A tour operator yesterday said it had opened bookings for trips to a North Korean border city to celebrate former leader Kim Jong’il’s birthday, offering foreign tourists the first chance to visit since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tour operators said last month that the North would reopen Rason, a city on the border with China, to foreign tourists, five years after Pyongyang sealed its frontiers in response to COVID-19.
Neither North Korea nor China has commented on the plans.
Photo: AP
Koryo Tours said the tour this month in Rason would be “the first trip back to North Korea since the borders closed in January 2020.”
“This tour will take you to the must-see sites in Rason, North Korea’s Special Economic Zone. Plus, you will travel to North Korea to celebrate one of the biggest holidays, Kim Jong-il’s Birthday,” the Beijing-based travel agency wrote on its Web site.
The birthdays of members of the ruling Kim dynasty are typically feted in the North with large-scale public celebrations.
The birthday of former ruler Kim Jong-il is marked as Day of the Shining Star on Feb. 16, and typically features large-scale public celebrations, including military parades.
Itineraries on offer also included visiting North Korean factories, schools and a bank at which tourists can open their very own North Korean bank account.
However, although the tour is open for bookings, it is “not yet confirmed,” Koryo said, adding it was “awaiting information from the Chinese authorities on the opening of the Chinese side of the border.”
The tours are to start in China, with guests to be driven to the border with the nuclear-armed North. Another travel agency, Young Pioneer Tours, last month also announced Rason tour packages.
Rason became North Korea’s first special economic zone in 1991 and has been a testing ground for new economic policies.
It is home to the socialist country’s first legal marketplace and has a separate visa regime from the rest of North Korea.
Tourism to the North was limited before the pandemic, with tour companies saying about 5,000 Western tourists visited each year. Americans were banned from traveling to the North after the imprisonment and subsequent death of student Otto Warmbier in 2017.
North Korea shut its borders in early 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and later bolstered defenses along its northern boundary with China to deter its own nationals from re-entering the country illegally.
Pyongyang has since reopened the border to some trade and official delegations, and North Korea last year permitted Russian tourists to enter the country for the first time since the pandemic.
Chinese tourists — who made up the bulk of foreign visitors to North Korea before the pandemic — have not returned to the country, with experts speculating that it might be linked to Beijing’s growing displeasure over Pyongyang bolstering ties with Moscow.
The North has sent arms and ammunition, plus thousands of soldiers to help Russia fight Ukraine, Seoul, Washington and Kyiv have said.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
‘LIMITING MYSELF’: New Zealand’s foreign minister said that the omments by Phil Goff were ‘disappointing’ and made the diplomat’s position in the UK ‘untenable’ New Zealand’s most senior envoy to the UK has lost his job over remarks he made about US President Donald Trump at an event in London this week, New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters said yesterday. Phil Goff, who is New Zealand’s High Commissioner to the UK, made the comments at an event held by international affairs think tank Chatham House in London on Tuesday. Goff asked a question from the audience of the guest speaker, Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs Elina Valtonen, in which he said he had been re-reading a famous speech by former British prime minister Winston
RSS