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When Janet Newenham saw an Instagram post about a trip to North Korea, she couldn’t move fast enough.

‘I dropped everything and emailed the company saying where do I send my money,’ she tells me.

‘We had to make our own way there, they just said we’ll meet you at this hotel in this random Chinese city. I had the flight booked before my place was even confirmed.’

A holiday to a country ruled by a dynastic totalitarian dictatorship with no cars, no restaurants and no real tourist attractions sounds like a hard sell.

And it is, to everyone except a select few like Janet: extreme travellers with an insatiable curiosity about the world and a dream of visiting all 195 officially recognised countries on Earth. She’s on 140.

The Bali-based Irish content creator was one of the first international tourists to step foot on North Korean soil in more than five years.

The hermit state sealed itself off at the start of the Covid pandemic in January 2020 and only opened to Western travellers in February 2025.

Janet arrived weeks later, the only woman in a tour group of ‘around 25 men’.

But on the final morning of their four-day visit, Pyongyang announced it would suspend tourist entries until further notice.

No reason was given and the borders remain closed.

So what’s really happening behind the curtain of this reclusive country?

Not a whole lot, Janet tells me with a laugh.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DT-wB4NksKC/?igsh=MXQydDc5dHF4cTd5dw==

‘The thing is there’s not really anything to do in North Korea, it’s all about being there,’ she says.

Their itinerary, organised by Young Pioneer Tours, a budget company that claims to specialise in North Korea and other ‘destinations your mother would rather you stay away from’, included:

• A bank: ‘We got to open an account so I now I have the equivalent of a North Korean MasterCard, which is hilarious.’
• A brewery: ‘They have their own local beer.’
• And five schools. This was the only time the group had anything approaching genuine interactions with local people, says Janet. ‘The kids know more about the world than you might think. When I said I was from Ireland, they asked if I was from the north or south.’

The group was also taken to several ‘restaurants that were not restaurants’, hotel conference rooms that had been turned into restaurants ‘just for us’.

Janet continues: ‘In a way, it’s very much what you imagine it to be, and in a way it’s not. Life is still going on. No one has a car except for government officials, it doesn’t feel like anyone has any money, and the way people dress is very old-fashioned.

‘Conservative, all black, old-world shoes, from years ago, and no jeans.’

And the unusual wardrobe is strictly enforced —we’re talking legally.

North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong-Un banned skinny jeans in May 2021, saying that they, along with mullets and certain body piercings, were symbols of a ‘capitalistic lifestyle’.

There are no entertainment venues and no internet, at least not any that is publicly accessible.

Instead there is a sort of intranet, with messaging services and state-sanctioned news, and Juchify, the North Korean answer to Spotify.

‘It’s got a lot of Mamma Mia and Celine Dion,’ Janet says.

The supreme leader bopping to I’m Alive... I can see it.

Still, for all its reclusion, North Korea is not totally cut off. Janet’s local guide had heard that Trump wanted to buy Greenland, for example, and others she talked to knew what was going on in Gaza.

Religion is strictly forbidden, which means no bibles, Qurans or religious memorabilia of any sort. Janet says she one of her group had a Quran confiscated at the border.

What is required, on the other hand, is devotion to ‘king’ and country.

‘You’d ask what their favourite song is, and our tour guide would say ‘the national anthem of North Korea’. Ask what their favourite book is, and they’d genuinely say the constitution,’ Janet recalls.

Janet’s passion for travel has become her business. She is the founder of Janet’s Journeys, an adventure travel company that sees her escort up to 15 people on trips of up to 10 days, immersing the group in local culture.

If North Korea reopens, will she run a trip?

‘It’s definitely not for everyone. It’s for people who are inquisitive about the world and locked off places.

‘I couldn’t say I really enjoyed it. Some places were weird, and to be honest the only reason it wasn’t boring was because of where it was.

‘You’re there as a group, dissecting everything at night together, ‘was that real’, ‘was that all for show’. Everything feels special because you’re like, woah, I’m in North Korea.’

The UK Foreign Office advises against all but essential travel to North Korea.

The few British people who visit are usually part of an organised tour. That is the only way to get a visa, if and when the borders do reopen to tourists.

Many embassies – including the British Embassy in Pyongyang – remain closed.

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