What you NEED to know about Traveling to North Korea!
Here's what you need to know about traveling to North Korea! Did you know that taking pictures of soldiers is not allowed, or that you have to take a tour and it’s forbidden to walk around by yourself?! Learn about what you can and can not do in this video about North Korea!
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Here’s what you need to know about traveling to North Korea!
10 - Tours
Contrary to popular belief, people can actually visit North Korea. The only detail is that you can’t do it on your own, like say, backpacking through Europe and staying at hostels all over the place. And if you’re an American, it’s RIGHT NOW HIGHLY recommended to NOT visit North Korea, as diplomatic relations are pretty much nonexistent right now. They’re just snatching up Americans left and right as bargaining chips.
But anyways, to visit North Korea you have to buy a guided tour with one of the authorized agencies. These tours are all government-approved and include 24/7 attention by official “minders” that explain the sights, take you to museums, and ensure that you abide the law. This is useful if you want to avoid doing something that might land you in jail, such as in the unfortunate case of Otto Warmbier, but if you were planning to get to know the REAL North Korea, you’ll have temper your expectations a bit.
Tours will mostly take you to the few tourist places that have been previously authorized by the government, so you most likely won’t be seeing how the general public actually functions and lives. The one good thing about the tours is that they’re pretty affordable. If you stay where you’re told to, and don’t go into the country planning to question everything you see, you should be fine. If you want to go off the beaten path all by yourself, then North Korea isn’t the ideal place to plan your next vacation.
9 - Visa
Citizens of most countries need a visa to visit North Korea, after doing the proper visa work, of course. Only a few countries have visa exemptions for its citizens to visit North Korea. After booking a tour with a travel agency, the tour must be approved by North Korean authorities. Once you have authorization, a visa will be issued. The travel agencies you travel with will take care of all the visa paperwork, but sometimes tourists are required to have a phone interview. These interviews are supposedly pretty friendly and usually only touch on certain aspects of your profession. If you’re a journalist or member of a political party, you’re pretty much gonna be rejected. South Koreans and journalists of any nationality can say goodbye to doing a special piece for a news channel. Missionaries and religious people are also forbidden entrance. Although the North Korean Constitution provides for freedom of religious belief”, let’s not forget the government doesn’t exactly actually allow religious freedom.
When traveling with a tour, the visas will be issued as a group. This way, visas are never held by the individual tourists. This might cause worry for some people, but you can take a picture with your phone of your visa and the tourist card of your tour guide, just in case. But then again, we ARE talking about travel to North Korea….so really, if they really wanted to do something, they’d be able to do it.
Ok, you have your tour booked, and your visa looks promising. Now you actually have to get into the country. Most foreigners can enter North Korea by train, plane or boat. But, US Citizens must enter and exit North Korea by air only. Flights for North Korea only depart from China, so tourists flying in are forced to travel to there first.
8 - Sightseeing
So, what would a typical tourist see inside North Korea? Nothing too exciting apparently. Tours will mostly consist of visiting war memorials and monuments dedicated to the supposedly great North Korean leaders of the revolution. There will also be museums that are mostly related to the war and the further glory of the Workers Party of Korea. Many tour groups also visit the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ for short, which is a very popular destination.