I must admit, I am extremely fascinated with DPRK, and hope to visit it before it is turned into a free country. Yes, I know this makes me sound like a prick, but it wouldn't exactly be the same experience if the guides didn't blabber on about how great Kim Il-Sung was, and the American battleship The Dear Leader's army had captured.
And the puny Christian minority facing persecution is hardly the biggest problem for the 24 million North Koreans. 3 million of these live in the capital, Pyongyang, but only the people deemed presentable to tourists, by the government, are allowed to live in the monotone city. Meaning no disabled, sick or elderly in the capital. This is to ensure that foreigners are left with a "better" picture of North Koreans as a whole. The unwanted people get moved to the rural areas where they are left on their own to live in shoddy sheds on the roads, or if they are lucky, dilapidated housing.
The problem with the famine starts here. The outcasts have to grow their own crops if they want to kill their hunger, but when the rice harvest fails (like in 2008), they can treat themselves with some delicious bark, because Kim Jeong-Il sure as hell won't give them any bread or rice rations. Unfortunately, bark doesn't kill anyone's hunger, so many people die from starvation outside of Pyongyang. The little food the DPRK has in store is given to the healthy, dare I say "normal", people in Pyongyang, and nobody gives a damn about the rural areas. The result is mass fatalities from starvation, and excavators busy digging huge holes to be used later as mass graves for the victims of the famine.
Now, it's not like Jeong-Il is trying to solve this. He keeps the wanted people alive in the capital with the food rations. The poorer rural areas are purposefully overlooked or isn't as much granted corn. Also years ago, Hyundai donated TONS of trucks, cars, corn, cattle and other items needed to keep a people alive to DPRK. Well, that machinery sure as hell didn't make its way to the farmers far outside the cities, where they still harvest with tools and wagons that look like something out of the 18th century.
Oh and by the way, the official DPRK tourist organization won't just let you "wander round" for a few days. You'll have to do that illegally via train from Irkutsk or anywhere that's not Beijing. You'll live on the hotels they decide. Myohyangsan Hotel in the mountains of the same name, and Yanggakdo in Pyongyang. They'll let you see what they want you to see, and they'll let you know, what they want you to know. Officially visiting North Korea without a guide is unheard of.
