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Comment by flyinghamster | Hacker News Reader

A 2008 trip from Vienna to Pyongyang: http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/

This featured, for part of the way, a ride in the North Korean sleeper car from Moscow to Pyongyang, as far as I know still the world's longest single continuous rail trip without changing trains.

Something like this could pretty well never be done again, though. The Khasan-Tumangang border crossing is really only open to North Koreans and Russians, and they managed to get in only on the technicality that Tumangang was listed on their visas as a valid port of entry. They were lucky they didn't end up in a North Korean jail - or a Russian one.

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I did a similar journey in 2009, and bought my ticket from Helmut Uttenthaler - the guy who wrote that blog!

My trip into North Korea got postponed until 2010, but the rest of the Trans-Siberian (including checking out a purported North Korean labour camp in Chegdomyn) continued as planned.

The route was basically: Geneva-Beijing-Xian-Beijing-Dandong-Beijing-What do I do with my double-entry Chinese visa and a week-Hong Kong-fly to Taipei-fly to Beijing-Harbin-Vladivostok-Khabarovsk-Chegdomyn-Khabarovsk-Irkutsk (first CouchSurfing experience!)-Moscow-Ukraine-Slovakia-Austria-Switzerland-fly to UK for university.

I liked Taiwan so much I went back the next summer for 2 months at an iPhone app startup, and enjoyed that so much I went back again from 2014-2018 and made many good memories (microSD, USB, DRAM factory).

About the long train journey though: the scenery is beautiful, and being offline for a while is very refreshing "Sorry I didn't answer your email, I was in Siberia". Worth doing every decade or so; it's about time I have another holiday like that. Maybe further south along the ancient Silk Road route.

That sounds like a fantastic trip!

> Irkutsk (first CouchSurfing experience!)

If you are going to do it again, would you still use CouchSurfing? We had a great experience surfing on all of our stops from Warsaw to Vladivostok in 2013, but I'm not sure if that's still a thing, or if it is all Airbnb now. I wonder if it still has the same vibe.

Asking because I'd also love to take the Transsiberian again. Vladivostok was great, but I'd love to see Mongolia this time.

I stayed active on CouchSurfing from then on, and was also able to host in Japan and Taiwan! It's a great community, with meetups as well if you're not travelling but still want to hang out with interesting people.

In May 2020 though, CouchSurfing started charging subscription fees. The community is outraged, and most people are moving to BeWelcome.org and Trustroots. BeWelcome has some online meetups as well, if you feel like coming and chatting.

So yes - I am still doing hospitality exchange, and would certainly try to do so on a trip like this.

This incredible travelogue rarely pops up, which is surprising considering that they were in North Korea without a guide. That's one hell of a "gaijin smash" they did there.

As far as I remember, he did NOT go into nk without a guide. He travelled through a non-tourist-approved border crossing without a booked guide, but the border guards let him through after arranging for a guide to meet him at pyongyang station.

The guide was booked - the assumption was they were arriving on the normal train from Beijing. They didn't, and that meant they had unescorted time alone in North Korean villages on the way from the border. I'm not even sure that the secret police managed to monitor them. They benefited from bureaucrats not knowing what to do and waiting for instructions from up high.

Wow, thanks for sharing this link! I took the train to Pyongyang in 2009 (from Wuhan via Beijing), so the photos of the North Korean train bring back some memories, I even have a copy of a propaganda magazine in this photo I took off the train on the way back.

Which tour company did you go in with? I guess Koryo. I went in with CYTS in 2010, and didn't understand a word because it was all in Chinese XD. But it was only 1000€ instead of 3000€!

These days Young Pioneer Tours are much cheaper, somewhere around the $500 mark depending on the number of days.

I went with some Dutch Company called VNC Asia, I have no recollection of how I found them and their website doesn't even offer an English option anymore. It was 1235 Euros, which honestly was pretty good, although at the time I'd been living in China for a year so it was crazy expensive to me.

The tour was a great deal, my buddy and I got a private car with two guides and a driver dedicated specifically to us, so they spoke great English. I was hoping to see them in the blog linked above, but the only person I recognized was a woman in a military uniform at the museum - she showed us around the USS Pueblo.

It's crazy you can go there for 500 dollars nowadays, I wonder how travel has changed.

Thanks for an incredible story. Sadly if you'd been an American wandering around Pyongyang without a guide for a couple of days you'd probably still be in one Marshall Kim's prisons.

IIRC they did arrange a tour company/guide, but didn't actually tell the company that they were arriving via that border crossing.

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