Yesterday NPR had one of the strangest travel stories I have yet come across — a new spa resort in North Korea. Mount Kumgang, North Korea, is an unabashedly consumerist and touristic resort built with money from Hyundai, and offers a retreat for South Koreans looking for natural landscape beauty as well as the normal amenities of a resort spa. That is, if you don’t mind going through the DMZ and skirting the land mines on either side of the road. “Just getting there involves busing through the demilitarized zone, where we are constantly told ‘no pictures, no pictures’ by our guide and informed that aside from the road we are on, the entire area is filled with land mines,” reports the CNN journalist who also made the trip. And if you don’t mind being entirely fenced in and heavily guarded from the local population.

The question is, why would the average South Korean make the trip? NPR producer Madhulika Sikka says that it’s often a symbol to South Koreans of what they see as the inevitability of eventual remerging of the two countries. And, of course, there’s always the true traveler’s answer: because it’s there.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 10:04 am and is filed under Antonia projects, Asia travel, travel stories, weirdness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.