First British tourist to gain access to North Korea in years shares 'heartbreaking' reality of secretive nation
'I am not a journalist, I have no political agenda'
Planet Earth feels like it's getting smaller by the day, and as almost no corner of this place we call home remains untouched, all you have to do is simply open up YouTube and you'll find some intrepid traveller stepping where no one else ever has.
With Elon Musk's Starlink supposedly bringing the internet to every corner of the globe, things are set to get even smaller.
While one YouTuber boasts of having visited every country on Earth, there are still numerous places we'll never be able to visit.
We recently covered Peru's 'impossible' pyramid that no one can explore, whereas the likes of North Sentinel Island are illegal to visit.
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Others are simply hard to visit for various geological or political reasons, but as one of the most secretive nations out there, more and more dark tourists are obsessed with North Korea.
Even though the COVID-19 pandemic might feel like it happened eons ago, North Korea has only recently started letting tourists in.
Posting on his YouTube channel, Mike O'Kennedy shared what it was like to be the first British tourist allowed back into North Korea.
North Korea is a notoriously strict place that has major restrictions on communication and the internet, and although O'Kennedy likes to do things as 'uncensored' as possible, he was forced to take part in the tour that had been meticulously planned in advance. As part of his five-day trip, he was given a guided tour around the economic zone of Rason. Near the borders of China and Russia, it's one of the few places that tourists can visit.
When entering North Korea, they were told to list every electronic device they had with them, not for fears about what they could smuggle out, but what they could leave behind to potentially influence North Korea's residents.
He said he was shocked by how much farmland there was in North Korea, and as 80% of the country is mountains, all the available bits of land are used for farming. There are also no adverts, with the background simply littered by pro-government propaganda.
Accompanied by three guides, a driver, and a photographer, O'Kennedy explained: "They were very friendly, always polite, and they did their absolute best to make sure that we felt at ease, but no matter how welcoming they seemed, there was no shaking this feeling that we were being watched."
He also noted that there was an unnerving lack of workers at a factory, while he only saw a handful of people and no cars on a two-hour bus journey.
O'Kennedy's hotel room looked perfectly comfortable, although he couldn't phone anyone outside of North Korea, and the windows were sealed shut.
Then again, he did note that Rason was a sparse area even before the pandemic, feeling like a bit of an 'experiment' with foreign investment from Russian and Chinese companies.
The video ended as he visited a school and watched a performance that many in the comments branded as 'heartbreaking'. Seeing a group of children happily singing as missiles detonated on a screen in the background was a pretty creepy way to round off the trip.