Eight interesting facts about North Korea’s airline

What do you know about Air Koryo? Probably not much. The state-run airline for North Korea, it’s the only realistic way you can fly into the country, unless you have some sort of crazy commando resources at your disposal. Of course, there’s a lot you have to do before booking your ticket, and getting a visa can be quite difficult for Americans and other westerners. If you do make it through the red tape though, you’ll find yourself with more options than you realized.

So, ready to book your trip to Arirang and sample the beer and pizza of the most reclusive nation on the planet? Here’s what you need to know about the airline that will take you there:

%Gallery-105693%1. More destinations than you’d expect: the Beijing-Pyongyang route is the one for which Air Koryo is “famous,” but the state-sponsored airline actually connects to eight other cities: Moscow Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Shenyang, Shanghai, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Kuwait City. Of course, if you want to use these cities to enter North Korea, you’ll still need to jump through the many hoops necessary to secure a visa.

2. Road warriors don’t get squat: are you a frequent flier to North Korea? Well, don’t expect much in exchange for your loyalty. While airlines around the world offer rewards programs, a mileage run on Air Koryo is worthless, as the carrier doesn’t have a program, according to a comment it made on its Facebook page.

3. A new home: as of July 15, 2011, the airline’s new terminal at Sunan International Airport in Pyongyang is open for business! The airline claims on Facebook, “The new terminal features modernised facilities for luggage, security, customs, border control and the list goes on to an extent.”

4. Mongolia may be next: it’s always hard to tell when Air Koryo is going to add a route, but this comment to a prospective customer offers some hope: “Flights to Uanbator have been tossed up for a while now, since there is a decent amount of DPRK citizens traveling to Mongolia for a number of reasons. Also vice versa. We havn’t [sic] heard of any flights for August, but we will make some inquiries.”

5. Kuwait’s on the map for a reason: it may not be as busy as the New York-to-London route, but Pyongyang and Kuwait City seem to comprise an important city-pair for Air Koryo. According to the person operating the Air Koryo Facebook page, “Between 5 and 10,000 North Korean workers currently reside in Kuwait. These numbers change weekly with the flights by Air Koryo now enabling the DPR Korean direct flights to Pyongyang.”

6. True dialogue in social media: social media marketers have always discussed the importance of “dialogue” via social media, rather than generating revenue. Well, Air Koryo is a fantastic model. A user responded to the above claim about North Koreans living in Kuwait, “‎between 5 and 10000″ … Wow, that is an accurate answer !” The airline’s intended range was probably “between 5,000 and 10,000,” but the fan appears to have a fetish for the exact. Showing a bit of style, Air Koryo replied, “We’re [not] exactly demographers here, so exact figures are beyond us. Sorry.” The missing word in the response makes the whole exchange even funnier.

7. Online check-in: okay, this is not in Air Koryo’s future, probably because the carrier has a different set of priorities. According to SFGate: “‘You kidding right?’ Air Koryo responded. “There are many things to do before even looking at ‘Online check-in’ such as actually creating a website.'”

8. Don’t expect much love from the cabin crew: in the United States, you only need to worry about bad serviceand the occasional meltdown. In North Korea, the flight attendants will great you with such pleasantries as “I hate America!” But, they do follow it with, “What would you like to drink today, sir?”

Sir?! Now that’s service!

[photos via Wikipedia]

Daily Pampering: Organic resort spa opens in Malaysia

The Chateau Spa and Wellness Resort, the world’s first organic wellness destination spa resort, will open on April 28, 2011 in a 150-million-year-old tropical rainforest in the Berjaya Hills, Malaysia.

Modeled after an 18th century medieval ‘Haut Koesnigburg’ castle in Alsace, France, The Chateau has 210 rooms and suites. The Chateau offers three, five, and seven night packages that are specially designed for guests and include accommodation in The Chateau’s spa rooms, daily meals created by their very own dietician, and complete daily fitness and wellness programs.

The five star deluxe spa resort is the first to offer the use of illusive European thermal facilities, which include a herbal infused sauna chamber, salt grotto or mud chamber, and a soap brush/aquaveda heated bed with automatic body scrub facilities. Each guest meets with a member of the spa personnel to create personalized therapies and programs that are designed to meet individual needs and health goals. Use the therapies to work on pampering, beauty, anti-stress, body cleansing, fitness, weight loss, and more.The spa’s unique products are created from The Chateau’s very own ecologically grown gardens. The Chateau also has an array of fitness and wellness activities to experience, including mountain biking, horse riding, trekking, yoga, dance classes, bowling, as well as an 18 hole award winning golf course.

Why wouldn’t you indulge in this pampering? The Chateau Spa & Organic Wellness Resort is a 45 minute drive from the Kuala Lumpur city center and a 90 minute drive from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

Want more? Get your daily dose of pampering right here.

Culinary travel tale: exploring Malaysia’s complicated cultural feast

Two weeks after I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, it was all over the news: an American fast-food chain had accidentally sold thousands of non-Halal beef burgers to nearly as many Muslim Malaysians. Panic streaked across radio airwaves and through the devout. Religious leaders issued decrees absolving the unsuspecting sinners. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, so my roommate, a beautiful local-born but Canadian-educated environmental researcher, tried to explain. “Food in Malaysia can be… complicated,” she smiled sheepishly.

* * *

My first morning, with the crunch of 12-hour jetlag in my bones, I walked to work alongside a 10-lane highway. Warned about purse-snatchers on motorcycles who had pulled a woman to her death a few days before, I clutched a cloth purse to my right hip. The sun was a low-hanging orb, fuzzy on the edges from smog and dust, and the humidity made moving feel like swimming. In a nondescript concrete office building beside the Eastin Hotel Petaling Jaya, I trudged into the cheap restaurant where I’d been told I could find breakfast.

On a flickering backlit plastic sign, an oversized piece of white bread floated in midair alongside two yellow-yolked eggs, over easy. Of all the pictures that ran along the back of this long, fluorescent-lit eatery, these Western symbols of breakfast were the most familiar. They were also the least appealing. My top lip was coated in a film of perspiration, my pink cotton v-neck already felt heavy in the oppressive early-morning heat. I stared searchingly at lines of text, rows of small black letters, unfamiliar and intimidating in Bahasa Melayu.

To my left, on a small green and white speckled arborite table, a tiny woman in a dark blue hijab and rounded Elton John glasses tore at something that looked like bread and dipped it in something else that looked like gravy. “That,” I pointed to her table. “Please.” The bushy-moustached man behind the counter raised his eyebrows incredulously, but put out a matching tray. “Roti tissu,” he pointed to the bread. “Curry. Fish,” he pointed to the sauce. With a hungry rumble in my stomach, I picked an inward-facing table against the wall, and watched my food as warily as the people behind the counter were watching me. Imitating the small woman’s right-handed scooping technique, I mopped some of the greasy bread, thinner than a crepe and crisp brown on one side, through the lumpy brown-red sauce.

It was sublime.

* * *

As I sat beside a chlorine-blue pool on an orange plastic beach chair, lychee juice dripped down my forearms and onto my thighs. I was completely alone on the large concrete patio beneath my all-Chinese and expat condo building, surrounded by palm trees and razor wire. I licked the fragrant, sticky liquid off my fingers. I wanted to call home, to hear a familiar voice, but it was the middle of the night where everyone I loved lived. The night before, my new roommate, Shaheera, had taken me to a pasar malam (night market) in downtown Kuala Lumpur. The smells and colourful chaos of the busy streets had been paralyzing. Overwhelmed and fearful of drawing attention to myself, I panicked and bought a giant woven basket of lychees at the first stand we passed. The hoary brown fruits had looked only slightly less alien than their similar-tasting Muppet-like rambutan neighbors.

“Are you sure?” shyly asked my wide-eyed companion. “We just got here.” Passing fresh fruit juice stands, rows of bootleg CDs and little old ladies preparing ketayap, a sweet crepe-like pastry filled with palm sugar and grated coconut, I couldn’t buy anything else; my arms were wrapped around a beach ball-sized fruit container. With forced bravado and a sinking heart, I carried the basket all the way home. The next day, surrounded by what seemed like hundreds of brown lychee skins and their oblong pits, covered in fragrant juice and driven by heat, hunger and loneliness, I had finished them all.

* * *

The smoky smell of pork ribs wafted inside from the patio, where platters of fresh exotic fruits (dragon, kiwi, longan and Chinese gooseberries) sat beside a heaping bowl of coleslaw. I had been invited to a barbecue hosted by a woman, trained as a journalist, who had cared for me as a child in Canada many years ago. Disappointed with her career prospects in the West, she had returned to Kuala Lumpur, where she was born. Her new boyfriend, Larry, was still someone else’s husband. His two children, at home with their mother in Louisiana, smiled brightly out of a photograph on a wooden table in their entryway. I was told this situation is common in Malaysia.

Bent over the barbecue, Larry was wearing a light blue apron with an alligator on it, his face shiny and red from the heat. He was making his favourite, long slabs of very non-Halal Cajun-style pork ribs. The crowd was made up entirely of Chinese people, plus me and Larry. The fact that Chinese and Muslim Malaysians rarely associate, something that was incredibly discomfiting when I arrived, didn’t feel quite as strange. It was on this well-appointed garden patio that I first heard a term used to refer to native Muslim Malays: bumiputras. Literally, it means “sons of the soil.” Behind me, someone scoffed. “Worms,” they said, in a low, nasty voice. After that, every time I saw my Malaysian friends and colleagues laughing and chatting, this voice rang in my ears.

* * *

On one of our weekends off, Shaheera took me to an open-air food market in Taman Tun, her hometown neighbourhood. She went to a Canadian university and studied environmental science before she moved back home to “KL,” as she called it. She was one of the few Muslim women I knew who didn’t wear hijab, and she was proud of the strength of her faith. Shoeless, welcomed into her family home for jasmine tea, I admired the pictures she showed me of her mother, raven-haired and stunning, wearing long see-through gauzy sleeves. This is what women used to wear, she said, before the extremists came to power.

We walked up a few steps to the raised market, near her family home, and she explained the system. The platform is lined with stands offering every kind of food you could possibly imagine, and you order from one stand at a time. The owners of the stand deliver the dish to your table. Each family has a specialty; her favorite was char kway teow so I tried it first. It was familiar, tasting like pad thai, but the thick rice noodles and small clams and shrimp were practically burnt in the searing pan in which it had been prepared. The edges of the noodles were caramelized and flecked with chilli sauce, the crisp bean sprouts were crunchy and sweet. And that was only the first course.

Despite the thick humidity of the summer evening, we shared a steaming bowl of asam laksa, a spicy fish gravy soup with chewy shrimp cake, round udon noodles and hunks of tart pineapple, with a dusting of cilantro, peanuts and dried anchovies. We were seated on a raised gray concrete platform at a folding plastic table, eating with flat metal cafeteria cutlery, but we might as well have been at the finest restaurant in the world. There were roast chicken, fresh fruit juices and sweetened pulled tea delivered to the table; and tom yum ayam, a blistering-hot lemongrass soup with chicken, subtly scented with fragrant galangal root and kaffir lime leaves. I ordered the latter in stammering, hesitant Bahasa Melayu. The men at the carts didn’t speak much English; I mustered what I could.

The meal was transcendent. I never wanted it to end. Half a world away from where I was born, in the company of people who had never eaten a single piece of bacon or a pork cutlet, I fell in love with food, and fell hard. As we ate, dish after dish, Shaheera told me long, winding tales of life as a modern Malaysian. She detailed the history and stories of each dish, tales of the coastal Nonya people who introduced flavors of the sea to local cuisine, of poor villagers who sustained themselves with engorged pineapples and stinky durian, pulled from wild jungle plants in times of hardship, and of Chinese spice traders who moored their boats in the southwestern port city of Melaka, fell in love, and decided to make a life for themselves in the hot, complicated country.

* * *

Half a world away from where I was born, in the company of people who had never eaten a single piece of bacon or a pork cutlet, I fell in love with food, and fell hard.

Weeks later, it was midnight and Shaheera and I were prying open dozens of clams and dipping them in dark-tasting bean sauce at a roadside stand. We took short breaks from cracking their tiny gray shells to devour yet another plate of sticky, charred sticks of chicken satay fired by a wizened old man and a small boy over a grill that was nearly in a lane of traffic.

Teenagers and young Muslims, noisy youths in jeans and their gorgeous female companions in rhinestone headscarves, gathered in clumps under strands of large multicolured Christmas lights and a giant gold and green-illuminated palm tree. Drinking sugary pop, they licked the rich, spicy peanut sauce from their fingers. Only 20 feet away, cars zoomed past along an eight-lane highway, separated from us by only a bent chain-link fence. Sitting in comfortable, satiated silence, I was no longer an intruder in their world of noisy color, scent and sound.

* * *

Near the end of my four-month stay, Shaheera, a Danish colleague and I were invited to an exclusive forest estate that belonged to a 60-or-so-year-old prestigious Muslim Malaysian who had worked for the United Nations for decades. Sitting in the front passenger seat, this refined, debonair man told us he had a soft spot for young Western women because we’re spunkier than our Islamic counterparts. We reminded him of New York City. Beside him, our driver eyed our uncovered heads with a mixture of suspicion and lechery. Driving past rice paddies, jungles and mountains, we eventually arrived at a boat launch, where we boarded a long wooden boat amidst a small herd of nearly naked boys, all leaping and diving and dunking each other in the murky water along the shore. Listening and watching for monkeys, we cruised towards the huge, secluded jungle property and its guest cottages. That night we slept in down-stuffed mattresses and fell asleep to the raucous calls of hornbills as fireflies hovered outside our windows. We spent the next morning catching fish with one of our host’s employees in a small metal boat, then watched in awe as his personal chef, under a long, thatched roof, spent an entire day preparing food for a princess.

“A real princess?” we asked with a mixture of adult sarcasm and childlike awe.

That afternoon, she arrived with three bodyguards and a small entourage for an early evening feast that was held on a large patio that hovered over the water. We ate stuffed, grilled fish, at least five of them, alongside metal plates filled with curries, vegetables, and a strangely scented green pod called petai (or, as we found out later, “stinky beans”) that was mixed with the chef’s own belachan. This latter concoction was a blend of chillies and dried shrimp paste that, even today, makes my heart beat faster. Two excellent bottles of red wine, 1994 vintages from Burgundy, sat on the table.

To the happy clattering of cutlery and glassware, we made polite small talk with the princess about her country and the hospitality of our host. “Malaysian food is amazing,” I said. “We eat food this good almost every single night.” Shaheera gasped. The entire table went silent, every head turned towards me and the princess’s eyes blazed with anger. “I mean… this is definitely the best so far… but the food really is… quite…,” I grasped for words as I felt my cozy integration slipping away. Our host smiled a tight smile, and with a gracious turn towards his prestigious guest, took the reins of the conversation and moved it away from what Shaheera later explained had been my almost unforgivable faux pas. While religious edicts banning alcohol didn’t apply that night, it appeared as if rules of wealth still did.

* * *

Gazing out the window as my plane lifted off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, I chided myself for thinking that I could gain a complete understanding of an entire culture in a single well-spent summer. But I suddenly realized that I had learned something else: I hadn’t been able to become part of this complicated country that I now loved, but I had tasted it. With my taste buds as translator, I had been given a chance to understand. And perhaps that was all I could have asked for.

Karen Pinchin has worked as a reporter, editor and freelancer at numerous news organizations, including the CBC, Maclean’s, Newsweek International, The Globe and Mail, The Georgia Straight and The Canadian Press. Her website is www.karenpinchin.com.

[Photos: Flickr | mingthein; avlxyz; mingthein; avlxyz; Laurel Fan]

Snakes on a plane – for real?

First it was monkeys, and now this. A Malaysian man pleaded guilty to smuggling after 95 live boa constrictors burst out of his bag on a luggage belt in the Kuala Lumpur International Airport last week.

Ken Liang “Anson” Wong, 52, was charged with exporting the snakes without a permit, said Shamsuddin Osman, a Malaysian wildlife department official. He will face six months in prison and the equivalent of a $50,000 fine, said Faridz Gohim Abdullah, a prosecuting officer representing Malaysia’s wildlife department. The maximum fine for this crime is up to seven years in jail.

Previously, Wong was sentenced to nearly six years in a U.S. prison in 2001 after he was found guilty of running an animal smuggling ring between Asia and Africa. He was arrested in Mexico in 1998. It is unknown if he served the full six-year sentence.

The most recent arrest took place as Wong was en route to Jakarta, Indonesia. The bag was also found to contain several other snakes and a turtle.

The criminal charges involve the boa constrictors only, because the other animals are not listed as endangered. All of the animals are alive and under the care of wildlife officials, Shamsuddin said.

In July, parliament passed a new law to punish poachers and smugglers more severely, but the act has not yet taken effect.

Activists are urging the government to seek the maximum seven year sentence against Wong, but it prosecutor Abdullah said he was planning to discuss with other government authorities whether to appeal the court’s ruling and seek a tougher sentence.

Image courtesy of http://nas.er.usgs.gov/.

Worst travel mistakes of the 2000’s: Kuala Lumpur passport shenanigans

Back before my days as a Gadling blogger I used to travel on an extremely tight margin. As a starving college graduate, travel was my main priority — debt, work and rent, well, those were ancillary.

My usual modus operandi involved saving up a few hundred dollars in cash and clearing another few hundred on my credit card prior to departure. I could spend and accrue debt in parallel until I returned home. And if I engineered things right, I would be hitting zero dollars and maximum debt by the time I touched down at home.

The success of the above plan was obviously predicated on my travel going flawlessly — no outrageous expenses, disasters or errors on my part. And for the first 99% of my trip through Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Hong Kong, everything worked like a well oiled machine. Until I left for my homeward bound flight from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to Hong Kong to Los Angeles to Dallas to Detroit.

The night prior I had spent my last dollars short of train fare on a couple of delicious Tiger Beers on the streets of KL, the hotel expenses already covered and my last meal consumed. We had opted to stay in a nicer hotel than usual for our last night on the road, a $20 cell with two lonely single beds and dank, flowing curtains. It was a setup so trustworthy that I hid my passport under the mattress and kept my other valuables clutched in my front pocket.

Waking up at 6:30 for my 8:30 Air Asia flight to Bangkok I groggily collected my belongings and shuffled towards the door, my last ringgit going towards an express train ticket to KLIA nonstop.

Few feelings on the planet beat the dread of realizing that you’ve lost your passport. I can only compare it to swallowing a baseball-sized rock or perhaps getting punched in the stomach — the feeling of “Oh no. Something is terribly, terribly wrong,” and a deep, sullen weight inside of your stomach. Reaching the airport I checked to find that I would indeed miss my flight without my passport, but that there was another, later flight with which I could connect. But I had to hurry and get back to that hotel before they cleaned the room.As it turns out, those ringgit that I spent the night prior were indeed my last. Dipping my ATM card into the train station kiosk, the LCD blinked “declined” back at me, slowly, scoldingly. Trying my credit card yielded the same result. I was out of money — completely — in Kuala Lumpur Airport without a passport.

Herein lies the worst feeling that I have ever had in my years travel. No money, no phone, no safety net and no passport in a foreign country. I did two laps around the departure terminal staring at the ceiling and getting my shit together — then put my backpack down and rifled through the gadget pocket. Twenty dollars. I had stashed a twenty in there when I left the states in case of emergency. It was still there.

Back at the hotel my companion had already left and the room had been turned down — the front desk didn’t understand why I needed to get back into the room so urgently. But when they followed me into the room and saw me pick up the mattress they knew why: my passport was still flattened between the slabs. I would make it home, barely, with the last $20 to my name through five different airports, twelve time zones and a lifetime of stress.

As it turns out I wasn’t out of money, there was a problem with all international bank transactions that morning and nothing was making it through. But the lesson of a young, foolish traveler is still seared into my memory: have a backup plan. Have several. You’re not that far from totally cutting loose and falling off the map.