About a thousand westerners visit North Korea every year – all of them with a state-approved tour group. I loathe travelling in groups, as did all the people who chose to make this trip. The result was a bunch of highly independent travellers on a coach tour. It was hilarious.
We had our first reality check at Pyongyang airport, when our mobile phones were confiscated. This evidence of total state control was immediate and shocking. We drove to downtown Pyongyang, an unattractive showcase for the school of brutalist communist architecture – huge open spaces surrounded by imposing monuments, cold statues and ugly tower blocks all designed to make you, as an individual, feel very insignificant. What I felt was total disorientation along with, I have to admit, no small tinge of excitement.
In one of the empty spaces, under a forbidding mural of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung, were assembled about 3,000 schoolgirls, performing a mass synchronized dance with the encouragement of two men sitting in a van with loudspeakers on the roof.
Our bus turned another corner and started trundling along the river. We passed another open space – this one filled with about 2,000 soldiers doing an aggressive, synchronized taekwondo routine under two large portraits of Marx and Lenin. It was like the final scene of a Bond movie, and we hadn't even reached the hotel yet.
For the next three days we were driven from "attraction" to "attraction" with totalitarian efficiency. We visited the War Museum, the Grand People's Study House (where citizens can read some of the many great works written by the Great Leader), the Museum of Lathes, the Great Leader's Mother's Tomb … the joys were endless.
It was a little like being taken on a slow-motion and highly intensive tour of Coventry – except that it was totally fascinating.
By day three, I was getting a touch of Pyongyang cabin fever, so it was a relief to leave the city and drive up into the mountains to visit the International Friendship Exhibition. This was a huge polished marble bunker that displays every single gift ever given to both the late Great Leader and his son Kim Jong-il, the Dear Leader, the country's current head.
Highlights of the exhibition included a stuffed alligator bearing a tray of drinks – a gift from the government of Nicaragua – and a rhino horn presented by Robert Mugabe – presumably ripped from the animal's head with his own bare hands. The place was packed with hushed soldiers and reverential young pioneers, all duly being shown just how much their leaders were loved by the rest of the world.
I left the country by train – a 23-hour journey from Pyongyang to Beijing. It was only as I crossed the river that separates North Korea from China that I started to realise how desensitised I had become. People started shouting into their recovered mobile phones and arguing with flirtatious waitresses – and I realised then that I hadn't really heard a raised voice or seen a non-Korean face for over a week. How curious it was to feel free in China …
• Bejing-based Koryo Tours (+86 10 6416 7544, koryogroup.com) runs group trips to North Korea; they vary in length and cost. From €790 for three days to €2,190 for 10 days. Tailormade tours can also be arranged
Dom Joly's book The Dark Tourist: Sightseeing in the World's Most Unlikely Holiday Destinations, is out now (Simon & Schuster>, £12.99)
