The 2025 Rason itinerary included a trip to a beer factory, a school, and what was described as a new, fully stocked pharmacy. The pharmacy staff, according to one visitor, seemed confused about why foreigners were there. They'd probably never seen one before.
That's the detail that gets me. The state built the showcase, stocked the shelves, put it on the tour route, and then forgot to brief the actors. The performance was real, but the performers hadn't been given their lines.
That's what Daniel's asking about. He wants to know what it actually feels like to be managed through a place like that, why a famine state spends scarce resources on choreography and fake events, whether your phone is confiscated or surveilled, and whether going rogue online gets you barred for life.
Four questions, and the fourth one has a more interesting answer than most people think.
So let's start with what it actually feels like to be a tourist in a country where every moment is scripted.
The baseline first, because it shapes everything else. North Korea is the most controlled tourist destination on the planet. You don't just book a flight and rent a car. Entry is only possible through state-licensed group tours, and the numbers are tiny. Roughly six thousand tourists a year, and before the January 2020 shutdown, Chinese tourists made up more than ninety-five percent of the market. Westerners were always a rounding error.
Six thousand a year. Disney World does that before lunch.
And right now, as of this month, the country remains closed to essentially everyone except Russian passport holders. Koryo Tours confirmed that in June. The 2026 Pyongyang Marathon was announced and then cancelled a month out. The US travel ban is in its tenth consecutive year, extended through August of 2027. And in June of this year, North Korea banned American dual nationals from entering at all, which closes the second-passport loophole that used to exist.
So if Daniel's asking whether he could go right now, the answer is no. Unless he's Russian.
Correct. And even if it reopened tomorrow, Americans face a separate wall. Since 2017, after Otto Warmbier's death, US passports are simply invalid for North Korea. Violating that ban is a federal felony, up to ten years in prison, and permanent passport revocation. That's not the regime's rule. That's our own government's rule.
Which makes the entire ethics debate slightly academic for Americans. But the paradox Daniel's pointing at is the real puzzle. Four in ten North Koreans are believed to be undernourished. That's a famine-adjacent number. And yet the state invests in fully stocked pharmacies, scripted classrooms, and eight-year-olds performing dance routines to animations of missiles hitting targets. Why does a country that can't feed its people spend money on theater for a few thousand tourists?
Because the tourists aren't the audience. Not really. The tourists are the delivery mechanism. The point of the whole performance is to produce a positive account that travels back out through the information wall. Every visitor is a tiny controlled breach, and the state's job is to make sure the message that leaks out is the right one.
The visitor is a propaganda carrier. They just don't know it.
And the mechanics of how that works are strange. Let's talk about what it feels like on the ground. You're assigned government guides the moment you arrive. You cannot leave the hotel without them. Ben Weston, a tour leader, described it as being on a school trip. Joshua Spodek said you must be escorted everywhere, forget about spontaneity, the guides mediate nearly all contact.
A school trip where the teacher reports to the secret police.
That's the other version. Tom Chesshyre said the guides report to the secret police and he was monitored the entire time. Both things are probably true. The guides are doing both jobs at once.
The detail that stuck with me from the 2025 accounts is Mike O'Kennedy, the British YouTuber. He said a couple of times he had to let them know when he wanted to use the bathroom. He'd never had to do that anywhere in the world.
The bathroom. That's the level of granularity we're talking about. And Hannah Yi, the American tourist who went in 2016, spent seven days shepherded by two female minders. Every destination came with a guide reciting statistics and speeches about the leaders' benevolence. And the tours ended in a guest room where tourists were asked to write reflections while the minders looked on over their shoulders.
Write reflections. While being watched. That's not tourism, that's a focus group with extra steps.
And here's the angle most coverage misses. The guides themselves are trapped in the same information bubble they're enforcing. Joe Smith, who's been three times, said his guide didn't know Assad had fallen in Syria. Hannah Yi's minder had no access to paprika. Not as a metaphor. The spice. She'd never seen it.
No paprika. That's a small thing, but it tells you everything. The person whose job is to control what you see has never seen a spice that's in every supermarket in the world.
They have no internet. No outside news. No freedom to deviate from the script. They're simultaneously the surveillers and the surveilled. Rowan Beard from Young Pioneer Tours said North Koreans aren't robots, they have opinions and goals and a sense of humor. But the guides get the one job in the country that lets them talk to foreigners, and they're terrified of screwing it up. One wrong answer to a tourist's question could cost them everything.
So when Daniel says the chaperones are unnerving because they're young and have good English and claim to be showing you around, but they're actually ensuring you don't deviate from the performance, he's right. But the fuller picture is that they're also prisoners of the script.
The performance itself is the part that sounds fake but isn't. The 2025 Rason itinerary had carefully choreographed trips to a beer factory, a school, and that pharmacy. At the school, eight-year-olds performed a dance to animations of ballistic missiles hitting targets. Children in red neckties singing while explosions flared behind them.
Eight-year-olds. Missile strike animations. That's the showpiece.
And Luca Pferdmenges, the German influencer on that first 2025 trip, said the teacher pretty much read a script when they entered the classroom. The school was a set. The pharmacy was a set where the staff hadn't been told they were extras.
That's the thing about a Potemkin village. You can build the facade, but you have to hire people to stand in it, and those people still have to go home to the real country at night.
Hannah Yi said the destinations felt like the country's attempt to prove North Korean prosperity and self-reliance. The propaganda phrase is that people have nothing to envy. That's the official line. Nothing to envy. And the tour is designed to produce that impression.
Nothing to envy. In a country where four in ten people are undernourished.
But here's what's interesting about 2025. The regime didn't actually hide visible poverty. Pferdmenges was surprised that the guides didn't stop him from seeing rural people using oxen and carts. What they forbade was photographing farmers' houses because they were very run-down and shabby. Nicholas Bonner, who founded Koryo Tours, said they don't like pictures that show anyone performing manual labor because they want to portray everything in a positive light. If you want to take pictures of people in a field, they want them smartly dressed and standing up straight.
So the regime polices the image, not the reality. They know the poverty is there. They just don't want you to bring home proof.
And Joe Smith's observation cuts through the whole thing. He said the regime's photos make the country look clean and shiny, but the roads are awful, the pavements are wobbly, and the buildings are weirdly constructed. His hotel room looked like his grandma's living room with a cracked window. And he said, they've had five years to fix things. If this is the best they can show, I dread to think what else is out there.
That's the line that stays with you. The showcase is falling apart, and it's still the best they have.
The more he visits, the less he knows. That's what Joe Smith said. Each time you get a little peek behind the curtain, which just leaves you with more questions.
So that's the managed experience. But Daniel's third question is about the technology. What happens to your phone? And that's where it gets even weirder.
The briefing rules are read to tourists up front. No phone signal, no internet, no cash machines. That's the official line. And it's not an exaggeration. No foreign carrier offers roaming in the DPRK. E-sims like Airalo won't activate. You're in a radio silence bubble from the moment you cross the border.
But historically there was a workaround. The Koryolink tourist SIM.
Right. You could rent a Koryolink SIM for a hundred and twenty dollars, but it only allowed international calls. No domestic calls. And it quickly fell out of favor when, as Young Pioneer Tours put it, a few people got too trigger-happy on Twitter. Since July 2014, North Korea deactivates tourist SIM cards at the end of the visit. The stated reason was to stop North Koreans from getting illicit internet access, but it also means the window for posting from inside the country is closed.
A hundred and twenty dollars to make a phone call that gets your SIM card killed on the way out.
And if you want internet, some hotels offer monitored WiFi at about a dollar seventy per ten minutes. Hotel email could be sent on your behalf for two dollars twenty. That's the entire connectivity menu.
Monitored WiFi. So even the connection you can buy is being watched.
And the devices themselves get searched. Pferdmenges said they can pretty much do whatever they want with you, including going through all the photos on your phone. Some people got their phones checked. He didn't. But the possibility was there. Western literature and North Korea travel guides are confiscated at customs. You can't bring in a Lonely Planet.
So the answer to Daniel's question is no, your phone isn't confiscated. But it's searched, it has no signal, and any SIM you buy gets deactivated. It's a paperweight with a camera that might get inspected.
Which brings us to the fourth question. The one about going rogue. And this is where the answer isn't what Daniel assumed.
His assumption was that if you share something unflattering, you're forever barred from returning. Individually blacklisted.
And here's the honest answer. I couldn't find a single documented case of an individual tourist being formally, permanently barred from reentry specifically for publishing an unflattering account. Not one named person on a regime blacklist. The evidence points in a different direction entirely. Collective punishment.
The 2025 re-closure.
The sequence was this. North Korea reopened to Western tourists in February 2025, Rason only, after five years of COVID closure. And within four weeks, it was shut again. The Mirror reported that influencers were blamed. Mike O'Kennedy posted a video mouthing what the f word at the missile dance. Hunter Williams posted a vlog titled broke North Korean Laws at their border. Zoe Stephens posted a video smirking at a statue. And Pyongyang closed the door. To everyone.
So the individual influencers didn't get a letter saying they were banned. The regime just ended the entire program. One mocking vlog shut the border for every Western tourist.
Koryo Tours issued a warning after that. North Korea is not the place to push boundaries. Doing the same in North Korea could have serious consequences. But the consequence wasn't personal. It was collective.
That's actually more chilling. You're not just risking your own access. You're risking it for everyone. The propaganda model is so fragile that a single sarcastic video can collapse the whole thing.
And that fragility is the real story. The regime spends enormous resources on the performance, but the performance only works if every visitor plays along. One person who refuses to be a propaganda carrier breaks the entire system. The wall isn't built to withstand mockery.
Because mockery is the one thing you can't choreograph a response to. You can script a school visit. You can stock a pharmacy. You can't script what happens when a YouTuber mouths what the f word at your missile dance and it gets two million views.
The US side is a separate, harder wall than the regime's. Even if Pyongyang reopened tomorrow and welcomed influencers back, Americans still can't go. The felony charge, the passport revocation, the ten years in prison. That's not the regime punishing you. That's Washington.
Daniel's premise, that going rogue gets you forever barred, is plausible but unverified. The documented reality is that going rogue gets everyone barred. The collective door slams shut, and then the US government's own door was already locked anyway.
There's an ethics layer here that deserves airing. Joanna Hosaniak from the Citizens Alliance for North Korean Human Rights said this isn't like tourism in other poor countries. The vast majority of the population don't know these tourists exist. Their money goes to the state and ultimately towards its military.
That's the argument against going at all. Your seven hundred and forty dollars funds the missile program.
Greg Vaczi from Koryo Tours defends it from the other side. He says North Koreans get the chance to engage with foreigners. This allows them to come up with new ideas, which, in a country this closed, is so important.
Both positions are defensible. The money goes to the regime, but the contact itself is a breach in the information wall. Even a controlled breach is still a breach.
The guides are the proof. They're the ones who get the exposure. The ones who learn that foreigners aren't monsters. The ones who find out paprika exists. That's not nothing.
It's not nothing. But it's also not clear it's worth funding a totalitarian state for.
That's the debate. I don't think there's a clean answer. The regime wants the money and the positive message. The tourists want the experience and maybe the chance to see behind the curtain. The guides want the one job that lets them talk to foreigners. Everyone's getting something slightly different from the same performance.
The performance itself is the weirdest part. The state spends scarce resources on fake events while real people are hungry. It builds a fully stocked pharmacy and forgets to tell the staff why they're there. It teaches eight-year-olds to dance to missile animations and calls it a school visit.
The regime polices the image, not the reality. That's the whole thing in one line.
The image is so fragile that one YouTuber making a face can break it.
Hilbert: The card had four lines on it. Do not photograph anything that looks poor. Do not photograph anything that looks military. Do not photograph anything that looks like it might be either. And then a fourth line, crossed out in pen. Do not ask about the camps.
Wait.
Hilbert: I worked for a travel agency in the late nineties. Cultural liaison, they called it. Adventure tourism to restricted countries. I spent three months photocopying and laminating briefing packets for a North Korea trip that never happened. The agency couldn't get a license. I still have one of the laminated cards in a drawer.
The crossed-out line. Was that official or did the agency owner add it?
Hilbert: Never found out. The line was printed on the original, then crossed out in blue pen on every copy. Same blue pen. Somebody made a decision once and then we all reproduced it for three months.
That's the most North Korea thing I've ever heard. The censorship of the censorship. Someone decided the warning about the camps was too revealing, so they removed it. But they didn't reprint the cards. They just drew a line through it. So every tourist would see the line and wonder what was underneath.
Hilbert: The guides weren't robots. That's the part I wanted to say. The agency dealt with a few of them on the phone, the ones assigned to the trip that never happened. They were proud of their English. Wanted to show off their country. And they were also reporting back. Both things. Same person.
The guide is a true believer and a surveillance asset and a human being, all at once.
Hilbert: They got the one job in the country that let them talk to foreigners. And they were terrified of screwing it up. One of them asked our agency owner if he could bring a gift for his mother. Ginseng. He wanted to know if ginseng was allowed. That's the level of fear we're talking about.
Asking permission to bring ginseng to your own mother. In a country where the tour you're guiding is a propaganda operation.
Hilbert: The card said do not ask about the camps. Crossed out. But the guides themselves never mentioned them either. It was the one subject that didn't exist on either side of the line.
The tourists were told not to ask, and the guides were told not to answer, and the subject just vanished from the conversation entirely. A whole category of reality that everyone agrees to not see.
Hilbert: The trip never happened. The agency folded a year later. But I kept the card. It's in a drawer with some other things from that job.
The crossed-out line is the whole regime in miniature. They can't even censor cleanly. The erasure leaves a mark. And the mark is the thing you remember.
That's what Joe Smith meant about the more he visits, the less he knows. The peeks behind the curtain just multiply the questions. You see the line crossed out and you spend the rest of your life wondering what was under it.
Hilbert: I never asked anyone about the camps. But I think about that blue pen more than I should.
The Potemkin village angle, the fake town of Kijong-dong, that's another thing we couldn't fully verify in this run. It's the famous example, the empty city with the lights on timers, but the details are murky. Worth flagging as unconfirmed rather than asserting it as fact.
What's confirmed is stranger than the legend anyway. The real performance isn't a fake town. It's a real town with the poverty edited out. The oxen and carts are there. You just can't photograph them.
The door is closing harder, not opening. The US ban is in its tenth year. North Korea banned dual nationals in June. A hundred thousand Korean Americans with relatives in the North are affected. Representative Brad Sherman is calling for the ban to be revised so people can attend funerals. But the trajectory is the opposite.
The propaganda model is fragile, but the walls around it are getting thicker. One mocking vlog shut the border for everyone. And the response wasn't to improve the performance. It was to end the audience.
Daniel's question about being forever barred has a strange answer. You might not be individually blacklisted. But your actions could close the door for thousands of other people. The collective punishment is the real mechanism. And the US government's own ban means Americans were already barred before they ever went rogue.
The regime polices the image, not the reality. And the tourists who go rogue don't just get themselves barred. They close the door for everyone. That's the fragility. The whole propaganda model depends on every visitor agreeing to carry the positive message. One refusal, and the system shuts down.
Thanks to Hilbert for producing. The crossed-out line will be with me for a while.
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