Well, would you look at that. North Korea, one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations (according to North Korea) and definitely NOT one of the world’s worst totalitarian regimes (also according to North Korea) has gone and got itself an official tourism website.
Launched to convince foreign tourists to travel to the country, dprktoday.com is written entirely in Korean, so… probably not super helpful to most foreign tourists after all. (Also, considering the borders have been closed for over a month due to fears of Ebola, they’re kind of advertising to people they’re not going to let in anyway. But details shmetails – there’s videos!)
Just like North Korea itself, the website appears to have taken a ‘nothing to see here’ approach to the accusations of horrific human rights abuses often levelled at the country. Everything is glossy and more than a few pictures include some kind of cartoon flower graphic.
Now, given that the whole thing is in Korean, the website is a little hard to navigate. But that kind of just makes it a bit of a bizarre online lucky dip – you never quite know what kind of definitely-not-staged photo you’re going to land on next.
So, after much random clicking, we’ve chosen the 9 most notable parts of North Korea’s new tourism website:
1. The homepage is the epitome of cutting edge design:
2. It’s almost definitely running on some kind of 1990s-style dial-up connection.
This thing is slow to load. SLOW. Each picture appears chunk by chunk. You know the internet first became a thing and it would take half an hour to upload a single picture of Hanson and/or the Buffy cast. dprktoday.com is pretty much like that:
(almost) via dprktoday.com