Fred Warmbier lashed out at tour agencies operating in North Korea, who advertise ‘No American ever gets detained on our tours’ and ‘This is a safe place to go’
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 travellers with a competitively priced catalogue of exotic-sounding, hard-partying adventures in one of the world’s most isolated countries. But the death on Monday of 22-year-old American student Otto Warmbier, who was arrested during a Young Pioneer tour to North Korea in late 2015 and fell into a coma while in detention, 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 are unknown, interviews with past Young Pioneer customers or those who have crossed paths with the tour operator describe a company with lapses in organisation, a gung-ho drinking culture and a cavalier attitude that has long troubled industry peers and North Korea watchers. Founded in 2008 by Briton Gareth Johnson in the central Chinese city of Xi’ an, Young Pioneer’s fun and casual style was seen precisely as its calling card, a counterpoint to North Korea’s reputation as a draconian hermit kingdom. “Budget tours to destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from, ” its website touts, while describing North Korea as one of the safest places on Earth. But the agency also known as YPT 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 Kim family are buried, resulting in a North Korean guide losing her job. In a July 2016 interview on the travel podcast Counting Countries, Johnson boasted of gaining notoriety after once stepping off a moving North Korean train while drunk on soju. That stunt resulted in Johnson breaking his ankle, leading to a stay at a Pyongyang hospital and visits from the British Embassy and United Nations doctors, who told Johnson he risked losing his foot within a week. “I didn’ t make [the jump] , but I became a legend, ” he said. In the podcast, Johnson described himself as a 36-year old university dropout from London who travelled through Eastern Europe and lived in the Cayman Islands before arriving in North Korea for the first time a decade ago. He was immediately hooked. “The first time you go to North Korea, it’s just an amazing experience, like nothing you’ ve ever seen, ” Johnson said. “After that first trip I knew I wanted to take people to North Korea.” Adam Pitt, a 33-year old British expatriate who formerly lived in Beijing and went on a 2013 trip, described to the AP 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.
