Gareth Johnson has been to North Korea over 100 times. He was also one of the first people to enter North Korea earlier this year, when the mysterious dictatorship briefly opened its doors. Writer Zanny Merullo Steffgen chats to Johnson about his take on travel behind the Iron Curtain.
North Korea is a destination that divides travelers. For some, it’s a mystery begging to be solved; for others, the totalitarian dictatorship is completely off-limits.
The travel ban is literal for South Koreans who are blocked from visiting due to ongoing political conflict between the neighboring nations, and the US government has prohibited its residents from traveling to North Korea after the 2017 death of American college student Otto Warmbier. Warmbier died soon after being sentenced to 15 years imprisonment and hard labor for stealing a propaganda poster.
In recent years, North Korea’s extended pandemic closure has only contributed to its air of mystery—the country completely shut down tourism in 2020 and stayed closed until February 2024, when it began welcoming exclusively Russian tourists.
Twelve months later, in February of this year, North Korea opened Rason, a port city in the country’s northeastern tip, to foreign tourism… before swiftly closing its borders again in March. Without warning or reason.
During that short window, a few tour operators managed to take groups into Rason, the first of which was Young Pioneer Tours, a company founded by Gareth Johnson. Johnson is no stranger to North Korea, since 2008—when he planned a trip for curious friends while living in China teaching English—he’s been to North Korea over 100 times, running tours that focus on interactions with local people.
Though there’s no official word yet about the country’s reopening, tour operators like Johnson are hopeful that tourism in North Korea will resume soon. To find out why, and what it was like to return to a slice of post-pandemic North Korea, I recently sat down with Johnson:
We have extremely in-depth pre-tour safety protocols that we go over with people, but it can largely be summarized as ‘follow local laws and customs.’ In essence, this is no different to traveling to countries like Saudi Arabia.
- Gareth Johnson, tour operator
We live in a very globalized world—I can walk down a high street in Spain and it looks like England; the shops are the same. But North Korea is still another planet. Until they invent a time machine, this is the only way to go back to the Eastern Bloc.
Another thing that I truly love is separating the myths from the facts—there are so many sensationalist stories out there… For example, the leader was accused of throwing his uncle to the dogs by one of the biggest newspapers in Hong Kong—that wouldn’t happen for any other place.
North Koreans are normal people and they’re fun to be around, they’ve got a good sense of humor. I have witnessed first-hand how sanctions affect the people and their ability to procure stuff from the outside, such as medicine. But you go out in the morning and people are getting on public transport to go to work and kids are going to school. You talk to people and they have the same kind of worries and fears as we have. You expect everything’s going to be different, but that’s one thing I’ve found just in general with travel—by and large, people are the same, no matter what the government system is.
I remember on our first-ever tour we took a walk through one of the main parks in Pyongyang and it was a national holiday, so people were out doing Korean barbecue. And they pulled us over to dance or sit and drink and use their broken English to talk to us… When I first started, there was a place called the Diplomatic Club, and everything you read said it was impossible to go there. I opened it to tourism and we would go and spend our last night singing karaoke with Koreans.
If your government is telling you ‘this country bad’ ‘these people bad’, then you go and actually interact with them, you see a whole different side of things.
They’re very, very different. I find Rason fascinating because it’s the Special Economic Zone where capitalist principles have been experimented with. It’s partly an example of what can be achieved by opening up, as there are joint venture companies and more things to buy.
So the way I often describe it is that Rason is a great place to visit after you’ve been to Pyongyang. Because if you’re obsessed with or into North Korea, it gives you a much further understanding of how North Korea works.
If you go [to Rason] before Pyongyang, you miss the whole glitz of everything—the massive statues, the monuments, the museums. It’s a very different vibe. It’s kind-of like going to New York City or a town in Upstate New York. But in a North Korean way, which makes it extra weird.
We visited the Taekwondo Center to see the kids do Taekwondo. We visited the Foreign Language School and got to talk to students. We ate a lot of good Korean food. The food in North Korea, while less foreign-influenced tends to be very fresh as it’s not mass-produced. We visited the tri-border area, which is where Russia, China and North Korea border each other.
I’m a huge fan of people-to-people interactions, I think they promote more understanding… These are people with faces—by meeting them you can understand their situation more and become a little bit more invested in it.
- Gareth Johnson, tour operator
North Korean beers are notoriously very good, and there’s a new beer made in Rason called Tumangang, so we visited there to see how the beer is made and talk to the brewmaster. Draft beer is everywhere—something not so common in Asia—with different restaurants brewing their own. National beers aren’t pasteurized, which makes them more natural, though also with a chance to go bad.
There are some quirky things, like you can exchange money at black market rates and open a North Korean bank account, which comes with a North Korean debit card that can only be used in Rason. If you were to do these things anywhere else in the world, people would go, ‘what the hell is this?’ But the stuff that might be considered normal in other places gets an extra sense of interest in North Korea.
I’m a huge fan of people-to-people interactions, I think they promote more understanding. I feel that so much that is said about North Korea and North Koreans isn’t true. These are people with faces—by meeting them you can understand their situation more and become a little bit more invested in it.
Though there are very real ethics and safety concerns associated with visiting North Korea, Johnson’s perspective on the subject gets at the true point of why we travel: To seek human connection that bridges chasms of difference. With the potential for tourism to return to North Korea again soon, it’s worth considering the ways in which this kind of connection could expand the perspectives of both travelers and locals.
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Zanny Merullo Steffgen is a chronically ill freelance writer and former Cambodia expat. Currently based in Colorado in the US, she writes full-time, focusing on stories about responsible travel. Her writing has appeared in Business Insider, Scuba Diving Magazine, Bluedot Living, Fodor’s and other publications. She also writes a Substack with her father, Hi Zan, Hi Pa (merullo.substack.com).
