The forbidden railway: Vienna-Pyongyang (2008) | Hacker News Reader

The forbidden railway: Vienna-Pyongyang (2008)

vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com

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Really great posts, with fascinating pictures.

If anyone is interested in a beautiful rail adventure with much, much less risk, I highly recommend the round trip <Western Europe> -> Zagreb -> Belgrade -> Bar -> Kotor -> Dubrovnik -> Split -> Zagreb -> <Western Europe>. This makes for a really nice 4 week trip. (The Bar -> Split leg is done via bus.)

When we started this trip in early summer 2015, we expected it to be a nice and relaxed adventure - and it would've been, the landscape simply was beautiful! But then the refugee crisis happened. We saw trains in Belgrade and Zagreb that were so full that people were basically glued flat to the windows, we walked through the enormous refugee camp in Bristol Park near the old main station in Belgrade, we had to fight for tickets while train employees were simply ignoring us because they thought we were refugees trying to sneak into the train, and we had basically all ours trains cancelled on our way back. We got out of Croatia with one of the last busses before Slovenia closed the border for several days and embarked on a very strange 16 hour bus journey from Zagreb to Munich which included being held for hours at the Slovenian border station, and being inspected by German border police in full gear and with MP5s. I remember a female passenger had some problems with her passport, and she was taken away at the Austrian / Slovenian border and we continued without her.

Classic German border, from all my travels nowhere in europe did I see as much heavy weapons, military and stressed out border people than between Germany and Austria and that's going on for years.

Have a inner seat in a travel bus? Expect a machine gun waving in front of your face.

As children when there wasn't any Schengen and there was actual border control there was WAY less military presence. We could just drive to Germany with our bikes without anyone stopping us.

I wonder where you're from, because my childhood memories of crossing into Germany from Poland were nothing like that - very much armed guards, long car inspections, having to get out and wait while they inspected every bolt and nut.....I remember once the guard said something to my dad, then he(my dad) disappeared in the guard booth for a bit, I asked him what was that about and he said they basically wanted to do an "enhanced" search of our vehicle which would mean they would have it for up to 24 hours to strip it apart while we wait at a hotel nearby, I asked why did they do that to which my dad said "well they wanted a bribe, of course. I gave his commander a bottle of vodka as a gift for his hard work and service and suddenly they didn't need to do the enhanced inspection anymore".

Austria. Our border was pretty tame, many shopping tourism to both sides. With a car or bus (there was a public bus line, every 15 minutes or so) there was a control but I remember them as short checking passports and nothing else.

Well, that's the rise of the right-wing politics in Germany for you. Expect more of that if voters stick to this.

That excessive border control been going on since 2015

I just think that a lot of it is for the show, you know? I crossed the Polish-German border in January of this year and there was a gigantic queue to cross, we waited almost 3 hours which wasn't great with a toddler, but anyway - I expected a full on inspection or at least a document check like there used to be.......but no, there were just a few guards waving cars through, no one was checking anything, looked like they had 4 inspections bays set up so I guess they do pull cars in for a check but there was no one there when we passed......so I was like, what did we just wait 3 hours for? Just so some dude could glance at our car for 10 seconds as we drive past? How does that improve border security in the slightest?

Not that much control. And only in some places. It's a show of forces, doesn't do much.

Do you know Walserberg? I haven't passed Walserberg once in the last 10 years without a machine gun in my face. Passing it maybe once a year usually from Austria to Germany. Afaik the other way is easier.

I know I can just drive a hour more to drive around it where there is no active control but police cars hidden in bushes in the whole German area.

I am not used to stuff like this, for me it's a creepy experience every time.

Edit:// just remembered they recently started to do the same on the Swiss border around Basel. Whatever Germans think that's not normal within shengen. I usually don't see anyone at all on french or Italian borders, especially not young army forces with machines guns

I went from Munich to Italy regularly from 2015-2019, haven't been controlled once at any of the borders.

Have seen French border police (sometimes) at the German-French border down here near Freiburg but not the German police.

But yes, German police was present in Basel some weeks ago when I crossed there. Although they had two cars they controlled and let everyone else pass in the long line that had formed, no matter the car plates.

So not sure if there's really that much to it.

And the far-left communist East German government was well known for its border control so?

Obvious derailing is obvious, you know that your comment doesn't make any sense here.

Very much worth it to intersperse that with ferry rides to various Croatian islands.

I live in Vienna, and am quite familiar with the regions you’ve routed. Zagreb and the surrounding area, in Spring, is just delightful.

I just want to say, take your time on this journey. This region you describe have joys in all the nooks and crannies!

Memories of a place such as Ljubljana in the sunshine, it felt like what it must be as a figure on a cake .. the food and wine of Hungarian villages, outrageous parties in Belgrade, and the Adriatic, if anyone wants to go for a swim, it is all proper lush.

Summer, though, folks. In Winter, it can be a bit of a drag.

If you wanted to explain to someone what the 00s-blogging phenomenon was all about, and to given them an example of the best of it, you may well point to this.

Photos of NK like these are incredibly difficult to come by. What a beautiful country.

Also, I admire his courage. In several photos, military people are staring at him, as they may well be. He was lucky as well. He states he hid the photos in a zip file in his C:\windows folder when leaving the country, having deleted them from his SD Card.

The follow on posts and photos are amazing. The photos of crowds of North Koreans are really interesting, as were the earlier station photos. The material culture of the place is kind of fascinating.

It's also kind of mind boggling to contemplate the lives Arirang performers[1]. What must that be like?

[1] https://imageshack.com/i/exNHDHTVj

There are just no people anywhere. Do they clear everyone out when westerners come through?

They are pixels

[image of the show with a giant screen beside] https://imageshack.com/i/exQrNAZnj

I was like "wow that is a big screen although not very bright".

> Each background picture is created by about 40.000 childrens holding tables containing pages with different pictures/colours

[zoom of the "screen" with endless pixels: a color square a little head on top of each - impressionist style] https://imageshack.com/i/exw2BFluj

Yeah it’s pretty incredible, and sort of horrifying.

Reading this made me nostalgic for the old internet and sad about what it's become since.

I miss the days of blogs and forums and authentic content like this.

Today it's all hyperpolished platforms filled with clickbaity influencers. Every step of the way, somebody's trying to extract as much money as they can.

I can't help but think that we in this community played a big part in turning it into what it is now and that thought fills me with regret.

The old internet is still there, it just hasn't scaled as quickly as everything else. And frankly, we have a role to play if we want to preserve and nourish it. You say you liked the site. Drop the author a thank you note. Amplify it beyond pressing the "up" arrow on HN. It's not just about the author: show others that this kind of stuff is valued.

Today, the signals young content creators get is that they can make dumb videos on YouTube or TikTok and get 10M subscribers and ad revenue, or set up a geeky blog that will get 100 views a month. But it's not Google or TikTok that did this: it's the content consumers.

> But it's not Google or TikTok that did this: it's the content consumers.

Given the intentionally addictive algorithms and psychological manipulation used by the big tech companies, I think at least some of the blame can be placed on them.

I am reposting one of my favorite Quora adventure stories for the sake of posterity:

What is the strangest thing you've seen at the airport?

By Aurelio Germes: The strangest thing I've seen was to find nobody not even police or security at the airport, so I took a plane and left the country without anyone noticing it. It was at the international airport in Malabo, island of Bioko in Equatorial Guinea.

It happened that I had missed my flight from Malabo to Madrid departing on Sunday and I didn't want to wait a whole week for the next weekly flight, so I decided to call a pilot in Cameroon and charter his plane to come and pick me up in Malabo and take me to the Douala airport in Cameroon where I could more easily catch a plane to Paris. We arranged date and hour of his arrival to Malabo.

On the date agreed I went to the international airport only to find out that it was closed since that day no flights, neither international nor domestic, were scheduled. There was nobody there not even a guard or a clerk, but it was already too late to cancel the trip. The only way out was to jump the wall surrounding the airport and wait on the runway until an aircraft arrived, and that's what I did.

I didn't have to wait long. A small plane with a French pilot arrived and soon we were ready to fly to Douala with me in the copilot seat. We could not take off in our first attempt since a door of the aircraft opened unexpectedly when we were about to take off, but we succeeded in our second attempt.

Due to lack of security, nobody noticed that a plane had arrived at the international airport and left with a passenger.

That's incredible. I have one of my very very distant relative who nearly caused a diplomatic incident in Ecquador, because he was on some organised trip to Colombia and someone told him that just over the border there are some great waterfalls that are worth seeing, so he got to the border, and from my understanding bribed the guard to let him through since he didn't have a visa or anything, came back two hours later only to find that the guards have changed and the new one wasn't interested in a bribe but was very interested in getting him arrested for not having the proper visa or documentation. This was long before cellphones were a thing, so basically he had to convince the commander of the jail where he was held to contact someone higher up so they could contact his country's embassy and for whatever reason they ended up sending a military helicopter to pick him up and bring him back to Colombia.

I think you can find the authentic content you are looking for here: https://www.horizonsunlimited.com/

This is probably the wildest story. A couple drove across the Democratic Republic of Congo from Lubumbashi to Kinshasa on their own.

https://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hubb/ride-tales/democratic...

You say this while literally looking at a post that fits what you desire. The old internet isn't gone,

it's just surrounded by a newer, often uglier (but not always) internet that's more commercialized and gamified. That's just how large human social and economic systems develop over time. The old is if anything given even more potential eyeballs, tools and space in which to continue being appreciated, while the new, among all its defects, also comes with its own opportunities.

It's a bit self-absorbed to think that something that provides a livelihood and means of communication and community to billions of people should disappear because it overshadows a few interesting old things that a smaller number of people enjoy.

That post is from like 2008. Where is stuff like this still being posted today?

And my main complaint is exactly that view of the internet as "providing a livelihood", or in other words, just being another venue of capitalist value extraction.

It stopped being a medium of genuine exchange of ideas and started being yet another money making scheme. What made it special in the early days was precisely the non-commercial nature.

It didn’t stop, it became drowned out by an incredible amount of noise. The content is still there, still being made.

How do we put it back in the spotlight, or at least make it accessible again?

I think I spent maybe 2 hours appreciating the author's journey.

This has been one of my best reads of the month, and I hope that I'll one day get to visit Pyongyang myself, without the US visa waiver issues that come with it.

Same here.

Proves that good content, not fancy CSS or animations, is still the king.

This reminds me a bit of Paul Theroux’s “The Old Patagonian Express” where he tries to make a trip from the northern US all the way to the southern tip of South America. It’s a great read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Patagonian_Express

Similar, but Japan: The Roads to Sata by Alan Booth

I hope they do the roads to NVMe next.

This was a really great read (read the whole travelogue), and I'm really glad these photos are still being hosted. I always wonder how long the shelf life of this sort freely published content will be. Even within the blog, he includes links to blogs or photos of others he encountered, and most of them seemed dead.

I was pleasantly surprised that imageshack still hosts all the pictures, as all mine from it were gone.

UPD: the Eurasia 2005 posts have images from imageshack _us_, all are unavailable.

some more links from the same author

The start of our trip with the North Korean train (still inside Russia):

http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/09/irkutsk-skovoro...

Approaching the border between Russia and North Korea (the last kilometers inside Russia):

http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/09/khabarovsk-khas...

Inside North Korea:

http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/09/tumangan-north-...

I think I probably refer a stupid number of people to this post each year when the topic of trains and/or North Korea comes up. Read it when it came out and always found it fascinating.

What a crazy place to see the Pacific Ocean for the first time in your life. The point where the Russian, Chinese, and N. Korean borders meet has to be one of the weirdest, most fascinating, most forbidden (for most of us, and especially Americans) places on earth.

Maybe someday tourists will be able to stand on it like the 4 Corners in the US. Well I guess technically it's in the river. But they could rig something up.

North Korea has some beautiful coastlines and mountains, seems like they could make a lot of money on tourism if they would open up and make sure visitors feel safe.

I don't think its possible for the Norks to "make sure visitors feel safe", its just not how they operate. If they can capture a tourist to turn into a political pawn, they will. Same goes for RU and China and even America. It's a global game and they all are willing to play it.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/DURwu3dHtt9aUWBm8 At the very least you can go to this mountain on the Chinese - NK border ("you"... I, as an American, went along with a mainland Chinese person). People do live in these places and there are (well, were...) cross-border interactions. I just stood kinda close to the border and was like "I guess I could just jump over?"

There were cameras but that's it.

There's not some magical thing when you look across the border and "feel the oppression", in some of the border towns on the Chinese side there were ads for tours where you could go to NK and do some shopping for cigarettes or something. I do not believe I would be able to sign up for those though.

I was just visiting but it's how I imagine some parts of the US/Mexico border are like? It's not like that area of China is super vibrant either, pretty industrial.

I have the impression that when Russia gets involved border stuff gets messy, if all those videos of people driving across Georgia and the like are to be believed.

There are borders in Central America (and I imagine lots of places) that locals can cross to go shopping, but foreigners would get stopped and sent to the official border.

There are a quite a few places where NK, CN, and RU meet that are open to tourists and are popular.

This video was released a few days ago by a popular American YouTuber, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPmtJSERzys

Old discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11139896 (155 points | Feb 2016 | 30 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2155794 (124 points | Jan 2011 | 19 comments)

This reminds me of a rail trip I’ve always wanted to take: Western Europe to Singapore, which may not be as geopolitically interesting, but may be the longest possible continuous rail journey.

When I first had the idea there was still a gap in the way in Southeast Asia, but it looks like it may have been closed now: https://www.seat61.com/map-of-train-routes-in-southeast-asia...

There was an article about this journey just recently: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/portugal-to-singapore-trai...

Unfortunately you may have to wait some time, at the moment the journey is not be completable because the Paris-Moscow express service (and indeed all train service between Russia and Western Europe) is suspended due to sanctions against Russia.

Somewhat related, there is currently a guy on YouTube attempting to drive a car from Belgium to Japan.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=w4OZmMlUHWw

Recent visit by Russian aviation blogger is much more interesting: https://youtu.be/uKEsg6dxi2k?si=kC1JWsBxE8hKhGcP

It is quite obvious that happy citizens walking back and forth on PjongJang streets are part of massive Potemkin Village playact.

Also I like this blogging style. Most others want to insert their fat face and stupid comments into every frame.

it's not quite obvious...

Crowds are Markow process and tend to make groups. Casual Korean strollers are too evenly distributed.

This is one of the best bits of the internet and should be at the top.

Want to see photos of the labour camp in Chegdomyn? Went there in 2010, then on a tour to Pyongyang in 2011.

Yes, if you have photos please do share!

Photos of where? The labour camp or somewhere else? @Homeless_engi

Answering on behalf of @Homeless_engi :-

Photos of both places please

Uploaded where?

Fascinating article, didn't know the border is/was that open via Russia

It normally isn't (unless you're Russian or North Korean), which is a large reason why this story is so fascinating.

I researched it a while ago as a Russian. You can't just visit North Korea by booking a ticket and going there. You have to buy a tour, and even then, while you're there, you can't move freely, can't interact with the locals, and can't have North Korean money, you can only buy things from special tourist shops for foreign currency. You're only allowed to see places and things approved by the government to be seen by foreign tourists.

Yes, but non-Russian tourists don't have the option to use the Tumangan crossing even on organized tours.

TIL. Though the more common route seems to be flying to Pyongyang from Vladivostok.

Neither do Russian tourists. Before their trip, NK officials simply never expected any foreigners coming through it with right papers. But after this incident the loophole was closed. (I also researched this when this travel report appeared).

This is from 2008. Back then, North Korea was still living under the previous Kim. Back then, the border was very leaky and Koreans could move to China and Russia without a lot of barriers.

A throwback to more hopeful times. The new internet really did a number on us.

Thank you so much for sharing this, it scratches a very particular itch I have! I love such routes and travels and plans and pictures and the writing about it.

When reading it it immediately makes me think of:

- the good old “through coach” („Kurswagen“) which existed until 2013 from pretty much any train station to any train station, for example there used to be one going directly Basel-Moscow - Europe without wars and polarization, easy travel, trust - Optimism about the future, being bright-eyed and enjoying travel - The very form of the blog - Life before smartphonization

long read, interesting journey.

The author wonders aloud several times about the contents of the huge piles of passenger boxes constantly blocking the train corridors. Most coming from russia I'd love to peek in !

Fascinating that they really had the freedom to go about in the middle of nowhere once they reached the 1st station in NK from a seldomly-used point of entry. Bold move!

Pretty sure I read this when it was new. Wild.

Is there anyone who has archived this into a PDF or ebook format? I'd love to save and read it in another way.

did he end up going?

Yes! There are a whole series of posts with photos and maps. Click the red "Tumangan, we are coming!!!" link at the bottom of the first post to jump to the next one, etc.

Thanks. I didn't realise the red text was a hyperlink either.

To save anyone else the hassle, this is where he finally crosses into NK:

https://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/09/tumangan-north...

What hassle are you talking about? Reading about the trip?

Keep going and going and going. There are a lot of trains (of course) but once you get past that there are a lot of very interesting photos, especially the shows that look extravagent and unique. This guy documents his trips well!

Hope it is backed up well (guess on the archive sites).

Yeah only after clicking the home button did I realize that '<' is next. It suddenly got a lot less ominous.

Ah, the blogosphere "Reverse chronological" order: Hit "< Prev" to read the chronologically next post...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com