That Time I Went to North Korea as a Tourist (Full Documentary)
Nov 2, 2026
AI Generated·May contain errors
North Korea, a country shrouded in secrecy,
governed by extremely strict laws and widely
considered the most isolated nation in the world.
Today, it's impossible to visit. The
borders have been slammed shut.
But back in 2018, I was lucky enough to get access,
spending less than US$1,500 on a 10-day budget tour.
That's for accommodation,
all food, and even a beer at the end of the day.
Not just in the capital of Pyongyang,
but out into the rural areas which are lesser known.
I documented the entire
journey on a 13 part series on this channel.
I've gone through all those
videos and I've pulled together the most poignant surreal
and revealing moments
from that entire trip and today I'm
gonna share them with you in this video.
But just before we get into the video I want
to make one thing completely clear.
Travelling to North Korea as a tourist
is in no way an endorsement of the
government or anything that goes on there. It's a heavy deep
So as you watch,
keep that
context in mind.
This is simply a record of a very rare window in time.
Not.
A stamp of approval.
Dissecting what I saw between real and fake is an impossible task.
Knowing if anything was set up is not information I personally have,
but it can be somewhat clear to see.
Please keep in mind this video was filmed
on a relatively affordable consumer camera.
This was to keep a low profile
because I didn't want to draw attention to myself
walking around with a huge camera set up.
Tourists have been locked up in the past
and there is one extremely grim case of a man
called Otto Warmbier.
Otto Warmbier was a 21-year-old American college student
who was arrested in North Korea two
years before I arrived in the country.
In January 2016, he was arrested for allegedly trying
to steal a propaganda poster from his
hotel.
Following a brief trial,
he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor shortly after he
He suffered severe brain damage.
damage under disputed circumstances whilst
in custody in North Korea. After
17 months of detention
and intense US diplomatic negotiations he was returned
to the United States in a coma in June 2017
and died six days later leading the
US government to ban its citizens
from traveling to North Korea. So having
learned this information I was beyond nervous.
This trip will always remain as
As one of the most
Fascinating places I have ever been.
Let's dive deep into the hermit kingdom.
Sometimes people describe North Korea
as a black hole of information,
and that black hole has become significantly darker
over the last few years.
Here I am in Beijing.
As you can see, I'm going to North Korea.
Pretty nervous.
Had a briefing last night with the tour company I'm going with.
Lots and lots of rules to take in.
I'm not quite sure what I'm going to feel comfortable
or being allowed to say.
Without any more talking, I've got to go get a taxi.
And then we've got to go to the airport and fly to North Korea
on what is called the world's only one-star airline.
Hello.
Air Koryo is North Korea's national airline
that received a one-star rating from Skytrax,
an airline rater. The staff were very friendly.
The food was questionable. This burger is quite famous
for people not knowing exactly what kind of meat is in it.
This is where the nerves were peaking
because there was no turning back at this point.
Arriving in North Korea. Alright guys, so this is
This is the part where we arrived in North Korea.
Korea and we met our tour guides.
We had two Korean tour guides the whole trip and one guy
from England who was working with the tour company.
All foreigners have to be accompanied
with a tour guide at all times
so you're basically in sight of these tour guides unless you are in
your hotel room. Under no circumstances
are you allowed to walk alone basically anywhere apart
from the hotel. When it came to filming it
was quite strict on what we were and what we weren't
We weren't allowed to film also.
We weren't allowed to film any military.
That's vehicles.
Soldiers, bases, anything like that.
We weren't allowed to film construction sites.
If we were to take photos of any pictures of the leaders,
then they had to be fully in frame.
You weren't allowed to take a part of a statue.
You had to take the full statue.
Otherwise, it was seen as an insult to the leaders.
You have to show extreme respect
to the leaders when you're in North Korea.
If you can't show respect to the leaders when you are there,
then you will be in some serious trouble.
We drove past the 105-story, 330-meter-tall
Ragyeong Hotel, I think I'm pronouncing that.
correctly. So basically the whole
of the inside is a construction zone and the
whole of the outside is complete
and you'll see this later in the video lit
up at night and it's pretty incredible.
So upon arrival we went to the train
station to pick up some people that were going
to be on the tour that arrived in
the country by train. I will be getting
the train out of North Korea at the end
of this trip.
Here from China.
It's like a 26 hour
ride so I'm bored
to that but first
impressions
of this place.
It feels like we're invisible.
People don't really look at us.
It's about after this we're going to the main square
and then getting dinner so
On our way to the Kim Il-sung Square,
we passed the Yanggakdo Hotel, which is the infamous
hotel where Otto Warmbier was caught
on video taking down a political poster and sentenced
to 15 years hard labor.
The last time Otto Warmbier's family saw him,
more than a year ago, he was healthy but distraught,
pleading for leniency in a North Korean court.
On the early morning of January 1st, 2016,
I committed my crime of taking out the important political slogan
from the staff-only area of the Angakdo International Hotel aimed
at harming the work ethic and the motivation of the Korean people.
I understand the severity of my crime,
and I have no idea what sort of penalty I may face.
I have been very impressed by the Korean government's
humanitarian treatment of severe criminals like myself.
Please.
I've made the worst mistake of my life.
Kim Jong-un's regime sentenced Warmbier to 15 years of hard labor
for allegedly taking down a propaganda banner in Pyongyang.
Just returned from North Korea with severe brain damage, has now died.
Guys, so we've come right
into the city center.
This is basically like the middle of North Korea,
as central as it gets.
This is Kim Il-sung Square.
Not sure how good
the audio
is because I
didn't bring
my microphone.
All these white dots.
You can see all over the ground here,
this is where people stand for the parades.
So you've probably seen the famous North Korean parades,
how everyone's perfectly lined up.
These lines go all the way around here, even across the road.
And they only have these parades maximum two times a year,
from what I've been told.
Sometimes they don't even have them.
Kim Jong-un has funnelled his country's limited finances
into developing nuclear weapons,
which are now so advanced they can, in theory, reach the US mainland.
From the square, we started to walk towards a bookshop.
We came across these supermarkets that were just fully stocked.
But nobody was in them.
I'm not quite sure what was going on here.
Maybe they'd gone home for the day, but I'm not quite sure.
These traffic wardens are fascinating.
If they see a government car, they will salute it.
And you can tell if it's a government car by their number plates.
All their number plates are different colors,
depending if the car belongs to a company,
the military, or a government official.
It's very rare for people to own their own cars in North Korea.
When we arrived in the bookstore,
we were greeted with more copies of the Pyongyang Times,
which is an English newspaper talking about North Korean news
with the newspapers or
any kind of magazine or pictures with any of the leaders on them.
You are not allowed to fold the newspaper through the leader's picture
so you have to be extremely
careful when handling these papers
because it's highly illegal to deface or crease. You're not
actually allowed to throw them away you just have
to leave them on a table somewhere and then let
people who are qualified to destroy the papers destroy them.
We were also able to buy anti-US
Are you shy?
From the bookstore, we took a drive through Pyongyang at night.
You can see the unfinished
hotel here again, fully lit up on the outside.
Incredible light show. This is a huge building.
It's just unbelievable. Strange
with the lighting considering there's not much electricity to go
around. And then we arrived to a restaurant for dinner.
The dinner was absolutely delicious.
Basically, we got something for anyone.
Kimchi, potatoes, different kinds of meat.
So the tour group was made up of people from all over the world.
Europe, Canada, South America, Asia,
people of all ages. I believe there was around 10 of us.
From dinner then we drove to a hotel.
This hotel is huge. There's 30 floors.
So this is the bedroom. I'm sharing with the French guy.
He's just downstairs.
So have a look out here so you can see the leaders lit up there.
Welcome to day two of the North Korea trip.
Beautiful day here in Pyongyang,
apparently it's going to be really hot today.
Today we're going on a city tour,
so we're going to explore the capital city here.
I think we're starting the day at some important monuments,
so I had
to wear long
pants to show
respect.
So as we arrived at the Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il monuments,
our tour coordinator Simon had
to buy flowers to place under the statues.
I'm not 100% sure if this is mandatory, but I feel like it is.
So when taking photos of these statues,
we had to be very careful how we took the photos.
The leaders had to be fully framed.
I think this was just to show how big the statues are.
They're 22 meters tall.
To both sides of the statues, there are 229 figures representing
the struggle that the Korean people went through during the war.
Underneath, you can see helmets from the U.S. Army
that the Korean people are standing on in the mud.
Gives you an idea of the feelings here.
From the statues, we went straight
to the International Children's Day celebrations,
which is a highly publicized state-mandated celebration held annually.
So as we arrived at this Children's Day celebration we
were instantly struck
because I think it was an extremely important event.
There were cameras everywhere and there was even a drone.
The state heavily propagates the slogan
that children are the kings of the
country. It was like nothing I've ever seen.
The day was based around children's games
so they'd have events like tug of war and relays.
They had these kids having to clap these pieces of plastic together
and this day was so hot I think
it was in between 35 and 40 degrees centigrade.
These kids are just clapping these bits of plastic
together for hours on end.
We spent like three hours there the whole time these kids were
clapping these things and I don't know how long they
were doing that before and after we left.
Alright so I've come to the back of the amusement park,
pretty much just been let to
Obviously, I think this is a fenced-in area,
but it's not as controlled as you'd imagine.
There's some cool roller coasters here.
I'd love to be able to ride them, but I think they closed today.
Completely different than I expected.
I mean, it's a lot more relaxed,
but still the locals don't really kind of look it.
Us foreigners, we're gonna ride the metro
which is the world's deepest metro system in the world.
World's deepest metro stations in Kyiv and Ukraine.
So this cliff was a pretty strange but funny experience.
I was lying on the grass waiting for the rest of the group
and these kids came over to me and
started saying things in Korean
and pretending to shoot me with toy guns.
No, I love him.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was, that was nice.
So there's been many rumors that the Pyongyang metro is a movie set
and there's only two stops and it's just for tourists.
But from my understanding, this has been thoroughly debunked
and it is actually used by the people lucky enough to live in Pyongyang
because Pyongyang is the cream of society. It's the top of the top.
You have to be somebody to live in Pyongyang, especially in the center.
Many North Koreans will never see Pyongyang in their lives.
We rode about five stops all together
and stopped at about three stations.
So grand and clean.
You compare that to let's say Europe, the metro stations,
graffiti and things. Here in Pyongyang, it was crystal clean.
I swear you could eat your lunch
off the ground here. All throughout Pyongyang, it's so clean.
The cleanest place I've been to.
Anyway, you can see this escalator here.
This is really similar to the escalators
and other parts of the station are really similar to metro stations in
Kyiv, Ukraine, obviously that's
because they were both built in the Soviet era.
Really fascinating to compare metro stations
in completely different parts of the world but just
so similar. Absolutely fascinating.
So we've just come out of the metro station and here's
the Arc de Triomphe.
It's actually 11 meters higher than the one in Paris. Boom, roasted.
It marks the date that North Korea
was liberated from the Japanese, 1945.
So after driving past some more pictures
of the leaders faces, we stopped for another
beautiful lunch.
After lunch, we drove to the supermarket
that we weren't allowed to take our cameras in.
Here's a little clip that my friend got on his phone.
I just got some
North Korean money and I don't know how much it is.
How much did we get? We got like heaps.
10 euros? 10 euros or 100 Chinese yen worth
so we're gonna try and spend this but
it's a lot of money. These are a few pieces of fruit
and some nuts that I got for the trip.
We've arrived at another monument.
This one represents the working party.
So the hammer represents the workers.
Writing brush represents the intellectuals.
And the sickle represents the farmers.
It's 50
meters
high.
This is a power cut that happened while we were bowling,
but only lasted for about five to 10 minutes.
From bowling we went into the basement and had a huge spread of food.
The food was seriously so good on this trip.
They give you beer with every meal. You can see here a barbecue.
Tomorrow we're going for a seven-hour drive.
We're actually going to the coast.
Hotel we're staying in is right on a beach.
Be able to walk right out the beach, go swimming and things.
So swimming in North Korea.
Anything where you put North Korea on the end sounds cool.
I've been traveling a lot this year
and one of the biggest frustrations used to be the cost.
of spending money abroad.
Foreign transaction fees and poor exchange rates
would add up on almost every trip.
That's why I started using Revolut,
who are kindly sponsoring this video.
With Revolut, you can hold and spend
in more than 25 currencies
with no exchange fees during market hours
within plan limits.
When I'm overseas,
I can pay in the local currency
without the usual extra charges.
You can also send and receive money
to over 140 countries
at competitive rates and low fees,
Whether you're paying for travel or receiving funds from abroad.
Foreign exchange rate and limits apply based on plan type.
Withdrawing cash is straightforward too.
Revolut offers cash withdrawals at ATM machines worldwide.
I simply open the app, add money in a few minutes,
and I'm ready to spend as soon as I arrive.
No complicated banking steps, no unexpected fees.
Over 80 million people already use Revolut
for this kind of flexibility.
Real money freedom wherever you are.
If you travel, you can join Revolut.
through my link and receive $40 when you sign up.
The link is in the description and in the pinned comment.
Thanks to Revolut for sponsoring this video.
Now, let's get back to the video.
Good morning, guys.
The view from my hotel room here in Pyongyang.
Probably going to take about seven hours drive,
so a lot of driving ahead of us.
Let's head to the coast.
This statue here is called the Arch of Reunification
and it's to symbolize one day
hopefully the whole of the Korean peninsula being reunited
as one country, 30 meters high or 98 feet.
As soon as we left the city we
were struck with just how
much farmland is in Korea.
Basically every square inch of the country
that I saw that wasn't mountains was covered
with farmland, mainly rice fields.
We saw thousands of workers on the side of the road.
Pretty much constantly between each destination
that we traveled to in Korea.
If you're wondering why some of the shots are extremely shaky,
it's because the roads in North Korea are some
of the worst roads that I've traveled on.
Holes all throughout the roads.
I did see many workers on the roads trying to repair them,
but the current state is that they
are pretty bad, to be honest with you.
In 2001, Kim Jong-il actually visited this waterfall
and it's kind of what made it famous and more of a tourist site.
But apparently this building here was built for him.
One of the guides told us because there
was no shade for him when he came.
So just in case he ever came back,
they built this building here for him just to keep him out of the sun.
After the waterfall, we had a little packed lunch with some sushi.
You can see here some pictures of the leaders visiting the
farms. Then we went into this little kind
of shop market area thing. I'm not quite sure
what this was about. Again just everything perfectly stocked up
and lots of like plastic
goods, plates, beer, oil, different kinds of dry goods,
hot toys, everything basically. But still
these places kind of were really quite bizarre.
I mean we were allowed to buy
things here if we wanted to but I don't think anyone
in the group bought anything here.
We've just arrived
at the biggest
fertilizer factory
in the whole of Korea.
So this fertilizer factory was one
of the highlights of the whole trip in North Korea.
It was literally like going back in time.
Just the people working here look like
something straight out of a 1940s film.
There's literally nothing to tell them apart.
They make fertilizer for farms.
So things like nitrogen
and hydrogen mixed together for the rice fields, I believe.
Inside the factory, it smelt really strong.
Even spending, you know,
You know, five, ten minutes in there
was enough to make you feel a bit dizzy.
I'll show you a few clips of the workers in a second,
but they were just going about their day normally.
You can see all these old gauges and everything here.
We had one of the employees of the factory show us around.
I think he might have been one of the managers.
I'm not 100% sure, but he was just so proud of this factory.
He had a big smile from ear to ear and you can see the workers here.
Sorry, it was quite dark in there,
so some of the footage is a bit grainy,
but it gives you a good idea of their clothing
and you can see they're using this.
Old, old phone here.
I think they were talking to the people in the level below
just to make sure everything was going right.
You know, they were talking on the phone, running back and forward,
you know, giving orders.
And it was just like getting in a time machine.
Going back to the early 20th century,
I'm really struggling to convey my words right now,
but something truly unique and kind of a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
We have arrived in the
accommodation for tonight.
We're just by the beach here.
Flicks out to the sea.
Nice bed and I've got a balcony out here.
We'll go down to the beach in just a second.
Got a bucket of water and that's hot water.
And then we've got a bathtub.
That's cold water.
That's hot water.
Cold water.
Not sure what to do with that.
And here's
our dinner.
I'll play a raw clip of one of the girls pouring the beer for us
because you can just notice how quiet it is.
North Korea has fired a barrage
of ballistic missiles towards waters off its eastern coast,
intensifying tensions with South Korea.
So our first stop of the day was at a temple
but to be honest I didn't get that many shots. I'm sorry
about that. I was more interested in the farmers outside the temple.
Looks like a very old tractor.
Also another farmer using a cow to pull him around the field.
Again made me think I was living in the
1940s. There was literally nothing to tell what I
was seeing apart from the early 20th century.
Just arrived at the Hamheung Grand Theatre.
This is the second biggest city in the DPRK,
population of 800,000 people.
There's heaps of kids around here and they're saying hello
and things like yelling out, really confident,
which is different to what we've seen,
normally the kids are a bit more reserved,
but these kids are just screaming hello
from the other side of the road, it's pretty cool.
Thank you.
Hello, I'm Nick, nice to meet you.
Hello,
kamsahamnida,
thank you.
So after driving for a few more hours,
Through the countryside,
we arrived at North Korea's biggest agriculture university.
Most of what we were shown were pictures
of Kim Jong-il because he actually came here
in 2009, and so there's pictures of his visit all over the university.
You can see here we had a tour guide,
and she kept talking about Kim Jong-il's visit
also.
This photo here is actually of Kim Jong-un on the right-hand side.
This is the second take of the photo
because the first take, apparently the man on the
left wasn't smiling enough.
So Kim Jong-un told them,
them to retake the photo and smile more.
I don't know how true that is but it was
coming from the guide's mouth.
So they showed us more around the university,
really nice grounds
and this triangle on the ground here is where Kim Jong Il
stood. They never wanted to forget that he was here
so they put these little
tiles down to remember exactly where he stood.
After the university we jumped
back in the bus and drove past locals,
farmers, just packed with people in the
fields here.
You can see these big factories in the background.
I would love to have visited more factories.
You can see these villages in the distance here.
We didn't visit these villages.
Sadly, it would have been interesting.
You can see some mosaics here,
driving through the mountainous landscapes of North Korea over rivers.
Pretty stunning countryside.
Luxury apartment here
on the beach.
This room I've got to myself is massive.
Got like a living area here with a couch and a desk.
Look at
this view.
Later we're gonna go to the beach.
I can smell it.
Scenes like this seemed completely normal to me.
It looks like any street scene that you would see in East Asia.
Clearly there's much worse places in North Korea
and clearly it's a lot different to central Pyongyang
which you'll see more of Pyongyang later in the video.
Apparently this is foreigners only beach.
There's some locals over in the distance there
but we're not really allowed to kind of go over there.
How is it?
Top
four.
All finished up on the beach.
Like five or six of us swam out to the diving board there
and we all jumped off.
Last thing I expect to do in North Korea,
nice change of routine and very relaxing.
After the beach we stopped in this little
art gallery for a few minutes.
One of the groups spent 800 euros on a painting.
So now we're just taking a walk along the pier.
Locals setting up fishing line and fish nets over here.
This is the main seaport of the DPRK.
So this is one of my favorite parts
of the whole trip, walking along this pier
and just seeing these locals go about
their daily life,
fishing and having little barbecues.
They looked up and saw us and started waving and we were clapping.
Some of the locals don't mind the cameras
but some really don't like it,
so you've got to be very careful with what you do with your camera.
Truly something special that I'll never forget.
Good morning, guys.
Welcome back to DPRK, Democratic People's Republic of Korea,
otherwise known as North Korea.
Today, woken up on this seaside resort that's sitting on a pier
in the biggest seaport town of North Korea.
Today, we are heading to the mountains, I believe.
The roads are basically slabs of concrete
and a lot of them are cracked,
hence the shaky footage.
The Chinese buses suspension that we were driving in
just couldn't handle the relentless bumps,
so everybody was just constantly getting
bumped around. You couldn't really sleep
on these buses on these huge driving days.
Just arrived in this village here below what's called Diamond Mountain
which we're going to be
climbing soon. I'll show you the landscape, it's pretty beautiful.
But this hotel is like
seriously luxurious compared to what we've been staying in.
You've got a nice bathroom here,
it's really modern compared to where else we have
been. Nice clean sheets, check that out.
Beautiful. It's about an eight kilometer hike today.
We ended up driving straight to lunch.
They brought out this boiling hot
river stone that they had preheated
and then they sat the meat on top of it.
I think we're going to just under 900 meters
above sea level today. This pathway is really
nice. These guys are just holding on to the side
of these massive bridges, painting them.
Seriously incredible.
From here we drove to the lagoon
but on the way we passed this building and this building here is
where North and South Korean families are reunited when it does happen.
It's very rare. When it has
happened in the past it's happened at these buildings here.
And then we arrived at the lagoon,
beautiful lagoon here, and then we headed back to the hotel.
So this is the mountain where General Kim Jong-il was born.
Empty. You can get a beer for like two euros or something.
And three waters for one US dollar.
There's no one around. It's really quite bizarre.
Pool. Table tennis.
Those are the mountain ranges.
Karaoke.
And then you can always buy things.
Always selling bits and pieces.
Am I allowed to go up here? Can I?
Yeah? Okay.
It's really quite beautiful.
I guess that's where we're having dinner tonight.
Incredible artwork everywhere.
We've
just
arrived
at the
North
Korean
ski
resort.
There's a chairlift line there.
Another one up there. Be interesting to come here in winter
and see how many people are really using
it. There was people watering the grass that lined
the side of the driveway with water bottles with
holes cut in the bottom of them before.
Pretty big stretch of grass and just watering it by hand.
So after a few more hours on the road,
we finally arrived back in Pyongyang.
We continued along the road and arrived at a school.
We were shown some more pictures
of the leaders as per usual on this tour.
You can never get enough of those guys.
Because we'll do a nice long look.
From here we walked down the extremely colorful hallways up the stairs
and there was interesting posters all over the walls of this school.
We then had the honor to watch some
of the girls put on a music show for us.
So pretty epic show there as you can see just for us, about 10 people.
Then we had a quick look in
one of the classrooms, pretty standard looking classroom.
From here we drove to a really cool
little bar. We went upstairs
and had a beer looking over the Taedong River with the Yangakdo
Hotel in the distance which was pretty incredible,
such an interesting hotel.
Amazing food every day something for everyone.
I've got some fish here lots of kimchi.
After this we had a little look at Pyongyang at night time
then we arrived at our grand hotel.
I have some good news and I have some bad news.
The bad news is the barber has gone home so I'm
not going to be able to get a North Korean haircut today.
Tomorrow going to get a North
Korean haircut but tomorrow I'm going to the DMZ
which should be fascinating. So much history at
history at that place and who knows what
will take place there in the future.
So the roads to the DMZ weren't that much different
to what we'd seen on previous days of
the trip. There was a slight difference though
and that was that there seemed to be a lot more
civilization along the side of the road here.
A few more villages and lots of houses you can see.
You'll also notice that it looks like
a lot less money has been invested into these small towns
compared to Pyongyang. We arrived at the DMZ.
We were greeted by this sign here with the finger.
I believe the writing says one career, the finger symbolizing one with
with the Korean Peninsula in the background.
We were introduced to our North Korean soldier.
He was a really nice guy.
He was quite interested in all the different countries we were from.
This room here was where the papers were signed, I believe,
between North and South Korea and the USA,
declaring it a demilitarized zone.
This is the chair where the papers were signed, I believe.
All over the wall, there's pictures
of important times in Korea's history,
especially later history.
Here's Kim Jong-un here.
Super interesting to just browse over
and read all the different bits and pieces.
Up here on the right-hand side,
you can see the famous blue buildings here.
So these are actually controlled by South Korea.
North Korea doesn't actually control when they are open and closed.
That's purely to South Korea to decide
when they want to open them to tourists.
Sadly, they weren't open on this day for us.
So I'll just have to come back another time
and cross from the South Korean side.
But yeah, heavily guarded, as you can see,
on the North Korean side, especially.
We didn't see any South Korean soldiers.
I would love to spend more time.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank
you.
Thank
you.
And then we arrived at the Yanggakdo Hotel,
Thank you.
Thank you.
so that's the famous hotel on the island in the
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
middle of the Taedong River,
Thank you.
Thank you.
the main river that goes through Pyongyang. The same place where the
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
American student Otto was found taking down a political poster
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
and sentenced to 15 years hard
Thank you.
labor. So we went up to the 47th floor of this hotel, the very top.
We had a beer on the very top
with the group. We couldn't see much out of the window as you can see.
I'm trying to get some clips here but...
The reflection off the inside of the glass plus Pyongyang
at night time isn't extremely lit up.
I think they turned down the lights at a certain time.
Hello. Hi. Haircut.
All right guys, so I've gone for this one. Let's try it out.
No, we're gonna have to do it.
The hairdresser spent 45 minutes, did a really thorough job.
Unfortunately my camera battery died
but at the end he gave me a full upper body massage as well
and it cost five US dollars.
At this point I was running quite late and had to quickly get to the
train station to get the train to China and out of North Korea.
At this point although North Korea
was incredible, there was a feeling of time to get out.
Alright
guys
so I've
made it to
the food
cabin.
I got
myself
some fake
Pringles.
So this is after going through customs
and immigration on the North Korean side.
This is on the start of the bridge here
to cross over the river into Dangdong, China.
So the customs guy hardly checked any of my belongings.
He didn't look in my bag.
He...
I only had to look at a few clips that I'd got,
some of the slow-motion clips from the farmland.
That's all he really looked at.
He didn't look at any of my other SD cards.
I had like seven other SD cards. It was so casual.
He might have known one of the guides that I was with,
so he was super chill about the whole thing.
This bridge was actually destroyed in the Korean War,
but half of it still remains on the China side of the river.
Tourists can come and take a look over at the land of North Korea.
You can see them here sitting on the end of this bridge here.
Pretty interesting being on a train coming over
and seeing the tourists looking at it like,
you know, this super mysterious land which it is,
but just to be able to discover it as many people will never get
to do was truly a feeling that hit here,
along with a liberating feeling of getting out
of North Korea with no problems.
Truly an emotional moment for so many reasons.
And after crossing the border into China,
then I jumped on a 20-hour train back to Beijing and flew home.
So that was my trip to North Korea.
Now obviously what you just saw was a heavily polished version of
the country and I would assume it
was almost entirely designed and stage managed by the
government for the most part.
But I don't actually know for sure because
it's an informational black hole. In reality...
Many many North Koreans face unimaginable hardships on a daily basis.
I'll leave you to do your own research
but I'm sure you're aware of the conditions for the local
people in North Korea.
I do want to reinforce the point that I am no way affiliated with nor
do I condone the actions of the North Korean government
and I never have. Thank you for
watching this video. I know that because
the footage is well over eight years old and I was
also over eight years younger things were a lot different back
then but trust me it's more painful
Painful for me to watch than it is for you.
Definitely some cringe moments.
want to have a look at these videos I'll leave
the link in the description to the
full playlist of my North Korea video series from 2018 but I would say
proceed at your own risk. I hope you enjoyed
this look back at one of the
most extraordinary trips of my life.
No music, no internet, no advertising and I
believe it would be even more relevant now
with our dependency on technology. It
was absolutely liberating.
Completely disconnected from the rest of the world.
This is the closest you can get
to space without getting into a rocket. Thank you
Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.

