Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Monday the third of February.

One of the most interesting figures in the travel industry is Simon Cockerel. He runs

choreos tours, which is the organisation that I think Simon has been sending people to North Korea

for more than anybody else. Yeah, we've been going there since 1993. So actually not the first, but just the most well

established and market leader, let's say. At the moment, North Korea is closed as it has been,

I calculate, for five years now. Yeah, that's right. Since January 2020, they closed to everyone,

not just tourists. And over the last year, they've been gradually opening, accepting tourists from Russian groups. But for most

tourists, it's remained completely closed until now. Why would they be doing that? Because

everything you hear about the North Korean economy, I mean, the fact that they're having to send

soldiers to fight

as mercenaries for Russia in Ukraine suggests that there is quite a lot of desperation. I would

have thought, since you've got presumably hundreds of thousands of people queuing up to go to North

Korea, that would be a much better way of boosting the finances. Well, tourism is better than war,

for sure, but they've never balanced their

economy on tourism anyway. Even at the highest years, there were only about 5,000 Western

tourists going to the country in a year, up to a couple of hundred thousand Chinese tourists,

though, so perhaps the ongoing closure to the Chinese market is more puzzling. But it's never

been the thing which has kept their economy afloat in the first place. So it's less important to them than people used to think. I mean, if they needed tourism dollars to survive, then they wouldn't have survived so far. So that's how that works. I mean, how, why they're still closed is a bit of a mystery. They definitely closed because of COVID five years ago. They were ahead of the game on that. But for the last couple of years, why they would still be closed remains a mystery. They're probably still closed because of COVID five years ago. They were ahead of the game on that. But for the last couple of years, why they would still be closed remains a mystery. They're probably still

closed because they were closed. Right. And that sounds a little bit kind of soviet. I guess it's

that mindset of, well, things are as they are and we'll keep them as they are. You must be

incredibly frustrating trying to fulfill people's ambitions to get to North Korea.

When do you think that people might actually at least be able to see a crumb of North Korea?

...