BEIJING — On their last morning in Pyongyang, father and daughter Hakan and Sophia Sokmensuer kept counting down the hours — until they were out safely.
The U.S. tourists had relished their visit to North Korea’s time-warp capital, where the Cold War isn’t over, and enjoyed Dennis Rodman’s controversial, high-profile basketball game there Jan. 8.
But fear rises fast inside the isolated, highly repressive state, where an elderly American visitor was taken from his airplane seat last October, then detained for a month. Squeezed onto the tarmac bus at Pyongyang airport, the Sokmensuers saw an official run out from the terminal, arms waving. “The doors opened and he pointed towards me,” recalls Hakan.
The problem? The passenger beside him had not returned his hotel key. After multiple apologies for leaving it in his room, the official relented and let the bus go.
“I gulped because I knew I had four room keys in my pocket,” says Sokmensuer, 55, a retired executive from Sarasota, Fla. “It was fortunately the only mini-heart attack of the journey.”
A trip to North Korea is not for the fainthearted, yet a small but rising number of intrepid Americans choose to spend their dollars and vacations visiting, and revisiting, a country
Article source: http://www.citizen-times.com/usatoday/article/4655879 If you need a cheap air ticket, hotel or rental car please visit http://www.airticket.com
