Somewhat of an adventure

[John Hill]

Somewhat of an adventure..

It is now 20 years since my work took me on a little adventure... nothing too exciting but I trust you find my account of a few weeks in 1998 at least interesting if not entertaining.

The adventure started routine enough, a flight to Singapore, a couple of days getting paper work in order and of course a spell of looking around the shops and the customary drink and peanuts in their shells at Raffles.

The next stage was a surprisingly long flight to Beijing arriving there at about 6 am. Experienced travellers will support me when I say that you know you have arrived in China immediately the aircraft doors open and this flight was no exception. I don't recall the airline we were on but it must have been somewhat down the pecking order as the terminal building where we berthed had seen much better days but the biggest surprise was that there were no officials at any of the immigration or customs counters which hundreds of travellers were just strolling through. I had a colleague with me and we agreed that that might not be a good idea to follow on if we wanted a stress free departure from China. So we waited a while at one of the desks that looked like it should be manned and I was pleased we did because soon enough police and security officials were herding those who had walked through back in behind us. When the immigration official arrived she had a bowl of thick grey soup which she put on her desk and proceeded to eat while we patiently waited. Breakfast over she stamped our passports and we were officially in China, as we left the terminal building we passed a huge cauldron of steaming hot grey soup surrounded by airport workers getting their share.

There have been massive changes in the cities of China in the last few years and nothing demonstrates this more than comparing pictures I see today with what I recall from 1999. Nowadays we see pictures of streets crammed with cars and motor cycles whereas as I recall bicycles were the predominant vehicles.

We were only in Beijing while further formalities were taken care of, arranging the flight for our next leg of this adventure and getting even more paper work in order. We also had to take delivery of a mountain of cartons of stuff which by some wonder of coordination had found its way from our office in Petone to the Swiss Hotel in Beijing.

Three days later with paper work in order we went to the airport for our next flight, Mike and I in one taxi with all our cartons piled onto an overloaded little pick up truck. Of course we were not flying on a 'regular' airline but we did have the address of an office to report to at the airport. There was only one man at the office and he put on a good show of acting surprised to see us. He wrote on a piece of paper the name of the terminal building to go to and the number of the check in counter, he also took charge of the pick up truck and all or cartons of stuff. We found the counter but it was closed, then a door opened and out popped the man from the office! Again, seemingly surprised to see us, yea right! Check in done he sent us to an immigration counter and wouldn't you know it, there he was before us. Then he sent us to a gate lounge to await boarding which I fully expected to be empty with just him there making boarding announcements for the two of us. But it was not quite like that in fact the lounge was hard to find being at ground level and was packed tight with folks who might have been Russian, there was no sign of our friend. No sign until the door to the apron opened and he was shoved aside by the horde of 'maybe-Russians' bursting out on to the tarmac where they milled about as there was no aircraft at the gate. In somewhat of an echo of what we observed on arrival the airport police and security quickly rounded them up and back into the lounge, somewhat more forcefully than we saw in the arrivals hall with more shouting and blowing of whistles. Then our man found us and showed us out another door to where we found a stretched black limo waiting, nothing for it but to climb into the limo which was already occupied by 3 or 4 Asian men in very natty looking business suits!

We seemed to drive for miles around the airport until the limo pulled up beside a really old four engine turbo prop airliner, not an Electra but somewhat similar and I suspect bigger, Russian manufacture presumably. It was somewhat reassuring to see the little pickup truck there too but this time empty of our cartons and stuff.

Passenger steps took us up to a door near the tail of the plane where we found a tiny cabin of about 10 seats. Our travelling companions had obviously been this way before and were already seated. The little cabin was otherwise empty except for half a dozen panes of glass that were stowed in the aisle but not tied down in any way. There were a set of basic aircraft instruments on the bulkhead showing time, direction, altitude, temperature and air speed. I noted that someone had been through and set the altimeter to zero for the runway at Beijing. The engines were started, seat belt light came on and we began to taxi for take off. Mike seemed a little concerned at what we had let ourselves in for but I recalled what I heard a Dominie pilot tell some American tourists "Of course it is safe, how do you think it got to be so old?"


Sometime into the flight the door in the bulkhead opened and a young woman in a smart uniform came through to welcome us aboard and to hand out inflight meals, which naturally enough, were chinese takeways. I snuck a peek through the open door and noticed the entire main cabin was stacked high with freight of all kinds.

We descended to low level then circled over a frozen and seemingly barren landscape.


As we taxied in at our destination I noticed the bulkhead thermometer -25C and if we needed any confirmation it was cold outdoors there was a jet engine mounted on a truck being used to clear snow from the taxiway for us.



They brought steps up to door, not so much steps but more of a ladder, the door opened and another young woman came aboard introducing herself and saying she was our 'interpretator', which I think was the only language blemish she would make in the few weeks we were in her care. Down the ladder and a short walk to the terminal building to go through more formalities, just the two of us as our companions from Beijing had already disappeared. The baggage claim was a serious business and that was the only time in my career that any official has ever checked that the bags I claimed matched our baggage tags!

Personal baggage in hand we went out to the waiting car, an old Mercedes in which we would be driven to our hotel. It was late afternoon on a very cold winters day as were driven through a small city, already growing dark, no other traffic to be seen but hundreds of people walking home in the bitter cold. We left that city and were driven for twenty minutes or so, a solitary vehicle on a wide highway, no roadside buildings, no pedestrians, no cyclists, just fruit trees in the grip of winter and frozen field plots.

We stopped at a sinister check point then continued on towards the a large city ahead of us. Wide streets, very wide streets, squares, memorial arches and huge statues, a few people walking and the very occasional vehicle but there were traffic police on every corner. There was a frozen river in the centre of the city which people were walking across. Several buildings that were surely blocks of flats stood in near total darkness, maybe a light or two at ground level and the flicker of a candle at upper windows, the streets were mostly dark.

We checked into the hotel which was full of light and staff in smart uniforms. The reception area was decorated with wall maps, clocks and displays showing the time in exotic places around the world, London, New York, Bucharest, Moscow, Kiev and of course Beijing. According to the display a train left at eight o'clock every morning for Paris. We changed our American dollar spending money into the local currency, the twenty dollar notes they took without question but the one dollar notes they only accepted after looking up the serial numbers in a big book.

The hotel had a grand foyer and a mezzanine floor or two, someone stood by the escalators turning them on when a guest approached. My room was on the 12th floor and as I went the last few yards I noticed two very unlikely looking men going into the room next to mine and over the next few days I noticed they went to their room when I went to mine and left their room soon after I left mine. No doubt about it we were being watched our every move, obviously I was careful to not do anything in my room that my mother would not have approved of!

I looked out the windows, down onto dark streets with a few vehicles, most buildings were in near darkness but I could see some statues and a monument on the other side of the river basking in the glare of a megawatt lighting system but I later noticed even they were turned off soon after midnight.



So what were we doing, two middle aged kiwi blokes, in Pyongyang, capital city of North Korea!

I had been writing software software for aviation for several years, if you had listened to an ATIS or VOLMET, had a NOTAM briefing or used an AFTN terminal in NZ, and a few other countries, you would have been using my software.

Now, you will recall the recent tragedy when Air Asia MH17 was shot down over the Ukraine and you might wonder how such a thing could happen, this is quite a serious business for airlines, ensuring it is safe to fly their chosen route and we were involved in a few of these situations. North Korea, Afghanistan (Taleban era) and Iraq following the second Gulf War.

Obviously the airlines want to fly the shortest safe route and our project was to 'open up' North Korean airspace to overflying airlines.

There are two organisations among those dealing with international civil aviation, ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) is the UN agency that states belong to and NZ is a founding member. ICAO sets the standards and recommended practices which member states agree to meet or to advise if they cannot meet them. IATA, which is the International Air Transport Association is the industry organisation that airlines belong to. IATA ensures the procedures and facilities are there to make airlines profitable and also presses states to meet the standards and practices recommended by ICAO.

IATA has a minimum standard of facilities that they require before their member airlines will operate in or over a particular country and IATA chose our company to provide and install some of those facilities in North Korea. Other companies involved in the project came from UK, Germany and Norway.

The project involved supply and installation of communications and navigation systems. Every year, around about this time of year, tempers flare and harsh words are spoken across the border to the south and usually we will hear on the TV that all communications have been cut between North and South Korea except the air traffic control channel, we installed that!

Next day we were taken to the airport for various speeches of welcome and a review of what had to be done and more importantly, who had agreed to do what. Getting to one of the meetings required us to walk down a long, dark, passageway (which might have been a tunnel) and as we walked along there was someone taking out the light bulbs behind us and running ahead to screw them in and light our way.

Work days saw us rise early, eat breakfast, use the hotel toilet (very important that one) and be driven to the airport. About a half hours drive on icy roads with our faithful guide and interpreter giving us commentary along the way, chatter, chatter, chatter, it seemed they never stopped talking!

We had a guide, Mr Han, and an interpreter, Miss Yew who seemed assigned to look after our every waking minute, they were constantly at our side and made a darn good job of ensuring we didn't go anywhere we were not wanted or speak to anyone outside the requirement of the job we were doing. But they were very pleasant young people and were not so much of an annoyance.

Most people we dealt with in Pyongyang were very young in fact the city is somewhat of a Potemkin village where old people and especially sick or people handicapped in any way are kept well out of sight. I was about fifty years of age at the time and Mike a little older and wherever we walked if it was dark, rough underfoot or slippery there would be slight young men and women grasping our elbows to ensure our safety but after a while they got sick of that especially whenever we got tired of them and took long strides they could never hope to match.

Miss Yew, told me she had been chief stewardess of Air Koryo and was now responsible for translating all ICAO documents into Korean, of course I thought she was really from the ministry of spies. Perhaps I was wrong, we started a day of training with me reading from ICAO Annex Ten and her translating for the airport staff. I read a paragraph or so and asked her to translate, which she did but seemed to take a long time do so at the end of which she said 'we have done this page'. And so it was, she knew the documents that had been my life since 1964 better than I did!

So training went along really well and we did a weeks worth of training in just a couple of short days.

Meanwhile others on the project were installing a satellite earth station and the agreement was that the Koreans would dig a hole for the foundations, a hole about the size of a domestic refrigerator. But something was wrong! No hole dug and the Koreans asked that the drawings be checked, the team pored over the drawings and everything seemed to be in order. The next morning we arrived to see that a gang of labourers had dug a good sized swimming pool in the frozen ground! The drawings were in feet and inches which the Koreans had interpreted as metres!

Another part of the project was a giant UPS for all the computer, radio, satellite and other communications systems which occupied a small room. They got it all assembled and wired up then connected the mains to the battery charger but the system refused to operate claiming 'mains failure' although clearly the mains were alive. So we began checking and found the mains frequency was very steady just a bit over 42 Hertz when it should have been 50 Hertz. Faced with a problem like that in North Korea you cant just accost someone at the power company so we had to find a way around the problem. The makers in Sweden saved the day when they advised us to set the UPS charger to 16.7Hertz which is a power frequency used in several countries in Europe.


When I say we called someone, we didn’t just pick a phone off someone's desk as North Korea was almost totally cut off from the outside world even more then than it is now. What we had was an Inmarsat satellite phone, it was the size of a briefcase and had to be set up and aligned to the appropriate satellite, on later projects we used satellite phones that were barely bigger than cell phones of the same era. It cost $15 a minute to use. Miss Yew was astonished when I told her I was going to call home and with eyes like saucers asked if we had a telephone at our house. I told her there was one in the building where we lived which she seemed to find more credible.

I noticed that after a day or so the guide and interpretor tended to reduce their chatter and began to ask questions about all manner of things related to life in NZ so I responded by answering every question as how it related to my family. Now I am from a big family as it seems my parents were pretty keen on that sort of thing so there was plenty I could say without having to invent anything and lay myself open to being called on any contradiction. And so it was, one day Miss Yew asked how many days each week we worked in the office, I told her five, and that on Saturday we cleaned our living place and went to get food for the following week. I told her that on Sundays some people go to church but that we do not and that some times we would take a car and go to visit our family. Quick as a flash she claimed "But you told me your family live in another town", then she bit her lip realising that she had just revealed that visiting another town would be impossible for her even though she was clearly a member of the most privileged classes.

It would have been a day or two after that that we had the 'Incident at the Check Point'!!! Every day we left the airport to return to Pyongyang, sometimes in a mini bus and sometimes in a number of cars. On the way we had to pass through a check point, a rather creepy place, a small concrete building with some sort of pill box on the hill above it. I didnt like the pill box too much, it had a canvas sheet hanging over the front and I noticed there were always fresh footprints in the snow leading to it and it had a commanding view over about half a mile of the road running beside rice fields. Anyway, we always stopped there and all documents were checked probably including ours which the guides had custody of. On this particular day our guide did not have his 'citizen card' and was roughly dragged out of the car and into the building. We sat quietly in the car while the driver and Miss Yew were both as white as table linen at the Koryo Hotel. This was not good. Fortunately we were not the last car in our group and the driver of one must have had some significant rank as on hearing what had happened he strode into the police building and promptly emerged dragging Mr Han by his ear, threw him into our car and said something to our driver that I am sure took ten years off his life. From that day on there was no more incessant chatter and questions, no more propaganda commentaries. We got along just fine when we no longer had to frequently express admiration at Dear Leader's amazing superhuman feats.

The control tower building is several stories high but with very few facilities even the tower itself was poorly equipped and appeared to have nothing other than a couple of hand held VHF sets. The communications centre down stairs had more but they were still using Morse code to stations in Russia writing it down on scraps of recycled wrapping paper etc.

We were there in the depth of winter with no heating and very little lighting. On the first day at work I took off my coat and hung it on a peg, everyone did the same but within a few minutes I was so cold I went and put mine back on. They all followed suit with much laughter and jokes which may or may not have been at my expense. It was so cold the water that was flowing out of an upstairs toilet froze as it ran down the concrete stairs, the toilet itself was indescribable and I have seen a few, we avoided using it. Among the 20 or 30 people who seemed to work in the building were a number of extremely well turned out young women and I wondered how they managed with the toilet facilities until I noticed that each one had a piss pot under her desk adorned with an embroidered cover.

Every Saturday and Sunday were off duty days. Although we were not expressly forbidden to leave the hotel we were not exactly encouraged to wander around outdoors either.

One Sunday most of the group and our 'minders' were out for a walk in the city, there were no open shops that we could browse and most people were indoors. It was somewhat interesting to see the ground floor levels of some buildings set up with sewing rooms (rows of commercial sewing machines) and even small lathes and drills set up in another, apparently people lived in the buildings and worked there too which would have explained the relative deserted look of the city on week days. Anyways, on this particular day I had dawdled a little behind the others and Mr Han had stayed with me, as would have been his duty. We turned into a street back towards our hotel and I asked Mr Han if we could walk on the other side of the street, he told me that was not on the tour plan (what, even our supposedly random walks in the city were planned and presumably approved by someone?) but I insisted and eventually he asked 'But Mr John, why do you want to walk on the other side of the street?', 'Because the sun is shining on that side!' I replied, Mr Han thought for a moment then we crossed the street and we both strode along in the weak winter sun while the rest of our party shuffled along in the freezing shade on the officially sanction side of the street. Mr Han showed great pleasure at grinning across the street out at our freezing colleagues, mine and his.

It was obvious that there were extreme shortages of everything, electricity for a few hours a day or none at all in much of the city, infrastructure in a parlous state, even the people of the obviously privileged classes showed signs of long term hunger.

Our minders were with us from when we came down from our rooms in the morning until we went to dinner in the evening when the usual programme was dinner then through to the bar. I don’t think anyone really believed anyone else's account of what we were doing there but that did not hinder the drinking, karaoke and general socialising.


So, every evening we gathered in the bar (without our minders) at the Koryo Hotel, one of only two hotels at the time where foreigners were permitted to stay. The patrons were a mixed bunch, Russians of course, some guy who claimed to be an insurance assessor from Lloyds and had convincing tales to tell, a party from France who where there commissioning the local art studios to produce the foundation layers for a series of animated cartoons. Somewhat of a surprise were two or three who claimed to be from the US State Department who told interesting tales too. A woman who claimed, and gave us business cards to support this, to be from an American Pentacostical church visiting Christian churches in North Korea. There were a couple of Australian guys who were monitoring the use of fuel oil at the local thermal power station as part of the KEDO project and who said the power station was like the scene from blade runner but assured us that the mains frequency was always maintained at exactly 50 Hertz. All these people were more or less convincing in their cover stories, if that is what they were, but two who really stretched my credibility detector were Arabs in cheap synthetic business suits who claimed to be business men on holiday from Saudi Arabia, yea right!






One of the members of the UK company on our project was called Mister Bean, not his real name of course but we had been told that all foreigners were called mister so we had Mister Gary, Mister Mike, Mister John etc etc and of course Mister Bean. Mr Bean did not drink alcohol but joined in the evening fun. The table was getting a bit laden with empties when Mr Bean decided to clean up and began by putting his fingers in the tops of several empties, except they were not all empty and one squirted beer over Mister Mike who jumped up from his chair bumping into Mr Peter who was at another table causing his table to crash against the biggest glass table where the Russians were sitting which crashed to the floor in a shower of shattered glass and spilled vodka! Everyone was in a merry mood and much laughter rang out from what must have looked like a minor war zone. I looked over towards the bar and saw that the Korean staff had taken cover under the counter and as I was watching a little hand come over the edge of the counter and retrieve the telephone. Within a few minutes all our 'minders were on the scene rounding up their charges and getting our accounts of what had happened. The UK satellite company agreed to pay for the tables and we all had a little something to settle our nerves. Next morning Mr Han said 'Do not be dishearted Mr John, even in Korea such things can happen!'

There were two times when we ate and drank with Koreans, one evening when we were invited to a dinner with one senior official in a private dining room with a dedicated waitress for each diner. The table was set with about 13 levels of cutlery and a whole row of drinking glasses, starting with beer and moving up to some super strong aperitif, or should that be digestif. Of course we were invited to talk frankly in this private atmosphere, obviously something we strove to avoid at all costs.

The other time was the last night after the project was complete and signed off. We were 'invited' to host a dinner for our clients and minders at the main hotel restaurant, a Mongolian feast fit for dedicated carnivores. The food was good but the drink was to excess! Some of our party obviously had little prior knowledge of North Korea and had stocked up on duty free booze en route which they now placed on the tables much to the delight of the senior official on the North Korean side. Perhaps the minders had never seen bottles of Black Label etc but for whatever reason they got drunk to the point of being almost incapable. It was something of an eye opener to see these young people behaving with such abandon in the presence of senior officials from their government department.

Next day we flew to Beijing on a Tu-154b on the first leg of our flight home.

[G-CPTN]

Fascinating Mr Hill (or should that be Mister John?).
ISTR you were 'teased' in TOP about your enthusiasm for NK, but the above seems to be an honest and 'enlightening' account of real life there.
I thoroughly enjoyed every word and look forward to more tales from your travels.
I had a similar experience to your 'ever-appearing' person in a factory in Taiwan where I climbed stairs to several floors where Mr Li and his wife were hard at work on every floor (with no other people around) - I suppose they thought that to me all Chinese looked the same, but they continued to brazen it out and keep up the charade.
I had to hand it to Mr Li - he was making counterfeit parts - but his company name was 'Genuine' (fit genuine parts).
He bragged that he could reproduce 'original' manufacturers' packaging that was indecipherable from the genuine article (sic).

[BenThere]

Thanks for that post, John Hill.

Experiences such as you described may not seem like much fun at the time, but they are what enrich our lives, if we are lucky enough to have them. Your narrative was very good. I felt myself living it, though in real life I've never been important enough to have a minder.

[Sisemen]

Thank you for that John. I take back all my jibes about trainspotting and apologise. Although I do wonder why on earth you couldn’t have just said why you were in North Korea in the first place. Would have saved an awful lot of hassle!

[Magnus]

Nice tale, JH, thank you. Never got to Raffles, but enjoyed a (not inexpensive) Singapore Sling in the Mariott on Orchard Rd. I'd like to return sometime.

[OFSO]

JH, thank you for posting that. Real 'eyewitness' writing, very enjoyable. In fact 'eyeopening'.

[ian16th]

John,
Very interesting.
Maybe I should put you in touch with a guy on the Boro Mailing list.
In 1966 during the World Cup, when N. Korea played a lot of their matches at Middlesbrough, he made friends of some oficials and has been over to N Korea a couple of times.

Three Press Links.

The St George Hotel at Teesside Airport that the team stayed at, was converted from the Officers Mess of RAF Middleton St. George!

[Rwy in Sight]

Fascinating reading. One of those times I wish I were in someones else shoes'. Excellent story and thanks for posting it. I loved the interactions with the local officials.

[Slasher]

No way this can be from Mr Hil. No snide comments, no praising of Nork leadership, no blaming the Yanks, coherent writing. Can't be him. Leopard, spots etc.

If he did then he got someone else to write it.

[John Hill]

Thanks for all the comments folks, ian16th thanks for the offer of contact but I will pass on that just now.

John

[Pontius Navigator]

He bragged that he could reproduce 'original' manufacturers' packaging that was indecipherable from the genuine article (sic).

I contend that you can recognise Chinese knock off copies from the packaging. It is far superior to the Western destroy to open stuff.

[Capetonian]

Thank you John, I thoroughly enjoyed reading that, and it gives a different and far more positive impression of you than most of your previous postings.

[probes]

Wow!
And you remember the details so vividly?!
Super!
(also wot your job was!)

[G-CPTN]

And you remember the details so vividly?!

Some things remain in the memory 'forever' due to their unusualness - like my night in a Stasi Sanatorium in 1990 . . .

[John Hill]

And you remember the details so vividly?!

No need for the snide comments, I wrote most of those words at the time.

[John Hill]

Thank you John, I thoroughly enjoyed reading that, and it gives a different and far more positive impression of you than most of your previous postings.

Do I ever attack you? The only complaint you should have about my posts is that you do not agree with them.

[Rwy in Sight]

And you remember the details so vividly?!

Some things remain in the memory 'forever' due to their unusualness - like my night in a Stasi Sanatorium in 1990 . . .

We are looking for the next award winning travel writer of the week.

Mister John did you feel they were envied you (in a good way) for being foreign with goods and liberties they did not have? Or they were in terms with their situation?

[John Hill]

I am sure the people we were with had a good understanding of our relative circumstances. One of them had actually lived in the West and entertained us on the daily commute by playing '70's' pop music on the vehicle cassette player.

[probes]

And you remember the details so vividly?!

No need for the snide comments, I wrote most of those words at the time.

I'm sorry if it looked like 'snide' - my intention was just the opposite. I remember my stay in Romania (just a tourist-week or so) very vividly too. The last years of the Ceausescu regime, 2 hours of TV programs a night to sing and read poems to 'celebrate' them (no other programs at all, at least not in the hotels), and limited hot water in the hotels (once was cut off just as I had shampooed thoroughly ), and I had to pretend I was drunk to 'cheat in' a local for a friendly chat with some of our group.
So, I'm sorry that my intended compliment was poorly verbalized! Seriously.

P.S our guide told us the women had to undergo regular checks each month to make sure no-one expecting could/would have an abortion. Next to no food in the shops, so the newborn death rate was counted for the one-month-old ones =the ones not making it that far didn't count). It can't be that she made it up, too horrid for that.

[John Hill]

I'm sorry if it looked like 'snide' - my intention was just the opposite..........

So, I'm sorry that my intended compliment was poorly verbalized! Seriously.

Thanks and accepted.