Tourists are banned from North Korea, so I became a marathon runner to get in

Earlier this month, George and 199 other Western content creators flew to North Korea with a Beijing-based tour company to participate in Pyongyang’s annual marathon. 

They were the first Westerners to enter the capital city since the government banned foreigners from entering the country five years ago.

George’s sources told him this ‘delegation’ was a compromise between two factions in the North Korean government. “It surprised me that there are factions,” he said. “But of course there are.” 

Because:

“North Korean officials are just like any other bureaucrats”

North Korean bureaucrats (known in the country as ‘the people who oversee the revolution’) don’t always act on the orders of the Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un. George learnt this during his stay. “Ministers have some autonomy. They push their agendas. No one person guides everything, contrary to what we hear.” 

The conservatives had pushed for a tourism ban because they didn’t want foreigners corrupting the people with alien ideas. “They don’t like Christians, for example,” said George. “Sometimes Christians come and distribute pamphlets about Jesus. The government wants to keep the country ideologically pure.”

But another faction—those in tourism mainly—wanted foreigners to know the truth about the country, without (as George termed it) all the “North Korea Hysteria” so prevalent in the West.

Perhaps that’s why the Western delegates were two hundred influencers armed with GoPros. As George said, “They wanted more positive international press coverage.”

And it worked. When the delegates exited the plane in Beijing, they were swamped with Japanese reporters. 

I digress.

The Pyonyang marathon… 

… Featured a twenty-four-mile circuit through the “massive highways, public squares and tower blocks” of North Korea’s capital.

It wasn’t unlike many post-Communist cities in Eastern Europe, said George. The chief difference was that Pyongyang has no public advertising anywhere. George felt their antipathy. “North Koreans call advertising ‘litter’,” he said. “I can’t say I disagree with them.” 

On every street for every kilometre, he jogged by armed sentries posted to ensure the Western delegates didn’t stray too far or go anywhere they weren’t supposed to. This was a freedom not usually given to outsiders, the chance to see the city in its normal, boring, day-to-day life. 

As he ran, passersby smiled at him or raised their hands in greeting.

Once, two women hailed him as he turned a corner. It turned out they were Chinese diplomats. “They spoke very good English,” he said. “And they were very progressive. We had a normal, unscripted conversation.” 

Another time, he couldn’t believe his eyes: a woman carrying a bright orange Sainsbury’s shopping bag. He ran to her excitedly, causing her “some alarm”.

Then, when he crossed the finishing line, he heard the crowd roar. Tens of thousands of North Koreans crammed into the seats, cheering. He knew it wasn’t scripted. In his own words: “They were just happy to see foreigners in their country.”

For five days, he saw those people leading ordinary lives. Going to karaoke bars and singing You Raise Me Up and It’s Time For Africa. Dining out in pizzerias selling 15-dollar pizzas that only the wealthy could afford. Procrastinating by playing (educational) online games on NK-manufactured smartphones. Men and women drinking, at the end of a long day, North Korea’s pilsner-style beer, brewed with equipment purchased from a British company that went bankrupt in the 1980s. Young men and women attending blind dates in fountain-filled public squares, hoping to marry within a year.

“It was annoying how familiar everything felt.”

Of course, this was different. Because:

“There are two North Koreas”

Several days later, George discovered this while on a Chinese-made bus bound for a North Korean greenhouse facility. The guides said the greenhouse was state-of-the-art, capable of significantly enhancing agricultural production. 

The run-down outskirts of Pyongyang gave way to arable land. George looked out the window, seeing endless fields stretching to a stark horizon. The North Koreans farm every inch of the land in the name of self-sufficiency, and there they were, the labourers digging North Korea’s characteristically hard and unyielding earth in the shadow of towerblocks, vast and decayed.

“There are two North Koreas,” George told me. “I was in Pyongyang, the place they wanted me to see. This wasn’t that place.”

“It felt like a school trip”

The delegates were escorted everywhere by English-speaking guides, although the guides themselves were happy to take them through the city on a whim.

Once, returning to the hotel late at night, they ran with the guides drunk and laughing down the street.

They saw great statues in the public squares commemorating Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, whom the people venerate as gods. “They have an extreme devotion to the leadership,” as George said.

During his stay, however, people didn’t adulate the current Supreme Leader so much as his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founder. George likened him to other national war leaders: Churchill, Lincoln, Lenin. “He’s their figure of salvation, the man who saved them from people who wanted to destroy them.” 

Seventy years ago, Korea became one of the most heavily bombed countries in history. All her major cities were destroyed. 1 million soldiers were killed, 3 million people slaughtered. Before then, the Japanese had forced hundreds of thousands of teenage girls into sexual slavery. George felt this keenly. “This was a traumatised people,” he said, “struggling to grieve.” 

This devotion to a saviour, arising out of suffering, is perhaps why there is one rule to follow in North Korea: do not denigrate the leadership. It must have been hard to uphold when the guides earnestly said that Kim Jong-un personally oversees the blueprint of every new building in the country. After three days, George felt himself normalising it all—the veneration of men as gods, the cult of the supreme leader. He stopped himself once, realising it wasn’t normal.

But George upheld the law to the letter. “Out of respect,” he said. “You shouldn’t go to any country and insult their way of things, no matter how alien it seems.” 

He laid flowers at the foot of the 70-ft-high bronze statue of Kim Il-sung. Seeing this, his guide warmed to him. Later, George told him he wanted to get a haircut in the style of the supreme leader. When in Rome. His guide encouraged him. He even took him to the barbershop to get it done. 

“As long as you don’t defame the leadership, they’re quite relaxed”.

He heard things. Things that suggest North Korea might be changing. Murmurs on the ground that Kim Jong-un is distancing himself from his grandfather, ushering in a new type of official messaging. “But that is just people speculating,” said George. 

Saying goodbye

He found North Koreans curious about the world. Despite the restricted intranet, they had some knowledge about life beyond their borders, even to the point of knowing how we think about them. 

The tour guides cracked jokes about certain members of the public being ‘paid actors’. “North Koreans have a very self-effacing humour,” George said. “Similar to the British.”

North Korea isn’t as isolated as we think. Government officials regularly travel to Russia, China and Africa and return with news from the outside world. 

George gazed, impressed, at the 700-meter-wide Taedong River. He said it looked nice. His guide was surprised. “Why do you care!” he cried. “You have the River Thames!” He had even heard or read about the Brits’ reservedness. “I thought you British people were cold,” he told him. “But you are very nice.” 

The people he spoke to wanted to see the West: Paris, Rome, Barcelona. He asked his guide if he would ever see it. The young man didn’t reply for a few moments, clearly weighed down by something. Then he answered in a low whisper, “No.” 

George found it hard to say goodbye. “I wanted to say, ‘See you soon’, but I knew I would be lying.”

When he boarded the plane, he considered what would happen to the tour guides. They would be taken away to a quiet room in a government building. Superiors looming over them, interrogating them. The delegates may have left, but they could be compromised. 

George doesn’t know if he’ll ever return. He’d heard rumours that tourism would open up in the autumn of 2025, but that was it. 

I asked him: Will North Korea change? I pointed to the emergence of this new middle class he spoke of: people who’ve seen the outside world and return with new ideas like pizza and pop music. I pointed to the “murmurs”, the speculation that the Supreme Leader is slightly distancing himself from his grandfather. 

“This isn’t an emerging coup,” he replied. 

“The system works for the people in power. They don’t want to change it.” 

Follow George on his Instagram account @georgegoesfar as he travels from Pakistan to Afghanistan to explore life under the Taliban.