First Report from the DPRK

It is May 1st, Beijing, sunny and cool.

We just arrived back on Air Koryo's Ilyushin 62 jet from Pyongyang, an arrival back from Oz as surely as Dorothy's.

Let us start at the start....all five of us had a briefing at the Beijing office of our capable tour company and also met 16 other Americans who would join our group. They were a good cross section, all younger than I am (most people are), some very young, generally tilted to the left... the type of keen traveler one would expect for Oz. ...we were given to usual admonitions: not to photograph without asking advice of our guides/minders...to dress respectfully. We later learned that North Koreans are some of the tidiest dressers on earth..perhaps with a military influence...women in suits, wearing heels and looking "Sunday going to church like". Let's just say there were variations on variations of olive drab, grey, navy and brown!

THEN Saturday the 28th was D-DAY and our Peninsula Hotel group was taken from Central Beijing to the airport....with all of us having little rushes of adrenalin. There it was: the Koryo Airlines check in counter. Then boarding the Russian built IL62, a 4-jet plane...the Air Koryo stewardesses dressed to the nines in the national dress, a billowing silk skirt which is waisted slightly oddly across the chest. Very pretty women. Tom and I get the upfront treatment: canapes (peanuts), a gelatinous rice with mystery chicken, some kim chee (the national condiment), sweet bread (almost always in the DPRK the bread is sweet), various soft drinks in lurid colors (sort of lava lamp colors), DPRK beer (slightly flat but rather good...as good as our mainline brands) or a wine which tasted like Welch's grapejuice with an alka seltzer.

We flew over the loess hills of North China....about 45 minutes out did a quick turn and were then obviously the Axis of Evil's air space.....below the land rather severe, the reservoirs looking seriously dry. We descend. Pyongyang's Airport has enormously long run ways.....we land nicely then pass several mothballed domestic aircraft. We are the only international flight at the airport: there are 8 a week compared with circa 2300 for the same period at Seoul's brilliant new Inchon Airport.

The Terminal building is about half the size of old Little Rock Adams Field with some Stalin architectural flourishes here and there. We are bussed in from the craft to the terminal building where there is one baggage carousel moving slowly, oh so slowly.....I would judge that our plane has held circa 150 people and the baggage claim took 50 minutes. Notable freight coming off the plane are numerous leaking sacks of grain! The airport terminal is rather eerily silent. I begin to sense a sort of national paranoia which is going to be reaffirmed time and time and time again. We are here!