where there’s smoke there’s fire

Today we will see some rare photos from inside North Korea (DPRK) from Viktor Nemeth (blog | flickr, see also his previous post on Chernobyl):

Tourists are, while quite a rarity in the DPRK are actually not that entirely uncommon. Numerous companies organise trips in and some of those trips last as long as twenty-something days. I was taking part in one of the shorter ones – this was a 5-day trip (3, really, the other 2 were mostly about getting to and fro’ the airport) during which we’ve been shown around the sights of Pyongyang, the DMZ and various locations, some more odd than the others (e.g. a water bottling plant, hence the image with the bottles in a factory). As part of the tour one can take the train or fly in from Beijing, then once in Pyongyang we had our items checked, I was asked about the GPS on the camera and my laptop has been looked at if I had any videos on it (I didn’t). We were then driven to the hotel, which is located centrally and has 47 floors. Even though Pyongyang has probably more night-time lights than the rest of the DPRK it’s still pretty dark. Buses and trams are unlit, and so are most of the streets and buildings, save for the monuments of course.

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