After we had been back to the hotel to change our clothes and have a lunch of the Korean delicacy of cold noodles that was so unpalatable that I was incredibly grateful that I couldn't manage to pick them up even with a knife and fork and was thus spared the need to actually eat them. Then it was onto the bus for a long drive out to the mountains where we were to stay for one night to give us a chance to go for a walk in the beautiful scenery, visit a Buddhist Monastery and Museum and then spend the following morning in the Friendship Exhibition.
We stopped off at the Arch of Triumph in Kaesonmun Square on the way to take a few pictures. It's quite an impressive structure which is 60 metres high and 52.5 metres wide. Once again I can quote from a leaflet picked up at the hotel.
"The Arch of Triumph stands in Kaesonmun Square... a historic place where the Great Leader President Kim Il Sung delivered a speech on October 14, 1945 upon his triumphal return to Pyongyang after he led the twenty-year long arduous anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle to victory"
While it may be impressive I would rather have turned my camera in the opposite direction to where a very large group of people were practising their singing and dancing in preparation for the Kim Il Sung birthday celebrations but when I asked permission I was told that I couldn't photograph people in the capital and so I had to content myself with the monument and a picture of a nearby stadium.
The drive to the mountains was through a drab, flat landscape that looked anything but fertile. Here and there, there were workers in the fields. They appeared to be doing everything by hand with no agricultural implements, however primitive. Only once did I see as much as a simple Ox-drawn plough.
We arrived in the late afternoon at our hotel, a strange looking pyramid shaped structure where we dropped our luggage and went off for that walk. The walk started out up a concrete road that soon turned into a wide dirt road. However before we had progressed very far we were forced to stop. After a conference with some men coming down the hill, our guide informed us that we needed to wait as there was blasting going on ahead. About ten minutes later there was an almighty explosion from further up the track and soon we were able to continue. The walk became steep. Parts of it followed the banks of a stream, others had had slippery steps carved into the stone. About half way up I stopped and said I'd wait. My knees were starting to ache a little and while that would make little difference on the way up I was anticipating the potential trouble on the way down. A couple of others stopped and waited with me.
Around half an hour later we were on the way back down from our short and, frankly, not terribly interesting walk. And an hour after that we were having another dinner in the hotel, this time rather more palatable than the lunchtime noodles had been - though still with bowls full of kimchee.
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