Jour 6 - 17 April 2014 (Juche 103)

Leaving by train

The main activity of the last day was to exit Korea by train. I thus went to the station with a family of 3 Swedish from our group and other tourists from other groups staying at our Hotel.

On the station platform, I looked at the usual scenes of tears and goodbyes. We shared a wagon of soft sleeper trains (the train is very much alike Chinese night trains) with Korean officers, civilian and even 10-15 years old kids of the National Figure skating team who were going to Manila to attend their first international competition.

The scenery along the railway was similar to what we saw from the bus: dry brown fields, cultivated by hand, with wooden ploughs pulled by oxen or sometimes metal ploughs pulled by small tractors. The frequent train horns suggested that a lot of people were walking along the railway, and were probably little accustomed to train passages.

On the way to the border, we sympathized with the little skaters, 3 of whom were sharing a compartment with a British tourist. We perverted their minds showing them imperialist games, such as Angry Birds or Cut the Rope, on our imperialist iPhones; I also showed them some pictures I had on my laptop: Mexico, Scuba diving in the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Hong Kong, etc.

At the border

The last kilometers before the border were striking. On the foreground, an ancestral countryside, on the background, China with a line of skyscrapers! The contrast was bizarre and astonishing. We finally reached the border, at Sinuiju, pretty much on time. The density of soldiers at the border was really impressive, it seemed complicated for local to access freely to the station and for the first time of the trip we really felt that we should not try to take pictures…

We filled the usual forms and gave our passports and Visa to an officer who came in the train. In the custom declaration, I checked that I had a cell phone, a few magazines and a GPS (a small Polar GPS receiver to measure my speed when I run), to be consistent with the declaration on the way in where I did not experience any problem. Like the cellphones, GPS were supposed to be authorized in DPRK for a few years, but the information did not seem to have reached Sinuiju since the officer asked me to show him the device and seemed confused; He made me understand to stay in the compartment (I wasn’t going to move anyway) and keep the GPS device close to me. He came back about 10 minutes later, with 4 colleagues with a lot of stars on their epaulettes, who asked the 3 Swedish to go out of the wagon and questioned me for about 10 minutes in the compartment about the GPS (one of them spoke correctly English). I explained again that it was for the Mangyondae festival, and that it was only displaying the speed without recording any position (which wasn’t entirely true). They let me keep my device after having made me fill the form again without checking the GPS box. All the officers but the first one left, the later searched me, listened for 5 minutes at my iPod (I had some DPRK martial songs on it but I think he listen to French Humor Podcast), found my wallet and went through it, and confiscated my North Korean Won banknotes (foreigners are not supposed to own this currency, but I had anticipated this and dispatched my notes in my wallet, my suitcase and my backpack)

On the other side

2.5 hours after stopping at the border, the train finally departed and crossed the bridge to Dandong. The contrast was striking! In 5 minutes and a few hundreds of meters, almost empty fields were replaced by traffic jam ,skyscrapers, advertisement, people with a huge diversity of clothes, remembering us how North Korea was special in the actual world.

We then had to go through the Chinese part of the border. Everything went smoothly on this side, our train hanged to Chinese wagons and we had to wait for about 1.5 hour (I believe the Chinese take a large time margin to leave time to the formalities on the other side of the border)

I looked a last time at the bridge, carpeted by advertisements on this side of the border, and looked at the totally flat land on the other side of the border; hopefully, there was a huge statue of Mao greeting us in front of the train station, so that we were not too disoriented.