It's the late leader Kim Jong Il's birthday celebrations, and everyone's invited.
For the first time in more than five years, foreign tourists can visit North Korea, albeit to the city of Rason, one of the secretive communist state's least visited places.
Koryo Tours, a tour operator based in Beijing, announced this week it had reopened bookings to see the city after North Korea sealed its borders in 2020 during the Covid pandemic.
For about $720, the tour includes four nights in Rason, a city in the northeast near the borders of China and Russia. Visitors will also get two nights in the Chinese city of Yanji.
The first tour is set to take place Feb. 12 to 18, when major celebrations are planned for the birthday of the country's late leader Kim Jong Il, one of North Korea's biggest holidays.
The national holiday, known as the Day of the Shining Star, is typically celebrated Feb. 16 with large public displays, including parades. North Koreans also bow to statues of Kim Jong Il, the father of their current leader, Kim Jong Un.
And though the capital, Pyongyang, remains closed to tourists, “there are a lot of people who have been waiting to go to North Korea,” Greg Vaczi of Koryo Tours told NBC News on Tuesday.
He added that 20 tourists will be able to enter in time for the birthday celebrations.
North Korea is “desperate for foreign currency,” said Hazel Smith, a professor at London’s SOAS University, who lived in North Korea for two years. “Not just for oil, but basic technology like irrigation or health services.”
Before the pandemic, the country hosted hundreds of thousands of Chinese tourists who provided up to $175 million in extra revenue in 2019, according to the South Korea-based news outlet NK News.
However, the United States banned citizens from traveling to the country after the death of American student Otto Warmbier in 2017.
Warmbier, 22, a University of Virginia student, stole a propaganda banner from a hotel during a visit to Pyongyang in January 2016 and was later sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for committing a hostile act against the government. He was returned to the United States in a coma the following year and died shortly afterward.
The latest tour promises to take tourists to the “must-see sites in Rason,” which is known as North Korea’s special economic zone.
The city has operated differently from the rest of the country since 1991, having been used as a testing ground for new economic policies, the country's first mobile phone network and the first card payment system.
Among other attractions, Koryo Tours said, tourists can visit the “Sea Cucumber Breeding Farm and Paekhaksan Combined Foodstuff Processing Factory.” They will also be offered the chance to open their own North Korean bank accounts during a stop at the Golden Triangle Bank.
From the Three Countries Border Viewpoint, visitors will also be able to view neighboring China and Russia.
Last month, another travel agency, Young Pioneer Tours, also announced tour packages to Rason.
But there's a chance the tours may not go ahead as planned.
Smith said the country, which once welcomed thousands of foreign visitors, would view the tours as a test. “They’re always cautious, but I think they will be super, super cautious now,” she said. “This is one way of doing it, having a tour operator which they trust, which is professional.”
As Rason does not have an international airport, the only way to get there is a drive across the Chinese border.
“The Chinese checkpoint at the Sino-Korean border is not ready yet to receive foreigners,” Vaczi said. “We have to wait until the Chinese are ready to receive [them].”
