Every now and then when you travel you have an experience that is so unclassifiably strange, so subtly unusual, that it is extremely difficult to know how to start explaining it to people. We have just got back from five days in North Korea, and we haven’t yet digested the experience sufficiently to know quite how to start blogging about it. We have to start somewhere, however. If this was a jigsaw puzzle we would start with the edges; as this is an essentially frivolous travel blog I will start with a suitably idiotic vignette and hope that the clarity starts to flow from there over the next few posts. Here we go.

OK, so I had been drinking. Lucy had very sensibly headed off to bed once I decided that six dry-ish weeks in the South Pacific had blunted my alcohol tolerance and needed to be rectified. Add one Pyongyang hotel bar with a microbrewery (unusually for North Korea, there was a choice … of Yellow Beer or Black Beer, I kid you not). Also add some high quality drinking companions including an American ex-fast jet pilot from central casting, complete with impressive stories and impressive jawline (hi Chris!) and the evening was made. Cue two in the morning, meandering back to the room, drinking lots of water (from the tap, I suspect), four and a half hours kip before an early start the next day. The scene is set…

Ladies and Gentlemen, I don’t know what all top ten things not to do with a crippling hangover are, and I hope never to find out. However, the top one thing not to do with a crippling hangover is … be forced to march up and down in lines by the North Korean Army, followed by a lunch of spicy dog meat. For, that day we visited the world famous Korean Demilitarized Zone. From the North side.

Jesus. I can handle a two and a half hour coach ride on the world’s bumpiest three lane highway. I can handle smoky briefing rooms. I can handle looking bleary-eyed out of said coach while high voltage electrified fences, massive tank traps and heavily mined, heavily tunneled strips of land scroll past. But being made to stand in two lines … now five lines … now march … now stop … now march … by the elite border guards of the DPRK Army was just too much for me. It was utterly terrible. I could be the only man in history to slump groggily for relief into the (actual) chair in which the (actual) UN representative sat to sign the (actual) Korean War Armistice. I slumped again for relief in the historic meeting room which straddles the North / South Korean border, and I slept stretched out on the back seats of the coach on the way to lunch. The actual visit was fairly interesting although, as usual for North Korea, what they didn’t tell us and didn’t show us was often more interesting than what they did. More on this later, as this touches on a more serious point and this, fairly obviously, isn’t the time or the place.

So about that dog meat, eh? When my hangover struck I was worried. I had expected to feel a little rough, but not THIS bad. Perhaps I really am out of practice on the booze; perhaps North Korean hotel-brewed beer had some nasties in it; perhaps the tapwater had some nasties in it? It doesn’t really matter I guess, but I was knocked out for a full 24 hours and wasn’t really able to stomach food until breakfast on the following day. I really, really didn’t want to have dog for lunch.

But (and it’s a huge but) this would make me three for three on borderline “so weird I might not actually want to do it” cultural experiences. First there was the invitation to the crocodile skin cutting ceremony in PNG, where we umm-ed and ahh-ed and eventually agreed that watching teenagers being tortured to prove their manhood probably was something we wanted to witness … only to have the ceremony postponed until after we had to leave the region. Then there was the offer to wear a Namba penis sheath and take part in the men’s dances in Ambrym, where I umm-ed and ahh-ed and decided that (a) being naked with a bunch of Ambrym village elders was an honest-to-god once in a lifetime experience and (b) I will never run for political office (sorry Dad) and that I should do it … only to have Chief Sekor’s sister in law tragically die the night before and the village be too busy with the funeral to wrap banana leaves around scared Westerners westerly bits. I even had a blog post worked out about it, to be called “Me and Prince Harry”. Third up was dog meat – we had umm-ed and ahh-ed once more, and decided to give it a try. With this history, no hangover on earth was going to stop me, and if Fido bounces, he bounces.

…

(tastes like beef)