A new North Korea travel app hit the stores today. Creator Chad O’Carroll, who runs the indispensable NK News website, told CNN that the app “is designed for armchair travelers as well as people who are actively interested in visiting.” Niche? For sure (though not as niche as targeting fans of Playboy who literally do “buy it for the articles.”) But does it have wider applications?
Armchair traveling is fine and the app certainly is good for that — it has great pictures, interesting tidbits about the locations and facilities, and geo-tagging by Curtis Melvin, perhaps the world’s foremost North Korea satellite imagery expert. But if you’re living in Beijing – or, God forbid, disgusting vapid Shanghai* – Pyongyang is quite easy to get to for a relatively cheap price, so is this app useful for people thinking of actually visiting the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea?
In short: useful. In particular, the “custom tour” section is uniquely worthwhile and is a better interface than any of the DPRK tour operators have for putting together such tours. You could get on the phone and talk through travel options, but here, one neatly chooses what to see and then sends out requests to tour companies that then get back to you with pricing.
For group tours – which are quite a bit cheaper – I couldn’t get the results to pop up, though I think this was a first-day-in-the-app-store-
Just for the fun of nitpicking, the language section could be more focused: I don’t really need to know how to say 10,000,000,000,000,000 in Korean. Indeed, I’m not sure what it is in English. Nor is a section on “asking directions” much needed when visiting a country in which you don’t have freedom of movement.
Other useful sections include a comprehensive FAQ and an “ethics” section, which is essentially an essay by the eminent professor Andrei Lankov, making the case for the positive effects of tourism in North Korea. (For an interesting debate among defectors on this issue, check out this article on NK News.)
Still, if you’re a non-American businessperson, economist or lawyer and feel uneasy about “just touring,” one can also travel to North Korea with Choson Exchange, a Singaporean non-profit that runs workshops in entrepreneurship, economic policy and law. Um. I may work for that organization.
*Sorry, I just want to get sucked into this silly expat faux-rivalry.
Andray Abrahamian is the Executive Director of Choson Exchange, a Singaporean non-profit that runs workshops in entrepreneurship, economic policy and law for North Koreans. He has a PhD in international relations/North Korea stuff.
