Young, clean-cut North Korean guards keep alert as South Koreans scramble up Mount Kumgang, a craggy tourist enclave inside the Stalinist state.
They seem happy to welcome their richer brothers and sisters from capitalist South Korea to North Korea’s only tourist resort, known as Diamond Mountain in English.
”We are one ethnic group. We are the same people. South Korean people are very happy that they can come here,” says Song Kwang-Chul (43) former Korean People’s Army soldier turned mountain guide.
A thousand years ago, Chinese poets praised the beauty of the chain of jagged peaks rising from a bed of pine forests. North Korea’s founding father Kim Il-Sung gave Mount Kumgang his personal blessing with a visit in 1947 with his wife.
Amid easing tensions between the two Koreas, more than a million tourists have visited the rugged terrain just a few kilometres north of the border with South Korea since tours began in November 1998.
The tours are run by Hyundai Asan, an spinoff from the once-mighty Hyundai empire that has sunk one billion dollars into North Korea projects since 1998 but has yet to make a dollar from its investment.
The firm is searching for foreign investors for the tourism project who, it says, can now reap the benefits of Hyundai Asan’s groundwork.
”I tell them, we have already laid out the table, so you just bring your spoon and it will be very much easier for you,” said Byun Ha-Jung, a senior manager with Hyundai Asan.
On the mountain, the shiny hiking boots, flash clothes and expensive cameras and watches from over the border evoke no overt envy among the North Koreans, most of whom describe themselves as environmental workers.
”We understand that they are here to enjoy themselves, to spend money and to have a good time,” says Song.
When they are not scrambling up the peaks the South Korean visitors can see a circus with fine acrobats, listen to an all-girl band tugging at their heart-strings with old Korean ballads, or soak their aching limbs in natural hot springs.
What they cannot do is step outside the zone and talk to the farmers toiling with bare hands in the fields or the scruffy kids kicking a football in a muddy schoolyard.
Hyundai Asan denies it has built a tourism bubble.
But tourists are kept in and unauthorised North Koreans are kept out by the green two-metre wire fence that surrounds the 200 000ha enclave.
”You may think it is a kind of Disneyland here, fenced off from the real North Korea. But you are wrong,” says Kim Soo-Hyun, a Hyundai tour guide and interpreter.
Mount Kumgang on the east coast is one of several South Korean-financed projects in North Korea that include a vast industrial park under construction in Kaesong just north of the border on the other side of the peninsula.
They are touted as a test bed for reconciliation between two wary neighbours in preparation for a soft landing when the borders finally come down.
”What we have to achieve is reunification and Kumgang Mountain is a good place to prepare for that by permitting exchanges between the two Koreas,” say Lim Kang-Chol (31) another North Korean guard.
But the complexity of dealing with North Korea is apparent in Hyundai’s current standoff with the highest powers in the land.
On September 1 North Korea unilaterally cut the number of arrivals from South Korea to 600 from more than 1 200 previously in response to Hyundai Asan’s decision to sack its chief executive, Kim Yoon-Kyu, a pioneer of inter-Korean cooperation accused of large scale embezzlement.
North Korea receives a $100 royalty for each tourist but is willing to forego the cash in its campaign to get Kim reinstated.
”Reducing the number of tourists shows our support and confidence in Kim,” says Koo Eun-Hye (20) a tour guide on the mountain since April
Byun, head of foreign investment for Hyundai Asan, believes the spat is temporary and says he is keen to attract big foreign companies, especially hotel chains, to Kumgang.
The resort has four hotels and needs more and he has been talking to Hyatt and Hilton and other hotel chains, he says. – AFP
