holidays in the hermit kingdom

I have known people who have traveled to North Korea (no Americans of course) and for a while I had entertained this tiny country as a fantasy travel destination, it arguably being the most isolated chunk of geography on the Earth. A place where history had not ground to a halt, but where the common narrative thread simply broke off from the rest of the world half a century ago. South Korea was a western style democracy with all the trappings of a manic capitalist nation, good and bad. North Korea was a "hermit kingdom" sealed, militarized, and combining a messiah like worship of the "dear leader" Kim Ill Sung with a Marxist worker state ethic into one of the more peculiar cosmologies in history. Even now little is know about the land above the 49th parallel, although horrific reports of mass starvation and political prisons emerge from time to time, sometimes from the handful of courageous defectors who manage to escape south. Still, in a country with no advertising, no internet access, no cell phones, no media outlets save for the government controlled radio and television, generations of North Koreans are being born with literally no idea of what the outside world is like. It's a terrifying example of just how efficient an authoritarian regime can be when it sets about to completely dominate its populace, psychologically and economically. Hannah Arendt defined the difference between autocracy and totalitarianism as the need for a totalitarian state to control every aspect of its people's lives, culturally and spiritually, while in an autocracy the only divisions that ultimately mattered were class structures. North Korea to me exemplifies this as much as any nation in history alongside Khmer Rouge era Cambodia and Nazi Germany.
The so called "Korean Friendship Association" is a peculiar outfit run by amateur bedroom Stalinist Alejandro Cao de Benos de Les y Perez. Cao de Benos is a Vonnegut worthy character: he is a portly twenty-something IT consultant from Spain who has reinvented himself as a person of importance by serving as North Korea's de facto web master. Not only does he operate the country's "official" web page, he sponsors Pyongyang sanctioned group trips to North Korea through the Friendship Association. (Americans are not allowed of course, with North Korea being perhpas the only nation on Earth where simply holding an American passport is enough to prevent your admission.) Of course, Cao de Benos has been feted by Kim Jong's regime as a valuable asset, and he takes it quite seriously, squeezing into a military outfit, acting the role of celebrity, and frequently being given to histrionics on his message board. One quite amusing thread I stumbled upon a couple of years ago found various newsgroup members debating whether or not the movie "Team America" was blasphemous to the Dear Leader and should be boycotted. One savvy blogger claimed that in fact the movie was much more a satire on "America's imperialist and capitalist ambitions" and therefore kosher viewing.
It would all be quite hilarious were it not for the fact that Kim Jong Il is a psychotic dictator who avidly watches American television shows and imports champagne and thousands of dvds to his palace, while most of his people outside of the capital city starve to death, and where even an off hand joke about his personage or a doubt of his divine appointment as God on Earth is enough to get you carted away to a modern day gulag. Still, if my conscience and wallet could cope, I would be fascinated by a trip to the most remote corner of Earth.