights burn anywhere, only a billboard flickering in the distance with images of the country’s dictator, Kim Jong-un. He’s the reason I’m here.

  But first, breakfast. The elevator snaps shut with crushing authority. It’s 38 floors down from my room to Restaurant 1, which sits next to Restaurant 2, which sits next to a glass-walled gift shop that sells severed baby bear paws to cure indigestion.

  At Floor 35 the doors jerk open. The hallway is a coal mine. No one is there.

  “Hello?” I call. No reply.

  The same happens again four floors later, and again three floors after that. It happens at Floor 25 and Floor 23 and Floor 19. Each time the scene is spookier than the last. No lights. No people. Only Floor 5 doesn’t open. This is because there is no button for Floor 5, and the stairwells at Floors 4 and 6 are barricaded and locked. Floor 5, I’ll later learn, holds all the bugging devices.

  There isn’t so much eavesdropping to do. Some say fewer than 2,500 Americans have visited the country since the Korean War ended in 1953, although official numbers are impossible to come by. Up until 2010 the regime refused to allow its bloodiest enemy into the country at all save for brief visits to Pyongyang’s summer mass games, a highly choreographed display of gymnastics and dances designed to demonstrate the power of the collective over the individual. Visa rules have relaxed since then, but foolish Westerners still get detained from time to time. My friend Dan Patitucci and I are among fewer than a handful of American civilians ever to witness the world’s bleakest country in its bleakest month, and our reason is absurd: to be among the first people ever to ski North Korea’s first, best, newest, and only luxury ski resort.

  Dan and I are spending five nights in and around Pyongyang first to get a feel for the country. When we arrive the entire nation is celebrating what would have been the seventy-third birthday of Kim Jong-il with dances, synchronized-swimming shows, and garish exhibitions of giant genetically engineered begonias called kimjongilias. We must do as we’re told. We bow before statues in unison. We may not take pictures of anything “dirty” or “poor” but “only beautiful, please.” We may not even leave the Yanggakdo without a minder. Make that two minders—one to watch us and another to watch the watcher.

  Back in the elevator the doors crash open into darkness again. This time the air rushes out as a herd of shriveled people rushes in. They are elderly Koreans, barely 4 feet high, their bodies gnarled by a lifetime of hunger, disease, and deprivation. I have no idea who they are or why they are here. They move in such a tight, protective pack that their heads bash together like livestock in a chute. Their eyes—Jesus. I can’t stop looking at their eyes. They are gray and so gooey they look like they could drip out of their skulls and stain the floor.

  A foreigner is not supposed to see this. This is a glitch in the Matrix that reveals the colossal failures happening inside North Korea. When we reach the lobby everyone scurries out. The bellhop looks at them, then at us. He sees our cameras and reports us to a guide.

  “You took photos,” the guide says.

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “Hmm,” he says suspiciously, but he lets us go.

  Terrible things can happen if you don’t play the game that every North Korean must play. You feign reverence and you swallow lies. You fold your newspaper gingerly to leave no creases on Kim Jong-un’s face. Mar his visage with a coffee ring and off to the gulag you go. The worst part is how you must be thankful for this misery. “We owe everything to our glorious leaders,” a North Korean flight attendant named Miss Rhee told me with zero emotion. “They love us and we love them.”

  The first leader, regime founder Kim Il-sung, ruled the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for 50 years after the Korean War killed at least 2 million people and left the peninsula divided into a Communist north and a capitalist south. The oldest of his four legitimate sons, Kim Jong-il, came next, in 1994. He immortalized his father by anointing him the country’s Eternal President and resetting the calendar to mark the years since Kim Il-sung’s birth and his adherence to juche, a belief in Korean self-reliance from the rest of the world.

  Psychologists working in conjunction with the Society for Terrorism Research would later show Kim Jong-il to be more sadistic than Saddam Hussein and Hitler. The “Highest Incarnation of the Revolutionary Comradely Love,” as he was sometimes called, kidnapped foreign movie stars and spent billions on a nuclear bomb while executing peasants for distributing rice during a famine. He died in a plush train car in 2011 and his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, took over. The boy-faced dictator was such a mystery to intelligence agencies that no one was even sure of his age. Was he 29? 30? 31? What was certain was that the oldest son and heir apparent, Kim Jong-nam, had forever fouled his chances of furthering the dynasty after Japanese authorities arrested him in 2001 for trying to slip into their country on a fake passport. It was no cloak-and-dagger mission. He was on his way to Disneyland.

  “These guys have never had to go around kissing babies,” says Simon Cockerell, manager of Beijing-based Koryo Tours, who has led at least 140 trips into North Korea since 1993. “They almost never speak. You never see them arriving or leaving or doing anything humans do.”

  This divinelike mystique allows the Kims to be experts on everything. When he wasn’t murdering his rivals, Kim Il-sung supposedly penned operas with titles like Sea of Blood. Kim Jong-il had a “profound knowledge of poultry,” shot 11 holes in one on his first game of golf, and apparently never pooed. Kim Jong-un, it turns out, is a pretty great skier.

  That last bit might actually be true. Unknown to virtually everyone inside North Korea, Kim Jong-un attended private school in Bern, Switzerland, where he almost certainly went skiing. After all, that entire country takes off for a week every winter to pursue the sport, and the Alps are within easy reach of town. So far his time in power has been characterized in part by the creation of a raft of new leisure facilities. You can now slide around at a water park in Pyongyang, watch dolphins at a dolphinarium, or ride roller coasters at a place called the People’s Pleasure Ground.

  “Since he’s come into power there are so many changes happening,” says Amanda Carr, a British guide who has made at least 44 trips to North Korea. “Every year more places are opening up.”

  A few weeks before my visit, Kim Jong-un unveiled his greatest pleasure project yet: the $100 million Masik Ryong Ski Resort. Located in the Ryongjo Workers’ District of Kangwon Province, some 110 miles east of Pyongyang, the resort opened on New Year’s Day 2014 with 10 north-facing runs, 6 lifts, and 2,300 vertical feet of cold northeast Asian powder. The army’s shock brigades had built it all in just 18 months. Bands played, people cheered. Even Kim Jong-un’s good pal Dennis Rodman was on hand, reportedly drunk and roaring around on a Ski-Doo. Then the portly dictator himself donned a dashing black hat and spent a few hours skiing with such perfect poise that he didn’t even need his poles. That was the rumor anyway, because no one actually saw it.

  Most remarkable of all, Americans could ski there, too. All I had to do was sign up with a North Korean–approved tour company and buy medical evacuation insurance. “I really have to insist that you get it,” Rich Beal, a polite Koryo Tours manager told me when we met in China. “The treatment for a compound fracture there is amputation.”

  Our five days of context in and around Pyongyang creep by. Speakers blast propaganda from rooftops. Bright red signs at intersections scream slogans like DEFENDING THE LEADER AT THE COST OF OUR LIFE IS OUR BEST LIFE! We go bowling as if nothing is wrong and visit a war museum so full of misinformation that even the East Germans ridiculed it in a 1961 memo. One day we put on ties and bow before the waxy remains of Kim Jong-il, who lies in a glass box like Lenin with his big, glorious head on a white bolster pillow. An Australian in another group gets detained for trying to distribute Christianity pamphlets, a crime a
gainst the state.

  At last the skiing can begin. It’s a four-hour trip to Masik Ryong on roads long and straight enough to land military jets because military jets do land on them. The landscape is severe, indifferent, beautiful: sharp hills, frosty streams, and flat, concrete town houses with rows of doors that look like harmonica chambers. We pass a truck that runs on wood and a soldier on a bike with a rifle bouncing in a handlebar basket. If North Korea were The Hunger Games, Pyongyang would be the Capitol: a place reserved for the elite to enjoy good food, nice clothes, and electricity. Out in the districts, the people have nothing.

  Dark falls and even the stars seem too spooked to shine. Then, suddenly, Masik: the resort burns away the night like an atomic blast. Lights blaze from the top of two trapezoidal hotels, dubbed Hotel 1 and Hotel 2. Before we enter, a guard checks everyone’s permits. Inside, the lobbies twinkle with recessed spotlights and flat-screen monitors. The woodwork is elegant. The tiles sparkle under our heels. Kim Jong-un has good taste. Even the urinals have that new-urinal smell.

  The whole thing is sickening, really. A United Nations report lists a prison camp not so far away, a place called Kyohwaso No. 8, where escapees say they expected to die. You can’t see it but you know it’s there. The cognitive dissonance is so loud I make a deal with myself: see Masik for what it is, not whose it is.

  The next morning a light snow falls and a dozen men with witch’s brooms line up in ranks to clear the pathways and parking lots, all of which are empty. I wander downstairs to a breakfast of pickled fern and then to the gear-rental room beneath Hotel 2. Unlike South Korea, which will host the Winter Games in 2018, North Korea has virtually no ski culture at all. I expect no line.