Beer-soaked “booze cruises” down North Korea’s Taedong River. Scuba diving trips off the country’s eastern coast. Saint Patrick’s Day pub crawls in Pyongyang featuring drinking games with cheery locals.
Since 2008, the Young Pioneer Tours agency built up a business attracting young travelers with a competitively priced catalog of exotic-sounding, hard-partying adventures in one of the world’s most isolated countries.
However, the death last week of 22-year-old US student Otto Warmbier, who was arrested during a Young Pioneer tour to North Korea in late 2015 and fell into a coma in prison, has renewed questions about whether the company was adequately prepared for its trips into the hardline communist state.
Although many details of Warmbier’s fateful trip remain unknown, interviews with past Young Pioneer customers or those who have crossed paths with the tour operator describe a company with occasional lapses in organization, a gung ho drinking culture and a cavalier attitude that has long raised red flags among industry peers and North Korea watchers.
Founded in 2008 by Briton Gareth Johnson in Xian, China, Young Pioneer’s fun and casual style was seen precisely as its calling card, a counterpoint to North Korea’s reputation as an inaccessible, draconian hermit kingdom.
“Budget tours to destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from,” its Web site touts, while describing North Korea as one of the safest places on Earth.
However, in travel circles in Beijing, the staging point for trips into North Korea, Young Pioneer Tours has been associated with a string of cautionary tales, including of the tourist who performed a handstand outside the most politically sensitive mausoleum in Pyongyang where two generations of the ruling Kim family are buried, resulting in a North Korean guide losing her job.
During another tour, Johnson attempted to step off a moving train after drinking and broke his ankle, leading to an unexpected stay at a Pyongyang hospital.
Adam Pitt, a 33-year-old British expatriate who formerly lived in Beijing and went on a 2013 trip, told reporters of a party atmosphere led by Johnson, who was often heavily inebriated and “almost unable to stand and barely understandable when he did speak” at a tense border crossing where he needed to hand wads of cash to officials as bribes.
While it is expected for tourists to relax and enjoy a few drinks while traveling, tour operators and tourists say the company has long stood out for its party-hearty tour groups.
In respective interviews with Fairfax Media and the Independent newspaper, Nick Calder, a New Zealander, and Darragh O Tuathail, an Irish tourist, both recalled the group Warmbier traveled with carousing until early morning. O Tuathail declined to discuss his recollections of the trip with reporters, saying he wanted to let Warmbier’s family grieve in peace.
In an emotional news conference on June 15, Fred Warmbier, Otto’s father, lashed out at tour agencies that “advertise slick ads on the Internet proclaiming, ‘no American ever gets detained on our tours’ and ‘this is a safe place to go.’”
Earlier this week, Young Pioneer Tours issued a statement saying it would no longer accept US customers because “the assessment of risk for Americans visiting North Korea has become too high.”
Pitt, who is Mormon and does not drink, said the company’s statement appeared to shift blame onto tourists rather than examining its own laissez-faire culture.
“It’s not about who goes, it’s about how their groups behave that causes problems,” Pitt said.
Company co-owner Rowan Beard said most reviewers have attested to the company’s professionalism and preparation.
“Frankly everyone has different perceptions on things like drinking and what concerns it raises,” Beard wrote in an e-mail. “With the recent tragedy it’s human nature for some people to over-emphasize certain aspects of their experience.”
Beard said that the mausoleum incident did not involve alcohol and that the company had warned all customers about the political sensitivities of the site.
He added that the firm has taken more than 8,000 tourists to North Korea with only one incident, and boasts a five-star rating and certificate of excellence on the TripAdvisor review Web site.
Johnson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Beard said Johnson was unavailable to comment and no longer leads tours.
He said Johnson was in North Korea on business when Warmbier was detained, but was not part of his tour.
John Delury, a North Korea expert at Yonsei University in Seoul, said tour groups barely existed 10 years ago and any sliver of “responsible engagement” between the US and North Korea is valuable.
However, he said he worried about tours that do not educate customers on the nuances and political realities of what they’re seeing.
“Hipster adventure tourism, where it’s like going to a zoo and staring at North Koreans, is problematic,” said Delury, who is familiar with several of the companies running tours into North Korea. “It seems like the framing of Warmbier’s trip was ‘go party and have a good time in Pyongyang.’ That is obviously not how responsible tour companies would frame what they’re about.”
Young Pioneer Tours has in recent years expanded its North Korea tours and boasts a long list of other so-called “dark tourism” offerings, ranging from trips to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site in Ukraine to jaunts through Iraq’s largely autonomous Kurdish region.
Christopher Barbara, a legal consultant who splits his time between Montreal and Shanghai, said he joined a trip to North Korea in 2009 headed by Johnson.
“It was so laid back that it was hard to take seriously,” Barbara said. “The way Young Pioneers managed the trip made it feel like the priority was having fun, not staying safe. I’m not sure it was the right balance, all things considered.”
One morning after they arrived, Barbara told the group’s North Korean minders who were looking for Johnson that he was ill, when he was in fact asleep after a long night.
“I was worried that Gareth’s behavior was going to get us in trouble,” Barbara said. “At times, I felt pressured to cover for him.”
Questionable behavior has cropped up more recently, including on the New Year’s Party tour of Pyongyang in late December 2015 that coincided with the tour that Warmbier was part of.
In an anonymous review left on TripAdvisor in January last year, a woman who took a train back to China said a Young Pioneer guide pulled a prank by helping hide her husband’s passport from border agents.
That resulted in a scramble to find the passport and a confrontation with irked North Korean soldiers who briefly detained her husband.
Troy Collings, a partner at the tour company, responded to the review on TripAdvisor and apologized, saying that the guide who participated in the prank had been removed from tours and would undergo “retraining.”
“We as company in no way condone any behavior that makes our customers feel unsafe, in danger, or that our guide lacked empathy with you,” Collings wrote. “Whilst we feel there may have been some misunderstandings it does not excuse what happened.”
US President Donald Trump last week told reporters that he had signed about 12 letters to US trading partners, which were set to be sent out yesterday, levying unilateral tariff rates of up to 70 percent from Aug. 1. However, Trump did not say which countries the letters would be sent to, nor did he discuss the specific tariff rates, reports said. The news of the tariff letters came as Washington and Hanoi reached a trade deal earlier last week to cut tariffs on Vietnamese exports to the US to 20 percent from 46 percent, making it the first Asian country
On Monday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) delivered a welcome speech at the ILA-ASIL Asia-Pacific Research Forum, addressing more than 50 international law experts from more than 20 countries. With an aim to refute the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) claim to be the successor to the 1945 Chinese government and its assertion that China acquired sovereignty over Taiwan, Lin articulated three key legal positions in his speech: First, the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Declaration were not legally binding instruments and thus had no legal effect for territorial disposition. All determinations must be based on the San Francisco Peace
As things heated up in the Middle East in early June, some in the Pentagon resisted American involvement in the Israel-Iran war because it would divert American attention and resources from the real challenge: China. This was exactly wrong. Rather, bombing Iran was the best thing that could have happened for America’s Asia policy. When it came to dealing with the Iranian nuclear program, “all options are on the table” had become an American mantra over the past two decades. But the more often US administration officials insisted that military force was in the cards, the less anyone believed it. After
During an impromptu Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) rally on Tuesday last week to protest what the party called the unfairness of the judicial system, a young TPP supporter said that if Taiwan goes to war, he would “surrender to the [Chinese] People’s Liberation Army [PLA] with unyielding determination.” The rally was held after former Taipei deputy mayor Pong Cheng-sheng’s (彭振聲) wife took her life prior to Pong’s appearance in court to testify in the Core Pacific corruption case involving former Taipei mayor and TPP chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲). The TPP supporter said President William Lai (賴清德) was leading them to die on
RSS