Tourist choreography

The Observer this week had a travel article about North Korea, a surprise piece as journalists are not usually allowed into the country. What it showed me, as someone who has been there, was just how thoroughly choreographed travel in that country actually is. Apart from our cock-up at the airport - a problem down to Beijing sending our luggage to the wrong country, rather than any Korean difficulty - Carole Cadwalladr's trip was, from her description, identical in every way to mine. The visit to the Mausoleum was the same. So were the trips to the Friendship Exhibition and the Demilitarized Zone. Even the surreal stop at the services on the otherwise empty motorway was the same.
I'm willing to bet that the Miss Kim who showed her around was the very same Miss Kim who showed us around, a charming and accomplished guide, and that their cameraman was the same tall, silent and rather spooky cameraman who glided in and out of our tour.
There can be no other place on Earth where your travel routine is so utterly fixed and undeviating. One thing in the article that I did disagree with was whether or not the adulation given to Great and Dear Leaders is entirely genuine. I agree it looks that way, and if I were a DPRK citizen mine would look that way too. I didn't get the impression that it would be a terribly safe place to look any other way. She also seems to have regarded the occasional glimpse of rural life (from a bus passing by very quickly) as quaint, but to me it looked like the very meagrest of subsistance farming.
Of course she is a journalist and I'm not so she may well simply be sticking to the agreed line to avoid making travel to the country even more difficult, whereas I was a normal tourist who happens to enjoy sharing his travel experiences.