Kimchi Kiwis: Motorcycling North Korea

By Gareth Morgan and Jo Morgan

Join Gareth and Jo Morgan and their companions as they rattle and splash their way around North Korea on their epic Motorcycle Adventure. Experience with them the thrill of riding through North Korea, the hermit kingdom itself. Above all, discover with them the truth behind the headlines that define North Korea and its people to the outside world, and sorrow at the tragedy that has prevented one third of the Korean people taking their place in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483538990

Gareth Morgan

Gareth Morgan is a writer, broadcaster and lecturer on the philosophy of science.

Book preview

KIMCHI KIWIS

There is the sound of something heavy moving outside the tent, followed by a pause and what might be a snuffling noise. Gareth’s skin feels as though it’s suddenly a couple of sizes too small. He dares not move, hardly dares to breathe. There is a brief silence, and then a rending, tearing noise and the starlight gleams in the eyes and on the flashing teeth of a bear.

He wakes with a shout. Bathed in sweat and panting, he looks about himself wildly. The dream has been so vivid that it takes several minutes before he can convince himself that he is in a hotel room with a noisily buzzing air-conditioner rather than in a shredded tent, wreathed in the carnivorous stink of the breath of a bear. He sinks back and lies there, eyes wide, heart pounding.

It’s strange the way things seem in the night. Gareth isn’t generally prone to anxiety dreams, and while he prides himself on his cold‒blooded rationalism, he can’t help but wonder as he lies there in the deep of the night: was this a premonition?

Ever since we began studying our route in detail and it became plain that we would, sooner or later, have to camp out under the stars at some point — perhaps at more than one point — bears have stalked Gareth’s subconscious. He has nothing in particular against the beasts and would, if pressed, say that he actually likes them. He’s admired them from relatively close range in the wilds of Alaska, but in each of those encounters he enjoyed a natural competitive advantage, being astride a motorcycle with the engine running at the time. Only once has he had what he felt was a close shave: when we camped in Yosemite National Park in 2006, we awoke to find that a bear had deftly broken and entered a Mustang convertible, in search of the burger that its unwary driver had left on the back seat. It was a cool operator, as we noted queasily at the time: this happened less than 100 metres from where we were snoring peacefully in our sleeping bags. For Gareth, camping has never quite been the same again.

In the planning stages for the Russian leg of this trip, it was clear that the distances between substantial settlements were too great for us to expect to stop each night in well-appointed hotels, or even shabby back-of-beyond B&Bs. Our options appeared to be sheltering in abandoned buildings (this part of Siberia has plenty of these), or camping. Neither, our research indicated, was without risk. The abandoned towns were haunted by gun-toting, vodka-addled misfits and outcasts, who had been known to accost and harass travellers. The badlands in between were crawling with bears.

For Gareth, the choice was simple. He had been rehearsing the Russian for ‘Don’t shoot. We come in peace, with vodka,’ for days.

This is just one of the things weighing on him as he lies awake.

His health is an area of uncertainty: besides niggling neck and back complaints, acquired through a lifetime of peering at computer screens in ergonomically deplorable conditions, he has just, seven days ago, had a hernia operation. The trip has come around long before the doctors considered it advisable for him to do anything other than rest up.

Then there are the usual questions that arise at the outset of a motorcycle expedition. Where will we find petrol, and what will the quality be like? Will the bikes hold up? What do we do if we break a bike, or — god forbid — a rider out there in the wastes of Siberia? Will conditions allow us to get through, and through in time?

For more than on most trips, time is the enemy on this one. We have a date with the Government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in Vladivostok on Tuesday 13 August 2013, and the North Koreans have assured us that we are not permitted to be late if we want our visas to be granted. After all they had many people involved making this ride happen from their side, and if we couldn’t even keep our date with them that would be seen as pretty unreasonable on our part. Fair enough.

The precise arrangements around our getting from Russia into North Korea have yet to be finalised. Getting people across the border is relatively straightforward, as there is a passenger train. But our bikes remained the sticking point. Eventually the best offer we got from the Russians is that it will cost us US$40,000 to hire a boxcar to take the bikes into North Korea. Gareth is an economist by training and by instinct, and this seems exorbitant in the extreme. Every time he thinks about that figure, he grinds his teeth involuntarily. The fact that the money had to be sent to Russia before we flew out of New Zealand but after our motorcycles had departed by ship to Magadan, meant our ability to call the whole thing off was limited. To do so would have meant writing off the bikes or at least sending someone up to Magadan to get them back. So we had coughed up the funds — which our contacts in Vladivostok confirmed were of an extortionary amount — and boarded the plane for Russia. And now worse still, up here in Magadan with our bikes in hand and with all this uncertainty over key points in the journey still swirling around, we’re about to lose contact with the outside world, as tomorrow the road north of Magadan beckons. Without email or cellphone coverage or comms of any other description, Gareth now has no way of keeping abreast of developments, let alone influencing them.

Carl Jung would have had a field day with the symbolism of Gareth’s dream. The bear is Russia’s national animal.

We had arrived in Magadan that morning, flying into Sokol Airport from Hong Kong via Khabarovsk. We emerged from the plane slightly dazed, and faintly amused to find that had we wanted to shop for fresh fish, there was a fishmonger’s stall in the terminal. Once we had collected our bags, Gareth phoned our contact, Pavel, to let him know we had made it and to find out what arrangements had been made to reunite us with our bikes.

‘Welcome to Russia,’ Pavel said gloomily. ‘Please to go now to hotel. I phone by five in the afternoon.’

We caught a cab to the hotel and were cooling our heels there when Pavel phoned at 3.00 p.m.

‘Good news,’ he said glumly. ‘Bikes have customs clearance. I send driver to bring you to port. Brown Honda Accord at four in the afternoon. The driver’s name is Yuri.’

Sure enough, at 4.00 p.m. a brown Honda Accord pulled up. The unsmiling Yuri drove us to the port, an unsightly assortment of rusting cranes and apparently derelict buildings, where we found our bikes sitting on their kickstands in a muddy, fenced yard, guarded by a big dude in fatigues.

He jerked his thumb at Jo’s bike as we approached.

‘Is not going,’ he said.

Jo turned the ignition key and the lamps lit up weakly. The battery was near dead, and too near death to turn the engine over. We prepared to push start it.

Thumping his chest and miming pushing, the guard told us he had already tried this, but as he stood there watching expressionlessly, we had a go anyway. Jo and Gareth pushed and when we had a bit of momentum up, Dave let the clutch out. The engine fluttered but refused to fire.

Jo had, with the level of foresight that only she seems to possess, packed a little lithium emergency battery in her hand luggage, which she now produced in triumph. A few minutes’ quick work with a spanner, and the bike was running. All three bikes needed fuel, and we needed to charge the flat battery.

Fortunately, we had been preceded on the ground in Magadan three weeks earlier by Brendan, Tony and Chris. As fate would have it, they too found that one of their three bikes had suffered battery corrosion on the sea voyage up from New Zealand. They had scouted the town and found a battery shop, and helpfully logged the GPS coordinates for us. We found our way to the point indicated by the boys’ intelligence, but there was little or nothing to suggest this was a commercial premises at all. It more closely resembled a junkyard, and nothing about this changed as we made our way through the yard between rusting sheds towards the blank, closed iron door in the bunker-like building at the end. Dave tentatively pushed on the door and it opened to reveal a counter and a few shelves loaded with batteries.

‘Well, how about that?’ Dave said. ‘It’s a battery shop.’

Lucky, he thought, we had the tip-off from the boys. With no spoken language and as little hope of reading such signage as there was, Dave was in full-blown culture shock.

For the twenty minutes before they closed, Jo’s battery sat on the charger, and when she produced her wallet to pay, the woman running the shop shook her head dismissively.

Jo installed the battery, still warm from the charger, back in the bike, and with the engine also still warm, it fired up no problem at all. Whether it would keep working remained to be seen, but for now, we were all in running order.

Suddenly Gareth was tired and grumpy and over it all, so we returned to the hotel. After a meal, he took himself off to bed, there to dream of being savaged by a bear. Jo and Dave, meanwhile, emptied the panniers from the three bikes onto the floor of the room and deployed all of their not inconsiderable skill and experience in trying to stuff everything back in. Too much weight — too many heavy inner tubes, Jo reckoned. But any kind of rationalisation would have to wait. After checking and adjusting tyre pressures, they judged us to be gassed up and ready to go. Then they too hit the hay.

‘Nah,’ says Gareth, shaking his head emphatically. ‘I’m not going.’

Jo and Dave regard him in consternation.

Jo was aware he was having a restless night. But in the morning, she found him looking drawn and agitated and apparently on the edge of a panic attack.

Dave has been talking to the hotel staff, and they say the weather is due to close in. Looking out the plane windows on our way in yesterday, we saw how waterlogged the hinterland had already become, and how brown and swollen the rivers were. Khabarovsk looked like a town dropped from the skies into a landscape that strongly resembled the Yukon, which is more lake than land, thanks to the way water sits without soaking through the permafrost. We know from the boys — Dave has been talking to Brendan and Tony — that we can expect only a 150 km of tarsealed road north of Magadan, then we’ll be on a soft surface, which the rain will turn to slush.

Eventually, Gareth relates his dream, and expresses his bear fears. To appease him, Jo undertakes to do an Internet search for alternatives to camping out, but to her, Gareth doesn’t seem quite right. Expedition motorcycling isn’t for the fainthearted, and he has faced greater doubts, dangers and uncertainties than this in the past without flinching. She takes his temperature and finds that he’s running a mild fever. He admits that the operation site is sore.

Jo and Dave confer, and decide that Gareth should go back to bed. We’ll reassess things at midday.

As Gareth sleeps, Jo hits the Internet. She uses Google Earth to ‘fly’ our route from Magadan to the next significant settlement, Susuman. It doesn’t look promising. There’s nothing in the way of towns or villages marked in what is, to all appearances, a landscape devoid of features and inhabitants — not counting the bears.

Before she despairs, Jo zooms in a little, and finally, in the hazy, pixillated zone, clusters of photograph icons appear, and if you drill down further, placenames emerge. She discovers that somewhere out there, at the absolute limit of a comfortable day’s ride in poor conditions, there is a place called Orotukan.

Googling Orotukan, she soon finds a few blog entries by people who have actually visited the place: a pair of intrepid cycle tourists, several groups of bikers and a bunch of people who appear to be adventure-minded Goths. It is possible to stay there, she reads, in an apartment fitted out for visiting mining officials. This is promising — although Jo is a little alarmed at the affinity the Goths seem to have found with Apartment 13. Nor are they the only group to mention zombies, and more than one group mentions vampires: all report being told by the locals to lock the door to Apartment 13 after dark and not to come out for anything.

Jo considers passing on this mixed news, but given Gareth’s fragile state of mind, she figures she had best keep it to herself for now.

Midday rolls around, and Gareth is a little better, if still reluctant to make a start, despite Jo’s assurances that camping will not be necessary on our first night on the road. We decide to have an easy day, and to spend it having a look around.

Magadan is the principal port on the Sea of Okhotsk in eastern Russia and gateway, as it is proclaimed, to the Kolyma region. There had long been a fishing settlement of sorts here, but Magadan really went ahead in 1932, when the government of the Soviet Union developed it as a facility to process the wealth of the Kolyma region — principally gold — outwards and the means of extracting it inwards. Kolyma, which is broadly defined as the region lying between the Siberian Sea, the Arctic and the Sea of Okhotsk, was the Soviet equivalent of the Yukon, and produced a fabulous amount of gold. But it is remembered less for the glittering wealth that it yielded up than for the terrible cost of obtaining it. The goldfields themselves and the infrastructure required to service them were built with forced labour. Kolyma was one of the more brutal reaches of the so-called ‘gulag archipelago’ that fourished under Josef Stalin’s rule. In his book Kolyma, the wonderfully named Robert Conquest estimated that up to three million people perished in the region between 1932 and 1952. This figure has been disputed, and alternative estimates run as low as a piddling 500,000. But there is no way of knowing how many people were executed or died of starvation and privation in pursuit of the riches that Stalin needed for his campaign to industrialise the Soviet Union. At its height, it is estimated that every kilogram of gold wrung from Kolyma cost a human life.

Prisoners — criminals, dissidents, homosexuals and those whom others had denounced — arrived at Magadan in grim convoys, assuming they survived the passage via the Arctic in the primitively appointed ships. They were dispatched northward along the Kolyma Highway, which the first prisoners built. Forced labour camps, or gulags, were threaded along the length of the highway, and their inmates were compelled to work digging and panning gold from the Siberian taiga (snowforest). They were poorly clothed and equipped, and they were deliberately malnourished. Anyone who refused to work or who was judged to be failing to perform was executed. Others simply starved, or died of hypothermia. Kolyma was ‘the pole of cold and human cruelty’, in the words of Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the Soviet writer who coined the term ‘gulag archipelago’ and brought the terrible system to the world’s attention.

It is the Kolyma Highway, offcially designated M56, that we are here to ride. It was chipped from the permafrost with handtools by men who were mostly unaccustomed to physical labour. They died in droves, and so as to dispose of their remains effciently, many of the victims were laid beneath the road itself.

That’s what accounts for the Kolyma Highway’s other name: the Road of Bones.

Present-day Magadan is a comparatively pleasant town — at this time of year, at any rate — on the shores of a wonderful natural harbour. Its population is roughly 100,000, and its main industries are fishing and servicing the mineral exploitation that still goes on in the Kolyma region.

We do the sights: some interesting civic art, comprising military hardware — a pair of MiG fighters, an attack helicopter, a surface-to-air missile — mounted on poles like game trophies; another pair of sculptures resembling trees, festooned with padlocks and coloured ribbons; the beautiful Orthodox church, with its gilded onion domes; a hilltop vantage giving a panoramic view of the town and its imposing radio masts and oil refinery flares; and a beautiful, moving sculpture rendered from concrete called ‘The Mask of Sorrows’, erected in 1996 to the memory of those who died in the atrocity that was the gulags. Its front comprises a face, with a teardrop made of smaller faces running from one eye, and a barred window for its other eye. Other faces adorn its other aspects, and inside and beneath it, there is a cold and lightless cell. The Mask was crafted by a Russian whose parents were amongst Stalin’s victims. Who knew that so soulful a lament could be phrased this way, in the industrial syllables of cement?

We finish our tour at a burger bar handy to Magadan’s pretty white sand beach. We’ve eaten in many tawdry fast-food joints in every corner of the world: we speak with authority when we say that you’d go a long way before you’d find burgers as bad as these. Rubbery meat patties languish in gooey muck that might be anaemic cheese or some nameless sauce, all of it enclosed in tough, stale buns.

Gareth is still grumpy and stressed. The weather forecast is for a deterioration. He knows — we all know — that we should have gone today. Dave is beginning to wonder whether we will get away at all.

The rain starts falling overnight, and we awake to a grey, streaming dawn. Gareth is over his funk, or at least, sufficiently over it to contemplate moving out. So after a fortifying breakfast and negotiating interminable hotel checkout formalities, we stuff our personal gear in our already overstuffed panniers, don our wet weather kit and prepare to roll out.

There’s always a few butterflies at this point in an expedition. The road is all ahead of you. You’ve yet to form a working relationship with your bike, and you’ve yet to work out the best way of trimming your kit so that you’re not too top-heavy or lopsided. But there’s also a surge of adrenalin when you kick into gear and let out the clutch on another adventure. Even after all this time, nearly 160,000 km, to be precise, none of us have tired of that feeling.

The rain is steady as we head out to negotiate the outskirts of Magadan. It’s an annoying, remorseless drizzle. If you lower the visor on your helmet, visibility is dramatically reduced. If you ride with your visor up, the water trickles down your face and neck and begins to infiltrate your inner clothing. Still, at least it isn’t cold. It was forecast to be around 8˚C but it’s closer to 16.

Soon, we’re on the open highway, the M56, the Kolyma Highway, the Road of Bones itself. The landscape is dreary in the rain — low, scrubby hills with the occasional stand of conifers: the browns and duns and dark greens bleed together in the rain. The traffic is relatively light and well behaved, and the road surface is passable. It’s mostly tarseal, with the odd stretch of concrete and still other stretches of areas under repair. We’re able to make good progress, and one advantage that the rain offers is that we don’t have to contend with the clouds of dust of which others have complained on this road. At first, we fall into our accustomed riding order, with Gareth leading, Jo coming next and Dave bringing up the rear. The idea is that you keep the headlamp of the bike behind you in your mirror. If it disappears more than momentarily, you slow until it reappears. If it fails to reappear, you assume there’s trouble afoot and you turn back. But on a good surface with no possibility of taking the wrong road, you can just concentrate on riding.

The tarseal, like all good things, comes to an end, and all too soon. Gareth sees the point where the hard stuff ends and the slick, slushy, soft stuff starts. He drops down a gear and tightens his bum in anticipation of the rear wheel’s tendency to twitch in the rutted surface. With a bump, the transition is made. A fine spray of mud jets forward from the tyre and rises to coat bike and rider alike.

On the positive side of the ledger is the fact that you have to concentrate so fiercely on your riding in conditions like these that you forget about everything else: time pressure, the uncertainties ahead, and bears.

Having had just one break to escape the drenching, under the veranda of a derelict lean-to, we reach the semi-derelict town of Akta about 11.00 a.m. As we climb off our bikes and stand upright, a little trickle of water runs down our spines from our upper to our lower backs. It’s still not cold, but we’re wet through and shivering all the same.

To our delight, we spot a shabby little building that just might be a café. Through a mixture of gestures and pidgin Russian, Jo ascertains that we can have any kind of coffee we want, as long as it is black and full of sugar. She slowly decodes the Cyrillic menu, wishing there were pictures depicting the unknown items, until the unfamiliar letters assemble themselves into something she recognises.

‘Plov!’ she says.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Dave asks.

Plov is a rice-based Uzbek dish that is popular in the Ukraine and just as popular amongst our kids. We nurse our coffees as the waitress digs spoonfuls of food from plastic containers onto polystyrene meat trays and gives each in turn a spin in the microwave. The plov proves to be lukewarm, woefully inadequate for hungry bikers and absolutely delicious.

The food revives our drooping spirits somewhat. Outside, we shed our wet layers and replace them from our panniers, reflecting gloomily that most of our clothes will be wet through by tonight. We don’t need the threat of bears to make the prospect of camping decidedly unappealing.

Gareth is still very touchy and withdrawn, and Jo finds herself with a bright, false smile fixed on her face and making absurdly optimistic pronouncements.

‘I think it’s going to clear,’ she says, peering out into the watery world, and miraculously as it seems, just as we’re preparing to mount up again, the sky does lighten, and the rain eases to a misty drizzle.

A few kilometres north of Akta, the road gets worse, deteriorating to a slippery, treacherous slush. You try to pick the tyre track of a vehicle that has preceded you and follow it. That works fine so long as you can stay in line, but each of us has anxious moments where we stray into the slushy ridges on either side. Then the rain gets heavier. Jo takes over Gareth’s position at the front: he is clearly still well below par, and has been making heavy weather of it. Jo wants to push the pace a bit and get this miserable day over and done with.

Four hundred kilometres aboard a fully laden expedition bike is a fair day’s ride at the best of times. In the wet, on your first day in a foreign country and before you’re in the rhythm of things, it’s a huge day. By the time we first sight Orotukan, we’re all knackered.

Nor is our first sight particularly encouraging. Gareth joins Jo just short of the bridge leading into town and stares, aghast. Beyond a sign sporting what appears to be a ‘road closed’ emblem, it’s a collection of wooden shanties, roofless houses, derelict concrete apartment blocks staring with blank, windowless eyesockets, all surrounded by broken and overgrown yards and piles of rusting rubbish.

‘I thought you said there’s accommodation here,’ Gareth says.

‘There is,’ Jo replies, pasting that saccharine smile across her face that is pinched with fatigue and, if Gareth reads it right, a shadow of doubt.

‘You’ve got to be joking,’ he says.

Dave arrives.

‘What does the sign say, Jo?’ he asks.

‘Transportnykh sredstv za predely strogo zapreshcheno’. Visitors strictly forbidden, she translates silently.

She feels the weight of the stares of both boys.

‘Welcome to Orotukan,’ she says brightly. ‘Follow me. It’ll be fine.’

We roll past the sign forbidding visitors and into town, or what passes for it. Here and there signs of life are detectable amongst the abandoned shells of what once were Soviet apartments: a child’s pushbike, a brightly coloured piece of fabric on a clothesline, a car that just might be in running order. Just a few of the blank window holes in the eerie abandoned apartment blocks remain glazed.

Still, we haven’t seen a soul by the time we reach what appears to be the town square, and spot a grim-looking building with an official plaque next to the open door. Then a small, sour-looking woman emerges from an alley and watches as we enter the