The most closed country in the world is opening for tourists from Belarus. For the first time we have the opportunity to purchase direct plane ticket from Minsk to Pyongyang. This possibility does not come cheap. But every year only 10 thousand people from around the world get the chance to visit North Korea.
They come to feel the spirit of the era, the atmosphere of the 50s and see how grandparents once lived. The Minsk based tourist company Merlintour invites you to join the next year’s visit to the DPRK, the cost of a week-long program is about three thousand euros.
“A tour into the closed country cannot be cheap, we rent a Belavia plane, which will only carry the participants of the tour. We plan to have 135 people, 50 places we give to the Belarusians, the rest of the places are almost all reserved,” said Iryna Baranava, touring company Merlintour.
To attract even more potential clients, the organizers of the tour launched a DPRK week in Minsk. It is still possible to get to the special screenings about North Korea.
“North Korea is quite exotic for us and we are interested to see our past through it,” said the visitor of the DPRK week.
“Stalinism continues to exist quite successfully in North Korea, it is a conserved Stalinism and it is interesting in the way that it shows how our grandfathers lived,” adds another visitor of the DPRK week.
Outside the tourism industry, Minsk and Pyongyang are related with few construction projects that were concluded before the crisis, at a time when the Belarusian builders left en masse in Russia, including to the construction of the Sochi Olympic infrastructure.
According to Belsat, now out of a few thousand North Korean specialists once working in Minsk, only a few hundred people are left waiting for the closure of contracts. They do not advertize their presence in Minsk, and salaries from the work of North Korean workers are directly received by the DPRK Embassy.
“The official Pyongyang has decided to raise the number of tourists by 2020 up to 2 million per year. We were there, when there were very few Europeans. Now the situation begins to change, the number of tourists there is growing very quickly,” says the activist Aleh Novikau.
Those who have visited North Korea, do not advise to go there for more than a week. They also warn that you need to be prepared to some absurd rules. For example, a newspaper with a portrait of Kim Jong Un needs to be folded 3 times instead of 2 times, because the fold should not pass through the photo.
The organizers of the Week of North Korea in Minsk stress: flight from Minsk to Pyongyang is a one-time event, and we must seize the moment. So far the tickets for the Tu-154 to the DPRK have been reserved by about a dozen of Belarusians. Visas were promised to everyone, but it is already known that officially there will be no journalists on the tour in North Korea.
Arkadz Nestyarenka, Belsat.eu
