A cartoonist’s view of North Korea

by Neil Woodburn on


I never would have expected a graphic novel to truly capture the sense of a place, but recently, I was pleasantly proven wrong with a nice gift I received for Christmas.

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle is a superb snapshot, perhaps the best I’ve seen, of what it is truly like to visit North Korea.

Delisle is a French Canadian who went to Pyongyang to work with the local animation studio. He was fortunate enough (or, perhaps, unfortunate enough) to spend more time there than I was permitted to during my recent visit since he was there in a professional capacity. This provided him the opportunity to explore Pyongyang a little more in depth than the average tourist does and with a more unique perspective–that of a cartoonist.Delisle’s eye for detail, for example, reveals bits and pieces of Pyongyang most people never see. For example, like every other tourist, he did not fail to notice the ubiquitous portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il that hang in nearly every room throughout the city. The difference, however, is that Delisle discovered that the portraits are thicker at the top of the frame, thus angling them in a way that not only minimizes reflection, but also makes them appear as though the Kims are looking down at you.

What’s truly wonderful about Delisle’s book, however, is that the entire thing is rendered in black and white shaded cartoons that perfectly capture the morose, stilted atmosphere of the world’s most reclusive Hermit Kingdom. In addition, the writing is sparse, succinct, powerful, and humorous, as you’d expect from a cartoonist.

I can’t recommend this book enough. I read it after visiting North Korea and found myself laughing and nodding my head in agreement throughout the entire, enjoyable read. Those who have never been, will most certainly enjoy it equally as much.

Google Earth: Zooming in on the forbidden sites of North Korea

by Neil Woodburn on


It sure is tough to be a hermit kingdom these days with Google Earth constantly peering into your business.

Take North Korea, for example. Just a few years ago, it was impossible for Americans to visit this reclusive country and Kim Jong Il was happy. Now, a few hundred Americans are let in each summer to view a small sliver of the country. It thought I was pretty special being one of them. It turns out, however, that armchair travelers can sit at their computers and do a much better job of zooming into all those secret airfields, bases, and palaces which our guides kept hidden from us on the ground.

One of the most outstanding things I’ve ever seen on Google Earth is an extraordinarily exhaustive mashup detailing countless military installations, concentration camps, monuments, palaces, government buildings, and other “off limit” sites throughout North Korea. I’ve just spent most of the evening zeroing in on all the places I visited in Pyongyang and then backing up the view to check out the surrounding areas we were prohibited from seeing.

Most unnerving are the rows and rows of work camp barracks located in the north of the country (above) that are clearly visible. All the cleanliness and order of Pyongyang almost makes one forget such atrocities exist in North Korea.

If you’ve got some time, spend a few minutes surfing through these enthralling yet bizarre satellite images of North Korea; because when things look off from outer space, you just know they’re far worse at ground level.

GADLING TAKE FIVE: Week of December 22-28

by Jamie Rhein on

Because Catherine is stuck at the Dallas Airport right now trying to get back to Alaska, I’m bringing you this week’s GADLING TAKE FIVE. Stay-tuned for Catherine’s tales of her holiday travels. In the meantime, here’s what happened this week in the midst of holiday mayhem.

Seriously, it’s very hard to choose from what’s written each week so I’m turning to the numbers game. For starters, here are the three posts that have been forwarded the most.

Aaron’s post “Are you smarter than a two-year-old” is one that can wow you or make you feel terrible that your geography skills are worse than a toddler’s. This toddler is also getting her 15 minutes of fame and more as she makes the TV circuit showing off her skills.

Grant’s “Christmas in Saigon” is one indication of how cultural traditions travel and that sometimes when a culture takes on another culture’s trait (Santa hats) it goes even further with it. I’ve seen the Santas on the motorcycles that Grant refers to. The man knows what he’s taking about.

Abha’s “Don’t miss the sky this christmas” gives reasons why it’s good to look up this time of year. The winter sky is perfect for star gazing. Christmas Eve may have been a perfect night, but there are still plenty of others.

Also this week, Neil’s must -read series on traveling in North Korea ended with his post, “Infiltrating North Korea Part 19: A Final Word.” If you haven’t read the series, click here to read it from the beginning.

As a series of sorts to follow, Jerry is embarking on a look at Nauru, a country you may not have heard of. Obviously, it’s one of the world’s smallest. His post appropriately named “A country you’ve never heard of” is the only posting so far, but I assure you there are others in the line-up.

Infiltrating North Korea Part 19: A Final Word

by Neil Woodburn on


Infiltrating North Korea is a 19-part series exploring the world’s most reclusive nation and its bizarre, anachronistic way of life. To start reading at the beginning of the series, be sure to click here.

Although it was a short trip of only five days, my time in North Korea proved to be one of the most fascinating journeys I’ve ever taken.

This brief glimpse into the world’s most reclusive nation was a rare opportunity to go back in time and witness what the Soviet Union was like fifty years ago. Everything I’ve ever read about the former USSR was alive and well in the streets of Pyongyang; red banners hanging everywhere, blanket censorship, ubiquitous propaganda, very few automobiles, fantastic and accessible cultural arts, barely any crime, and a tightly controlled populace afraid to even fold a newspaper with an image of Kim Il Sung on the front for fear of doing something sacrilegious to the Great Leader’s image.

The North Koreans, however, have taken this concept of totalitarianism even further than the Soviets ever did. The Korean cult of personality, for example, requires that people not only wear a pin of Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il on their lapel every day, but also that they bow to any statue of the leaders they come across–and there are a lot of statues in North Korea. Not even Stalin nor Lenin were worshipped to such a degree.The North Koreans are also more paranoid about tourists than their Soviet predecessors; we weren’t allowed to speak to anyone during our time in North Korea, we were routinely prohibited from taking photographs, and we couldn’t wander about on our own. We saw only what the government wanted us to see and spoke only to those thoroughly vetted and officially approved to deal with tourists.

Knowing that my journey to North Korea was carefully regulated to reveal only the positive sides of this “socialist paradise” was extraordinarily frustrating. History is full of naïve international observers who were similarly distracted by smoke and mirror tactics, and then reported back to the civilized world about the excellent conditions they witnessed at various prisons, camps, and hellholes.


Totalitarian governments are very effective with their Potemkin villages and deceitful webs and I wanted to make sure I did not fall victim as well. I therefore read everything I could get my hands on before visiting the country. If you plan on going yourself, I highly recommend that you do the same, otherwise you will be won over by singing children, clean streets, well dressed citizens, and a fanatical devotion to socialism.

In fact, I will go so far as to say that it’s criminal to visit North Korea without educating yourself first. Mandatory reading starts with The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-Hwan–the son of a privileged Pyongyang family who spent ten years of his life, starting at the age of nine, in a North Korean labor camp. Chol-Hwan is coincidently my age and it was therefore particularly poignant knowing that at the same time I was going to high school homecoming dances and football games in the 1980s, Chol-Hwan was being beaten, brainwashed, and forced to cut trees and dig holes in freezing temperatures without adequate clothing. And, he ate rats to survive.

This certainly raises a moral conundrum; should tourists pay exorbitant prices to visit this totalitarian nation knowing that their hard currency helps support the regime?

I scoffed at this originally because my experience in traveling has taught me that human interaction with supposed “enemies” is the very best diplomacy in the world. In addition, bringing an outside perspective to an imprisoned people can also be extraordinarily powerful. The whole reason East Germany was the first communist country to fall was because they had more access to the outside world than any other communist country–they saw what life was like on the other side of the Wall and they rebelled.


The problem with North Korea, however, is that the people remain isolated even in the presence of foreigners. We were never given a chance to speak or interact with a single person. My initial belief that I could make some type of impact, perhaps by simply giving a child a candy bar, turned out to be an absurd impossibility.

And, as a result, my presence did nothing more than slightly boost the government coffers and help Kim Jong Il purchase more of his beloved premium cognac while the rest of the country starves.

And so, I leave it up to you to decide on whether such a trip is appropriate or not (and if you’d like contact information for my travel agent, please email me). Despite my frustrations, however, I feel fortunate that I was able to go and I can only hope that my injection of hard currency into the Kim Jong Il regime has been negated by this fair and balanced account of my time spent in the Hermit Kingdom.

Yesterday: A Tale of Two Cities

Infiltrating North Korea Part 18: A Tale of Two Cities, Pyongyang vs. Seoul

by Neil Woodburn on

Infiltrating North Korea is a 19-part series exploring the world’s most reclusive nation and its bizarre, anachronistic way of life. To start reading at the beginning of the series, be sure to click here.

When it came time to leave North Korea and check out how the other half lives, it wasn’t as easy as showing up at the border and crossing from the North into South Korea; the two countries are still technically at war and border crossings as well as direct flights simply don’t exist between them.

Instead, I had to fly to China and then onwards to Seoul. Although the travel time took less than a day, I felt as though I had journeyed 50 years into the future when I arrived in South Korea.

I had never been to South Korea before and it was very odd showing up for the first time having just come from the North. I can’t imagine that too many people are introduced to the Korean Peninsula in this same unorthodox order, but by doing so, my perspective shifted and I began comparing the South to my experience in the North, instead of the other way around (which is the way it’s normally done).

Although I was in the sedate North for only five days, I was nonetheless taken aback when I arrived in the chaos of Seoul and was briefly overwhelmed with the mass of people, the hordes of traffic, the loud noise pollution and the avalanche of consumerism screaming for my attention with neon lights and brightly lit storefronts. North Korean defectors who arrive here must explode from sensory overload.

Seoul was very alive and very, very different from anything I saw in North Korea. It’s simply amazing that a similar people divided by a political line drawn in the sand can grow so radically apart and change so fundamentally over the course of 60 years. We’ve seen this before in East and West Germany, but the differences in Korea are far more extreme.

Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate this is a simple satellite photo of the Korean Peninsula at night which clearly shows a very dark North and a brightly lit South.

The differences are equally extreme when a tourist such as myself is able to zoom down to a more granular level and personally witness the impact of communism in the North, the explosion of capitalism in the South, and the shocking polarity which has occurred as a result.

The photos accompanying this post help illustrate this in a simple, visual manner. As you’ve no doubt figured out by now, the North Koreans are featured on the left (naturally) while their southern brothers are spotlighted on the right.

The differences, in my opinion, are so pronounced that I could mix up the photos and most people will still be able to guess which ones were taken in the North. One thing that doesn’t come across, however, is the pronounced height difference between the two countries. Prior to World War II, a variance didn’t exist. But after years of malnutrition, northerners are now four inches shorter than their South Korean counterparts. In fact, according to a fascinating LA Times article by Barbara Demick, the problem has become so extreme that the North Korean army has waived its 5’3″ height requirement.

Perhaps one day in the future, North and South will become one country; it will take countless more generations after that, however, before the Koreans return to being one people.

Yesterday: Video Tour of Pyongyang Highlights
Tomorrow: A Final Word