And so we come to the last day in the DPRK. Our return to China was to be by train, a journey of almost twenty four hours, and though it lacked any sightseeing it was not without incident.
Straight after breakfast we took our usual bus to the station where we said our goodbyes to the guides. They goodbyes were sincere enough. Whatever the political situation in North Korea, they had been friendly and courteous and if everything they said was exactly in line with their government then who can blame them for that? I liked our guides, both the ones permanently assigned to us and the ones who had shown us individual things in the country,I didn't even doubt their sincerity. When your sources of information are so limited it's easy to believe the little you are being told.
We were to change trains at the border but on both the North Korean and Chinese trains the set up was similar - four berth sleeper compartments. On the North Korean one I found myself sharing with Neil (our English tour leader), Ray (one of the other members of the group) and a Chinese man who was unconnected with our party and who spoke no English. Neil had some conversation with him in Chinese but I have no idea what it was about.
The train pulled away from the station and out of the city. The views were much as they had been from the bus when we went out to the mountains. Most of what we saw was scarcely even subsistence farming. It was little more than people scratching lines in the ground with sticks. Here and there, there were towns but as impoverished-looking as any I have seen anywhere in the world. The land looked bleak and barren. The occasional signs of industrialisation - empty roads, isolated railways, distant factories - simple added to the feeling of desolation.
We had lunch on the train, a difficult feat of coordination in such cramped conditions but a tasty enough selection of fare.
We played a couple of games of trivial pursuit.
We passed the time.
And then, in the early afternoon we approached the border.
We had been briefed about the procedures that we would encounter there but they were, nevertheless, rather alarming. Especially given what happened, literally five seconds before we stopped at the border station.
We were slowing down to approach; the train was already drawing level with a platform where what looked like a battalion of military police were waiting for us. As the train halted and the soldiers reached for the doors the Chinese man in our compartment quickly drew something from his bag and pushed it down behind my seat. I stared at him and at Neil and Ray. None of the three of us knew what to do. He put his finger to his lips and before any of us could think of how to react there were three soldiers in the train corridor and one in the room with us. What could we do? None of us spoke Korean. The Koreans didn't speak English. The Chinese man spoke neither. Neil spoke Chinese, but what could he possibly say? We did the English thing and did nothing.
The soldiers indicated that they wanted us to leave and wait in the corridor. We did so, waiting anxiously and peering back in through the open door. They called Neil back in and indicated that they wanted his bags. He opened them and they searched, very thoroughly searched, through his belongings. He had his mobile phone with him. As they are forbidden in North Korea, it had been wrapped and sealed at the airport. They checked the seals to make sure that they had not been tampered with and returned it. They took away and checked his passport. Ray and I soon followed, undergoing exactly the same procedures. The small plastic scoring devices from Ray's Travel Trivial Pursuit gave them some pause for thought - a fact which in itself indicates the level of their paranoia. Then it was the turn of the Chinese man. His "interview" was even more thorough than ours had been. Everything in his luggage was examined in detail; he was questioned at length (a process rendered difficult by the language barrier and his tendency to shrug at every question posed); his documents were all taken from him for verification. Then, to my horror, the soldier pulled the back of his seat away from the wall and felt down behind it. Of course there was nothing there, whatever he had hidden was behind my seat. What was it? If they found it, would they think it was mine? The soldier had now stood up and started looking around.
Suddenly there was a little commotion from further down the carriage, from another of the compartments. The soldiers from our compartment went down to check on what was happening and returned a few moments later. They seemed now to have decided that the Chinese man could proceed. He closed up his luggage and sat down.
Meanwhile another guard who had been progressing along the carriage examining everyone's cameras had reached me. She took my camera and indicated that she wanted to know how to review the pictures. I showed her and she started at picture number one, looking at each one. Given that there were over eight hundred on there it was going to take some time. Five minutes later she stopped and called over a more senior officer. She showed him a picture. He became quite belligerent, pointing at the picture and angrily demanding "Delete!"
I glanced at it. It was a picture of someone in uniform. I didn't even remember taking it. Quickly I deleted it. The woman went back to examining the rest. Five more minutes and she handed back my camera.
Eventually we were done and the train pulled out and over the bridge that would take us into the relative freedom and relaxed liberty of communist China - a thought that was voiced with irony by more than one of us. The bridge was marked and scarred by bullet and shell holes, deliberately left unrepaired since the end of the Korean War.
The Chinese man pulled out whatever he had hidden. It seemed to be some kind of poster written in Korean. I can only imagine that it was something subversive about Korea, perhaps something about the Great Leader. I didn't know what it was and I didn't really care. I was just glad that it was back in his possession.
Straight after breakfast we took our usual bus to the station where we said our goodbyes to the guides. They goodbyes were sincere enough. Whatever the political situation in North Korea, they had been friendly and courteous and if everything they said was exactly in line with their government then who can blame them for that? I liked our guides, both the ones permanently assigned to us and the ones who had shown us individual things in the country,I didn't even doubt their sincerity. When your sources of information are so limited it's easy to believe the little you are being told.
We were to change trains at the border but on both the North Korean and Chinese trains the set up was similar - four berth sleeper compartments. On the North Korean one I found myself sharing with Neil (our English tour leader), Ray (one of the other members of the group) and a Chinese man who was unconnected with our party and who spoke no English. Neil had some conversation with him in Chinese but I have no idea what it was about.
The train pulled away from the station and out of the city. The views were much as they had been from the bus when we went out to the mountains. Most of what we saw was scarcely even subsistence farming. It was little more than people scratching lines in the ground with sticks. Here and there, there were towns but as impoverished-looking as any I have seen anywhere in the world. The land looked bleak and barren. The occasional signs of industrialisation - empty roads, isolated railways, distant factories - simple added to the feeling of desolation.
We had lunch on the train, a difficult feat of coordination in such cramped conditions but a tasty enough selection of fare.
We played a couple of games of trivial pursuit.
We passed the time.
And then, in the early afternoon we approached the border.
We had been briefed about the procedures that we would encounter there but they were, nevertheless, rather alarming. Especially given what happened, literally five seconds before we stopped at the border station.
We were slowing down to approach; the train was already drawing level with a platform where what looked like a battalion of military police were waiting for us. As the train halted and the soldiers reached for the doors the Chinese man in our compartment quickly drew something from his bag and pushed it down behind my seat. I stared at him and at Neil and Ray. None of the three of us knew what to do. He put his finger to his lips and before any of us could think of how to react there were three soldiers in the train corridor and one in the room with us. What could we do? None of us spoke Korean. The Koreans didn't speak English. The Chinese man spoke neither. Neil spoke Chinese, but what could he possibly say? We did the English thing and did nothing.
The soldiers indicated that they wanted us to leave and wait in the corridor. We did so, waiting anxiously and peering back in through the open door. They called Neil back in and indicated that they wanted his bags. He opened them and they searched, very thoroughly searched, through his belongings. He had his mobile phone with him. As they are forbidden in North Korea, it had been wrapped and sealed at the airport. They checked the seals to make sure that they had not been tampered with and returned it. They took away and checked his passport. Ray and I soon followed, undergoing exactly the same procedures. The small plastic scoring devices from Ray's Travel Trivial Pursuit gave them some pause for thought - a fact which in itself indicates the level of their paranoia. Then it was the turn of the Chinese man. His "interview" was even more thorough than ours had been. Everything in his luggage was examined in detail; he was questioned at length (a process rendered difficult by the language barrier and his tendency to shrug at every question posed); his documents were all taken from him for verification. Then, to my horror, the soldier pulled the back of his seat away from the wall and felt down behind it. Of course there was nothing there, whatever he had hidden was behind my seat. What was it? If they found it, would they think it was mine? The soldier had now stood up and started looking around.
Suddenly there was a little commotion from further down the carriage, from another of the compartments. The soldiers from our compartment went down to check on what was happening and returned a few moments later. They seemed now to have decided that the Chinese man could proceed. He closed up his luggage and sat down.
Meanwhile another guard who had been progressing along the carriage examining everyone's cameras had reached me. She took my camera and indicated that she wanted to know how to review the pictures. I showed her and she started at picture number one, looking at each one. Given that there were over eight hundred on there it was going to take some time. Five minutes later she stopped and called over a more senior officer. She showed him a picture. He became quite belligerent, pointing at the picture and angrily demanding "Delete!"
I glanced at it. It was a picture of someone in uniform. I didn't even remember taking it. Quickly I deleted it. The woman went back to examining the rest. Five more minutes and she handed back my camera.
Eventually we were done and the train pulled out and over the bridge that would take us into the relative freedom and relaxed liberty of communist China - a thought that was voiced with irony by more than one of us. The bridge was marked and scarred by bullet and shell holes, deliberately left unrepaired since the end of the Korean War.
The Chinese man pulled out whatever he had hidden. It seemed to be some kind of poster written in Korean. I can only imagine that it was something subversive about Korea, perhaps something about the Great Leader. I didn't know what it was and I didn't really care. I was just glad that it was back in his possession.
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