North Korea Watch, what is it like to travel to North Korea by taking the green train?

North Korea is a unique country. Before going to North Korea, our domestic tour guide warned us to be careful in what we say and do when we arrive in North Korea. After setting off from Sinuiju, North Korea, it didn’t take long for the phone to lose signal, leaving only the camera function.

We took the green leather train, which had a nostalgic feel. However, the internal environment is quite clean. I went to the car connection to smoke, and saw that the place where these carriages were produced actually said Nanjing. The distance from Sinuiju to Pyongyang is only over 200 kilometers. If you take the high-speed rail in China, you can reach this distance in less than an hour, but in North Korea it takes more than six hours.

This is because the speed of North Korean trains is only 40 to 50 kilometers per hour, and the track is a one-way track. In order to meet the train, the train usually stays for a long time after arriving at the station. From Sinuiju to Pyongyang, most of the places we saw were rural areas, but not a single decent city. I didn’t see a single asphalt road outside the window, there were more gravel roads and dirt roads. There are also very few cars, and occasionally tractors and trucks can be seen passing by.

After arriving in Pyongyang, our tour guide said that Pyongyang is known as the Garden City. Although Pyongyang feels very clean, I think it is a bit too much to be called a garden city. There is no shortage of tall buildings in Pyongyang, but the designs are all mediocre. There are few traffic lights on the road and the traffic flow is very small.

Our tour guide said the road from Pyongyang to Kaesong is a highway. In my opinion, it is only equivalent to a domestic county-level highway. Our tour bus was driving on it, and it was very bumpy. I was sitting in the back of the car, and I was often bounced up. The feeling was really sour.