Knife Tricks: A Blogger Goes to North Korea
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 05.10.07 | 6:19 AM ET
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.’”
Lukacs has started to blog and post photos from the experience, including his flight from Beijing to Pyongyang on a Soviet Union-made Ilyushin 62-M airplane. “I was placing my life in the hands of a 28-year-old machine built by a country that no longer existed and operated by a country that could not generate enough electricity to power its capital,” he writes. “I had to laugh.”
Lukacs says he’ll post more on his weblog, but not in other media. The North Korean government apparently doesn’t care what he writes online because the country’s citizens have no Internet access and, thus, there’s very little chance what he writes will influence or subvert the regime.
Image courtesy Guy Delisle from his graphic novel/travelogue, Pyongyang.
Related on World Hum:
* Dictatorship Tourism: North Korea Opens (Briefly) to U.S. Citizens
* North Korea: The Leader in ‘Don’t Do It!’ Vacations
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
karl 10.01.07 | 12:09 AM ET
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