After six years of delays, instruction setbacks, and a global pandemic, North Korea, the nation that builds propaganda directly into its smartphones, has finally opened its Wonsan Kalma beach resort.
According to the BBC, this “luxury” 2.5-mile stretch of seaside land development on North Korea’s east coast is meant to be the new shining star in Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un’s effort to turn the nation colloquially referred to in the West as the Hermit Kingdom into a tourist destination. One that will threaten to nuke you if you leave anything less than a five-star Google review.
The resort, according to state-run media, includes hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, and a water park. It’s all designed to accommodate up to 20,000 visitors. Verification of any of that info is impossible, of course, because this is North Korea, where facts are often indecipherable from fiction.
Still, the official narrative is that this is the dawn of a new era for North Korean tourism.
New Beach Resort Opens Just in Time for Summer—in North Korea?
Wonsan is where Kim Jong Un spent much of his childhood. It’s a town of fancy villas, military bunkers, and, at one point, a missile testing site. Fun for the whole family.
The opening was celebrated with some good old-fashioned North Korean pageantry. Un, his wife Ri Sol Ju, and their daughter Kim Ju Ae sat poolside, soaking in the rays, watching folks shoot down a water slide as one of several activities of the part of a ceremony that unfolded at the resort’s waterpark.
A Russian investor was there to help one of their few international friends celebrate this momentous occasion.
Foreign tourists probably won’t be hitting up North Korean beaches anytime soon. Westerners were briefly allowed back earlier this year, but the border shut again without explanation weeks later.
For now, Russian tourists are the only foreigners welcome at Wonsan, thanks to Pyongyang’s deepening bromance with Moscow. The two countries even reopened their train route this week in a show of unity.
Tour operators who spoke to the BBC are skeptical that Wansan will ever become a thriving tourism destination that rivals Pyongyang’s brutalist architecture or surpasses the popularity of the DMZ between North and South Korea.
But if you’re down to visit one of the poorest countries in the world that dedicates most of its money to building concrete monuments to its leader, then you can do worse than sipping some margaritas under the watchful eye of the least elegant mass surveillance state in the world.