Paranoia, no cars and silence in the cities: What I saw when I played golf in the most secretive and dangerous country on earth



By RICHARD SHEARS in Pyongyang, North Korea

Drizzle swept across the fairway and a bitter wind ripped leaves from the trees as I stepped onto the first tee of one of the world's most exclusive golf courses.



The setting might have been a British links in typical British weather, except that in the UK I would not be watched by two minders waiting to call me back should I stray too far looking for a lost ball.



There would be no sudden boom of a heavy gun from a military base near the course - and no peasants bent double in the surrounding fields digging over acres of brown mud with hoes, or oxen pulling wooden ploughs across the arid landscape.

Richard Shears with North Korean caddy Miss Nim on the Pyongyang golf course in the first ever tournament to be played in the secretive country on earth

For I was competing in an extraordinary golf tournament in North Korea - an event which proved to be my ticket into what is probably the most secretive - and dangerous - country on earth.



Few Western writers have ever gained access, but during five days touring the country I was able to witness something of how life is lived in a nation about which we know so little.

I don't suppose most of the workers in the fields surrounding the Pyongyang Golf Club have even heard of the game. In fact, it's hard to believe courses have been built at all in a land which for the most part exists under a centuries-old feudal system. But then foreign diplomats and the political elite do need some form of entertainment.



We even heard a story that Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, scored a series of 11 holes-in-one after the course opened.

One of the main streets in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. There are relatively few vehicles in the country and most streets are just like this, virtually devoid of traffic

Though the upper echelons of the ruling Korean Workers' Party may enjoy the perks that come with power, the vast majority of the 22 million population live under an iron fist of totalitarian control.



It is the world's most militarised nation, with nearly ten million active and reserve personnel, while its continuing aggression towards South Korea - strenuously denied by the North, which says it is the South which is to blame -famously led George W Bush to describe it as an outpost of tyranny.



Before I arrived, I'd read news stories of mass starvation, of people living in misery under a brutally strict regime and of prison camps where inmates would rather die than suffer years of unbearable hardship.

A boy hurries along a street, typically empty of cars, in Pyongyang, where bicycles and walking are the main means of getting about

So what would I see for myself?



I was one of 18 players from around the Western world granted a visa to play in the tournament arranged by British Lupine Travel agent Dylan Harris.



Most unexpectedly, although we were all domiciled in a hotel on a river island in the centre of the capital Pyongyang - a city of around 3.3 million people - with a soldier guarding a bridge to the 'mainland', we were were given an intimate insight into daily life in a country that allows only 2,000 visitors to pass through its borders every year.



We swung our clubs near 'Dear Leader' Kim Jong Il's extremely private lakeside villa and we were taken to the demilitarised zone (DMZ), where we were able to wave across rolls of barbed wire to an astonished group of American servicemen a few hundred yards away in South Korea.

A rare image: Girl cadets learning how to march in Pyongyang

Amnesty International has claimed that prison camps in North Korea have been expanding as more political dissidents are arrested, but I had no hope of verifying this, having been warned beforehand that asking any kind of political questions could provoke serious consequences for our minders, who, as the days went by, proved to be a jovial group.



Nevertheless, the level of control - you might call it paranoia - was extreme.



I was forced to leave my laptop, mobile phone and camera zoom lenses in China, presumably because the authorities were worried I might provide information to any dissidents in North Korea - or show the populace pictures of lavish western lifestyles.



Everywhere we went, we were monitored carefully by our three minders - Mr Oh, Mr Han and Miss Ann - who ate with us and travelled with us, never letting us out of their sight, even on the golf course.

Close to the demilitarised zone in North Korea, a soldier turns to read an inscription on a monument marking the death of Great Leader Kim Il Sung, praised for taking the country out of the ruins of the Korean War

They had joined us on the train from the border town of Siniuju, where I had my first glimpse of life inside this secret country.



Smartly-dressed men and women rode on bicycles side by side along the wide boulevards, their briefcases or shopping bags sitting in small baskets. A few military vehicles passed them by, but most striking of all was the almost complete absence of cars, which are incredibly rare across the country.



With no car horns and no roar even of motorbikes, this was a silent city.



Yet while I was transfixed by these scenes, reminiscent of a China long before the motor car clogged its roads, the cyclists who found me and my fellow golfers equal subjects of fascination.



An ancient green and white diesel which creaked along at 40mph on the 200-mile carried us on the six-hour journey to the capital Pyongyang, clinging precariously to an unstable track that cut through a parched brown landscape, broken at times by groups of workers scurrying about like figures in a Bruegel painting and an occasional toy-like red and blue tractor.

A North Korean military officer stares at South Korea across the demarkation line inside the demilitarised zone (DMZ) between the two bitter nations. The line is immediately in front of the blue buildings on the side closest to the officer's position

Stopping at a station, we were allowed to step down onto the platform - 'but you will take no pictures, it is forbidden', we were told, the first order of many in that vein which were to follow. As we stretched out legs, squads of soldiers with backpacks scurried around, while a female voice singing patriotic songs was amplified through overhead speakers.



As we continued our journey, I saw numerous large statues of Kim Il Sung, known simply as the Great Leader, his hand held out in a gesture of embrace. He it was who founded the country in 1948, and ruled until his death in 1994. Now, his son Kim Jong Il is the master of the nation. The cult-like worship of both figures is one of the most marked features of everyday life.



We reached the Yanggakdo Hotel in Pyongyang at night, but it stood out among the surrounding and darkened tall buildings of the capital, for it rose up to 47 floors and it seemed there was a light on in every room.

North Koreans clamber onto an already overcrowded bus - one of the few forms of transport in Pyongyang

Opened in 1995, it is located on an island in the middle of the Taedong river, a waterway dividing the city.



The foyer is cavernous, very much a throw-back from a Soviet era despite its relatively modern opening, but what surprised me was its concession towards Western expectations - a revolving restaurant on the 47th floor - while in the basement there was a bar, a bowling alley, a pool room and a table tennis room.



In my room, I could watch the BBC world service on a Japanese TV set before heading downstairs to drink a beer or two at around £1 a bottle, and eat Chinese-style food, with rice being served last because it's regarded as a 'filler', with the good meats and fish should be enjoyed first.



Once, we were afforded a fascinating snapshot of everyday life when we rode on the underground Metro from a yawning, brightly-lit station named Prosperity to another called Glory. The trains were packed with office workers crowded in together, the men in suits, the women smartly dressed in jackets and trousers which gave the impression they were not struggling for survival.



Even here, the silence of the city was striking, with wide boulevards cutting between skyscraper buildings. I could count the number of cars at any given time on my fingers, the main mode of road transport being trolleybuses, trams and bicycles.

Taken secretly from a bus, this picture shows a typical street in Pyongyang with public housing in the background. North Koreans are given flats free once married, but have to pay 3 per cent of their income for power and water

It was in the capital that I really came to understand the obsessive reverence that must be paid to the nation's leader. If you suggested to any sane Briton that he or she treat David Cameron the same way they would laugh in your face.



One day, I was led into a vast 'villa of reverence', where a lifelike figure of the Great Leader - straight from Madame Tussauds, it seemed - stood in a garden of plastic flowers.



Wearing woollen covers over my shoes, I was ordered to stand in line in front of the grey-suited figure, and at a command I bowed my head as soft music played in the background. If my hosts hadn't clearly been taking the ritual so deadly seriously, it was have been all too easy to laugh out loud.



At Mount Myohyang - the so-called Mysterious Fragrant Mountain 100 miles north east of the capital - were more amazing sights for here the people come to revel in the patriotic artefacts kept within a vast exhibition hall. Here, as was the case in Pyongyang, everyone wore pin badges showing the portrait of the now-deceased Great Leader Kim Il Sung.

Another picture taken secretly from a bus, this image shows children working in a field south of Pyongyang

The economy is largely based on agriculture

We were invited to inspect gifts that had been given by world leaders to Kim - father and son - displayed in scores of glass cases.



There was a stuffed baby crocodile perched upright holding a tray of wooden goblets from Nicaragua, a painting from Cambodia portraying a broom sweeping U.S. troops out of Asia, bears' heads from the former Soviet Union and Romania, and even a plaque portraying an image of London Bridge from a group calling itself the Britain-Korea Friendship Committee.



One of the great myths to emerge from North Korea has centred around Kim Jong Il's supposed private train, which is said to have its own station and its own track leading into Beijing, the Chinese capital, which he's visited in the past to receive medical treatment and has recently returned to drop in on the Chinese hierarchy.



The reality is that in the exhibition hall there are two special carriages - one presented by the Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung, another by Stalin - but they have not been used since 1978. Kim Jong Il does have a special train to travel on these days, but it is nothing like the bullet-proof version I was shown.

Pictured from Dandong, China, these North Koreans stare across the Yalu River separating the two countries. Many stand for hours looking at the Chinese city that is for most beyond reach - so near yet so far

As we travelled around, our ears were filled with propaganda - or as Mr Oh and Mr Han insisted, the truth - about the United States.



Bookshops in hotels are filled with English language publications about the hated U.S., with one title describing America as the Empire of Terrorism.



We were driven south to the demilitarised zone where we stared across the demarkation line towards South Korea - a couple of hundred yards away - where, by coincidence a group of American servicemen stood.



They had been brought to the 'dividing line' from Seoul presumably to stare across to the north at starving peasants and aggressive North Korean soldiers.



Instead they saw my grinning group of Western golfers waving happily at them. They did not wave back. Neither did a South Korean soldier - picked for his intimidating height - in his green uniform, glaring instead at our cheek.

Photo taken from a boat in the middle of the Yalu River between China and North Korea shows two North Korean men sharing a joke on the riverside wharf. It is the closest they will get to China - and the world beyond

As if to reiterate the North Korean authorities' intense antipathy towards America, I was taken aboard the U.S. 'spy ship' Pueblo, which was captured in 1968 and is now moored on the Taedong River in Pyongyang. While the Americans said at the time that it was in international waters, the North Koreans insisted it had strayed into their territory. I was even shown a black and white newsreel describing how it was overwhelmed by the Korean navy.



While the itinerary that had been planned for us was clearly intended to show off the strength of North Korea as a military power, I was more interested to know about the more mundane aspects of life.



I asked, too, if there was any truth in reports some time ago about an assassination attempt on Kim Jong Il. But any mention of it to our minders proved fruitless as they made it quite clear that any discussion about Dear Leader was off limits.



When I asked Miss Ann to tell me about how families exist, she surprisingly tucked her arm in mine as we walked to our bus and told me that once people are married - an arranged affair by parents - they are given free accommodation in a flat. All health care is free, too, and while Korean traditional medicine was is alongside Western treatments, it is the Korean treatments that were the most successful in preventing diseases.

A North Korean woman in traditional dress walks through a garden north of Pyongyang

The economy is largely based on agriculture. Farmers grow vegetables and rice, there are chickens, goats, pigs and sheep to eat, and it was suggested to me that talk of thousands of people starving to death during times of famine was an illusion manufactured by the West.

As for a nuclear threat from North Korea, that was just a fabrication of Western imperialists.



All three minders emphasised that everyone in Korea is happy - and happily devoted to the Dear Leader.



I certainly found the people to be friendly, if perhaps a little shy at first. I witnessed workers in the fields laughing together as they toiled. Maybe it is a dangerous assumption to make that someone who has little must be unhappy - especially if they have never known any other existence.



When the day came for the golf tournament, fortified by a breakfast of pickled cabbage and sauteed pork, we set out in groups for the first tee. There, we were amazed to find we'd been provided with a number of attractive young Korean women dressed in formal blue and white uniforms who would serve as our caddies.



The fairways were like light rough and extremely narrow. By the end of the day, I had been left way down the field - in spite of the attempts by my caddy, Miss Nim, to suggest in her very limited English what club I should use on each hole.



And as I missed each easy putt, she smiled sweetly and clapped politely.

A Buddhist monk peers out from a preserved temple north of Pyongyang

On the way back to the hotel, Miss Ann decided it was time to sing us all a song. Standing at the front of our coach with microphone in hand, she treated us to a softly sung Korean song, while Mr Han, bizarrely, gave us a rendering of Eidelweiss.



It was a curiously touching gesture, and evidence - to my mind at least - that the natural bonds of humanity will often supersede the most implacable political divide.



When it was time to leave for China, Mr Han, Mr Ho and Miss Ann shook my hand and expressed the wish that we all return again next year.



Perhaps we will. And if we and others like us continue to do so, perhaps the barriers erected so many years ago will finally begin to crumble.

I left North Korea with mixed feelings. Perhaps, in towns and villages beyond the distant hills, there is abject poverty.



Yet one Western businessman who has dealings with North Korea pointed out that the pleasures we in the West enjoy - our TVs, our cars and so on - are not craved by North Koreans because they've never had them.



As for the story of Kim Jong Il's 11 holes-in-one, a few discreet inquiries among officials at the golf club revealed that it was nothing more than an urban myth. Not that any of them would dare to say so in public.

Richard Shears strikes a blow for the West on the Pyongyang Club course in North Korea





