Taken by Choson Exchange volunteers in 2019
The Wonsan region is receiving a lot of love recently, as the world’s media, analysts and pundits all weigh in on DPRK leader Kim Jong Un’s whereabouts. We would like to talk about another aspect of Wonsan - tourism - at a time when no one is probably thinking about traveling.
Pre-COVID19, 2020 was supposed to be a big year for DPRK’s tourism industry. Going as far back as 2013, we worked with partners in the Wonsan area to train a cohort of policymakers and business operators who would go on to develop the plans for the Wonsan-Kalma-Geumgang Mountain tourism zone. This has been the country’s key tourism development focus for the last 5 years - a belt on the East Coast of the country, away from Pyongyang, bordering South Korea and Japan, with inspiring coastal mountains, ski slopes and beaches. The zone was projected to have a grand opening this year, but with COVID19, this is likely to be delayed.
In conjunction with this development, we planned to restart a multi-year education initiative focused on entrepreneurs and policymakers in this region. We had scheduled a workshop in Wonsan originally for our volunteers in August. We expected the province to play a significant role in regional cooperation and economic exchange in the future because of its unique position and its past history facilitating interactions between DPRK, Japan and South Korea. Some of our volunteers visited Wonsan and Geumgang Mountain late 2019 in preparation for this. Our plans to do so remain, but we will have to wait to see when borders will reopen.
PY Combinator with our volunteers and some DPR Koreans
While travel and tourism is probably the furthest thing from people’s minds at the moment, we hope that post-COVID19, people will visit North Korea and take in not just the sights in Pyongyang but also more of the countryside and its natural beauty. Outside of the east coast, DPRK opened several touristic spots this and last year, most notably the Yangdok Hot Springs north of Pyongyang and the the Samjiyon slopes in the Northern border of the country. We hope to sample some of these offerings with our volunteer workshop leaders too when the country reopens. In the meantime, we have to settle with these articles kindly sent to us by the DPRK embassy in Singapore.