One night while drinking in the hotel bar, I got word that a reasonably cute Russian girl from another tour had taken a liking to me, and she wanted to go walk around the parking lot outside the hotel. I accepted, if only out of curiosity. She and I ventured outside into the darkness, and traipsed around the limited area where we were allowed to walk. She was tipsy and getting a little bit frisky, and let me know in broken English that she wanted to kiss me. Oh, but there was a catch! She insisted that she would only kiss me if we tried to escape from the hotel and go into Pyongyang proper, mingling with the locals, away from the repressive clutches of our organized tour.

I laughed. Was she serious? She was. In the back of my mind, this felt familiar somehow. And then it struck me: we were mirroring characters in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. She was Julia and I was Winston, and this was not going to end well for us. Big Brother was watching us.

We approached the outer gate of the hotel complex, and a sleepy guard stood up from his modest folding chair perch. He shined a flashlight on the two of us and signaled calmly that we could not go any farther. Suddenly, the Russian girl made a run for it. At full speed, she darted past the guard, across a bridge, and into the darkness of Pyongyang. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and neither could the guard. This person was completely fucking insane.

The stunned guard swung his flashlight back on me for a second. I put my hands over my head and indicated to him that I was absolutely heading back to the hotel, and that I posed him no threat whatsoever. I turned around and immediately marched back to the hotel by myself. He started chasing after the psychotic Russian girl. Her disappearance was extremely concerning to the western guides, who were drunk already for the evening and not sure what to do. People doing stupid things in North Korea put their tour company at risk, and they were less than thrilled about her disappearance.

Amazingly, the Russian girl returned to the hotel in the wee hours of the morning, claiming that she had spent a fantastic time cavorting around with the locals in Pyongyang. I’m not sure if she got in trouble officially, but for the rest of the trip I didn’t say a single word to her, despite everyone referring to her as Ryan’s Crazy Russian Girlfriend, much to my chagrin. Associating with her felt like an inevitable trip to a prison camp, so I gave her a wide berth and avoided eye contact whenever possible.

There was plenty of trouble to get into at the hotel itself, however. Thanks to a YouTube video popular among would-be North Korean visitors, suspicions abound about a staff-only secret floor of the hotel, totally closed to foreigners and full of anti-American propaganda. Suspiciously, buttons in the hotel’s elevator jump from floor 4 to floor 6, and a stairway on the 4th floor inexplicably climbs directly into a solid wall. Our British guide Gareth indicated to us that the secret floor was very real, and that he had been there in the past, but that recently access had become more restricted. He implored us not to try to see it in person.

At 3am one night, a tipsy group of four people in my group decided to risk it and try to get onto the fifth floor. They walked down a housekeeping hallway and found a staff-only service elevator which had access to floor five. The elevator door opened and the space was dark and somber compared the rest of the hotel, walls painted with anti-Western propaganda posters to remind hotel staff that while they can be warm and inviting to the guests, that these foreigners remained the enemy.

Apparently this sign on the fifth floor reads: “This bomb is the product of the Americans. Every product of the Americans is our enemy. Get revenge a thousand hundred times against the Americans.” Photo from an article on Business Insider

They explored for a few minutes until suddenly a guard shouted at them from behind. Their hearts sunk; they were caught. They might get reprimanded, deported, sent to prison, or worse. Our North Korean guides, Kim and Lee, were woken up by the hotel’s guards and staff, and the whole group was led up to the revolving restaurant on the top floor. As punishment, they had to write formal apology letters to the government, and they had all of their photos of the floor deleted from their cameras. Later in the week, their cameras were all confiscated again without warning and searched for photos of the fifth floor. Apparently, the angry hotel staff threatened to post their apology letter on the Internet as a way to shame the travelers, not understanding that would be the ultimate prize in Western traveler circles.

As a rare American in the country, I was hypersensitive about doing anything that could be deemed offensive to the government because I was legitimately terrified of getting imprisoned. I couldn’t believe how many other travelers—even those in my group—seemed willing to risk their lives for a good story to tell.

My fears were not unjustified. In 2012, a Korean-American named Kenneth Bae was arrested by the North Korean government for allegedly crossing the border illegally, trying to spread religion, and plotting to overthrow the government. In early 2014, a tourist named Matthew Miller was arrested after he allegedly ripped up his tourist visa, apparently seeking asylum in the DPRK. Both men were imprisoned by the government and sent to labor camps, but eventually let go in November 2014 after a secret delegation was sent to Pyongyang by President Obama in an effort to free the men.

Traveling in the country felt totally safe — in many ways more safe than anywhere I had ever been — but the specter of a lifetime of imprisonment in a remote labor camp certainly hung in the air.