Longtime World Hum readers will be familiar with the Ryugyong Hotel, a sad icon of North Korea. “It’s a hotel that stands 105 floors, has 3,700 rooms and is crowned with five revolving restaurants,” we wrote in 2005. “No one has ever stayed in it. In fact, it has stood derelict since 1989.” Esquire recently dubbed the building the worst in the history of mankind.

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Gadling blogger Neil Woodburn has been posting some interesting pieces about his recent trip to North Korea. My favorite so far: The Sexy Traffic Girls of Pyongyang. Turns out there are no traffic signals in the capital. Hence, the “traffic girls.”

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North Korea and South Korea meet at just one place, the Joint Security Area (JSA) at Panmunjom, about 40 miles north of Seoul. The demilitarized zone, the mine-riddled buffer between the two countries, doesn’t extend there. Instead, “on the demarcation line itself stand five huts,” writes the Telegraph’s Alex Bellos about a trip to the JSA. “In the middle one, which tourists are allowed to enter, the line bisects the middle of a shiny, wooden negotiating table. Meetings between the two nations still go on here. Once in the hut, you can walk round the table—thus stepping a few yards into North Korea.” Bellos provides a brief but insightful look at the JSA, with some telling details about the efforts of both sides to control the propaganda war tourists are inevitably sucked into. 

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Photographer Charlie Crane and writer Nick Bonner of Koryo Tours have teamed for a new book, Welcome to Pyongyang, which compiles photos and commentary from three trips they took to the North Korean capital. “Pyongyang” comes out in the U.S. next week, but The Guardian and Budget Travel both have sneak-peak slideshows. The pair’s commentary accompanies the Guardian presentation, and Budget Traveler has an excerpt from the book’s introduction. 

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The test run of two five-car trains today was met with “jubilation and pride,” according to the Washington Post. One train ran from Munsan, South Korea to Gaesong, North Korea, and the other linked the Diamond Mountain resort in the North to the town of Jejin in the South, and both journeys were covered live by South Korean television networks. Each train carried 150 people from North and South and “new hopes of peace and unification,” writes Joohee Cho in the Post. 

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On his blog Knife Tricks, Paul Karl Lukacs posts a Q&A with himself and asks this: Why go to North Korea? His answer: Why not? He knows the $2,200 he paid for his trip will mostly go to subsidize Kim Jong-Il’s totalitarian regime—he went with a Beijing-based group called Koryo Tours to attend a government-sanctioned festival—but he sees a benefit. He writes: “As the Dalai Lama said about travel to Tibet, ‘Go, and tell the world what you see.’”

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It’s not a new idea, visiting the countries U.S. President George W. Bush dubbed the “Axis of Evil.” Ben Anderson, for instance, did it several years ago, and the BBC broadcast several programs based on his travels. Now Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler has written “Bad Lands: A Tourist on the Axis of Evil,” in which he chronicles his travels through Bush’s original three “axis” countries—Iran, Iraq and North Korea—plus Afghanistan, Albania, Burma, Cuba, Libya and Saudi Arabia. 

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International media have been invited by Burma’s military rulers to visit Naypyidaw, the country’s new capital city. Like North Korea’s recent decision to allow U.S. citizens to visit, Burma’s move revolves around a huge, state-sanctioned event. In Burma’s case, it’s the country’s Armed Forces Day parade. According to the BBC’s Jonathan Head, it’s the first time outsiders have been allowed to see Naypyidaw since Burma made the confounding decision in 2005 to move the capital from Rangoon. 

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Yes, in its infinite wisdom, Kim Jong-Il’s regime has generously decided to allow U.S. citizens to visit the Orwellian nation this year—during two stadium festivals, one taking place this spring and the other in the fall. According to Elisabeth Eaves’s story in Forbes, the president of Asia Pacific Travel, based in Illinois, “received an e-mail from the North Korean tourism authority saying it was appointing his company the sole travel agent it would deal with for the U.S. market.” Nice work if you can get it. I exchanged e-mails with Eaves today. She wasn’t too surprised that North Korea has opened, if only briefly, to Americans. The country needs the money, she wrote, and “it’s the foreigners who can afford the priciest festival seating.” (Festival seats go for up to $300.) But what about the ethics of visiting North Korea?

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Today’s Los Angeles Times has a terrific story about a small group of hard-core American travelers, including one Californian claiming to be the world’s most traveled person, who were recently awarded visas to visit North Korea and made the highly unusual trip. Times reporter Bruce Wallace put the visit into perspective this way: “Opportunities for American tourists to visit the secretive state that makes no secret of its loathing for the U.S. are mighty tough to come by. A North Korean visa for an American is like round-the-clock electricity here in the North Korean capital: not impossible, but rare enough to be appreciated when it unexpectedly arrives.”

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Writer Steve Knipp recently visited North Korea on a trip organized by Hyundai Corp., which is best known for its cars but also runs a tourism business in North Korea. Knipp had a good time, but he faced all kinds of restrictions. “A Hyundai executive half-jokingly says that his company’s excursions are called ‘Don’t Do It! Tours,’” Knipp writes in the Christian Science Monitor. “Cellphones, laptops, telephoto lenses, and powerful binoculars are strictly verboten. Visitors must wear photo ID tags at all times.” Among other things, Knipp was warned not to speak with locals about politics. “Two years ago,” he writes, “a South Korean woman reportedly asked a North Korean why President Kim Jong Il was the only fat man in the country, and was detained for several days as a result.” Yikes. 

The author of “Amsterdam” and other acclaimed novels made the tongue-in-cheek remark in front of a Seattle audience after he was initially refused entry into the United States. Officials told him the $5,000 speaking honorarium he was to be paid disqualified him from a visa-waiver program. Unfortunately, he is but one of many writers who have been harassed by U.S. officials since the Department of Homeland Security took over border and immigration control last year, writes British journalist Elena Lappin in the New York Times. Lappin was handcuffed and detained for 36 hours after she arrived in the United States without a special journalist visa. Understandably, she wasn’t pleased. “American journalists working abroad, especially in free countries, are not accustomed to monitoring of this kind,” she writes. “By requiring foreign journalists to obtain special visas, the United States has aligned itself with the likes of Iran, North Korea and Cuba, places where reporters are treated as dangerous subversives and disseminators of uncomfortable truths.”