Sanitised as it is, the Mt Kumgang experiment nonetheless offers a tantalising glimpse into the world's most secretive country. From the immigration hall, the tour buses take a bumpy road through something approximating the real North Korea. A low cement wall prevents close inspection of the village, but from the bus one can see North Korean villagers going about their daily business. The North Koreans wear drab brown and grey, their faces healthy enough but ruddy and hardened by a life spent outdoors. Children carry heavy sacks along a disused railroad while the adults till fields by hand and burn off rubbish.
Soldiers stand to attention in their thick, fur-lined winter coats.
A barbed-wire fence flanks the road. Everything conspires to endow the scene with a prison camp quality. Nearby, a poster depicts a radiant Kim Il-sung on a park bench surrounded by adoring children. The two-day hike takes trekkers along two spectacular mountain routes. North Korean guides, most of them women with hairstyles time-warped from the 1960s, are stationed every couple of kilometres to catch tourists breaching a strict set of rules Pyongyang has laid down.