By MICHAEL WRAY [Time] – For most non-American visitors, the journey to North Korea begins with a train ride harking back to the mid–20th century: a diesel locomotive drags boxy carriages crammed with soldiers from Sinuiju, which sits across the Yalu River from China, south toward Pyongyang. American citizens, who are only allowed to arrive by plane, miss the five hours of North Korean scenery: peasants trudging through knee-deep mud, furrowed fields and rows of squat, cement buildings. Peasants wear khaki-and-blue clothes. Red flags dot the landscape. 

The journey to the golf course gets you slightly off the Potemkin tourist trail, a route traveled by some 2,500 Western tourists and thousands more Chinese each year. The Kaesong Highway to the demilitarized zone near the border with South Korea, for instance, is relatively well maintained. But the nearly empty six-lane highway that runs southwest from the capital, past the Pyongyang Golf Club to Nampho, near the coast, tells a different story. The 30-km journey from the Yanggakdo Hotel in Pyongyang to the golf course can take more than an hour as a modern, 30-seat bus picks its way over crater-size potholes. North Koreans walking and cycling unhurriedly along the side of the highway sometimes move faster than the bus. Beyond them, the Pyongyang plains are covered with fenceless acres of fields where peasants, tractors and ox plow through dry, red dirt.

The golf itself was an unforgiving slog across undulating fairways and incredibly slow greens. Teeing off on the first hole, players see a generous fairway bending gently up to an inviting green. On closer inspection, though, the test is much sterner

Continued at Time | More Chronicle & Notices.

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