May 2005.
I had a chance to go on a South Korean tour to North Korea and so I took it. It was pretty good, we saw some of the mountains and coast in the area, but we were pretty well insulated from most things North Korean. We did get to chat with some of the North Korean tour guides in the mountains though, and it was pretty interesting. The North Koreans were in the mountains while the South Koreans seemed to stay in the town for the most part. The two groups did not seem to get along well...which is not surprising since Koreans in general don't seem to like each other too much either!
The funniest part of the whole thing, was the fact that our hotel was ...seaworthy. I have a theory that when the South Koreans first set up shop there they didn't have the rights to build any buildings, and so they made a hotel and ferried it up. It is the weirdest thing. You wake up in the morning feeling like you have been on a boat for eight hours, but you haven't moved an inch. All of staff were from the Phillipines or China, South Koreans did the coordination in the towns, North Koreans handled the tourist sites. It was interesting.
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