[imagesource:Nicole Reed/Hotels of Pyongyang]

Unless you’re a journalist, a politician, or someone who studies oppressive cultures, or culture in North Korea, I can’t imagine why you would want to go to the world’s most secretive country.

It’s certainly not high on the list of places I’d like to visit once this pandemic is behind us and we can travel again.

And yet, it does have a tourism industry.

Of course, once you’re there you probably shouldn’t mention any reservations you might be harbouring about Kim Jong Un and his dictatorship, or else you might find yourself ‘disappeared’. 

At the same time, the higher-end accommodation doesn’t look too bad, as revealed in a rare look at the industry, in a new book, Hotels of Pyongyang, documenting the hotels of the North Korean capital.

TravellerAU spoke to James Scullin, a former tour guide in North Korea, who along with photographer Nicole Reed travelled to Pyongyang to visit 11 international hotels.

For Scullin, 37, it was a chance to satisfy his curiosity by getting inside hotels he had only seen from the outside as a tour guide.

“Western tourists typically stay in just two hotels, but I’d always see these structures and wondered what they were,” Scullin says of the city’s other hotels that were designed for Chinese guests.

Despite the hotels having few guests at times, due to now tenuous relations with China and the COVID-19 pandemic which recently made its way into the country, the staff have remained employed and the hotels have been kept in pristine condition.

“In any other country, the hotels would go out of business … but in North Korea, because everything is government owned, these relics survive,” he says.

“So you’ve got this really old, brutalist, seemingly dated structure, and inside there are people cleaning it and maintaining it.”

“A lot of them have these epic lobbies, grand dining halls, strange karaoke rooms. They’re such a connection to the past because typically there’s not a lot of renovation that’s happened, but the maintenance has been first class.”

Scullin became a tour guide for Western tourists while he was living in China in 2013.

“You can be quite nervous going over there, then you meet the local guides – who are often young women in the their 20s and 30s – who are really personable. You can be disarmed by that.”

As a Western guide, Scullin says it was part of his role to ensure tourists didn’t relax too much and kept in mind the various rules of the society – like not photographing soldiers or cropping any shot of a leader’s image.

He says that getting permission to photograph the hotels wasn’t difficult because there were no political elements to the project.

One of the hotels featured in the book is the infamous Ryugyong Hotel – a giant, 105-storey structure, reportedly with 3000 rooms, which has been under construction since 1987. As far as we know, it’s yet to host a single guest.

Scullin says that Koryo Hotel is his favourite because of the experience that he had there.

“You’d relax with the guides in the revolving restaurant and talk. Not about political things, but what their lives were like – dating, career, family,” he says.

The highlight of the hotel, however, is the karaoke room.

“It’s just stuck in the 80s. It’s so kitsch. It’s got four different types of tiling, it’s got this huge, curved futuristic-looking bar like something from The Jetsons,” he says.

That karaoke room is very full-on.

The people behind the design of the hotels remains a mystery.

As far as visiting North Korea is concerned, Scullin says it’s a unique experience.

“In a world that’s so globalised, countries are becoming more and more similar,” he says. “North Korea is up there with Cuba, in terms of being a place that’s nothing like anywhere you’ve been before.

“Visiting gives a new perspective on what the country is like, with all its troubles and challenges as part of that. “

‘Troubles and challenges’ is a nice way of putting it.

I’m sure the people trapped there would describe it differently, if they were allowed to do so.

[source:travellerau]