After the stress of exam term and the exhaustion of May Week, everybody needs a holiday. Most jet off to some postcard-perfect paradise to soak up the sun and relax but I fancied something a little different. I went to North Korea. And it is with the eager delight of a primary school child that I would now like to recount my adventure through the most isolated country on earth.

Reactions to my plans varied from the incredulous to the concerned, and my parents, who I conveniently forgot to inform until the trip was booked, were rather confused. They knew I was going to Beijing with the Pembroke Players but I had neglected to tell them the extraneous details of my later travel plans. Oh well.

The thing is, I’ve been interested in Korea for a while now. I visited the South last summer to teach English, I’m a fan of the sickeningly florid “K-Pop” and I pester my Korean friend with questions about nuances of grammar that even toddlers can grasp. I believe the initial attraction was the realisation of how little I knew about the place. This is generally true for most people: Korea seems to be the forgotten land of East Asia. Everybody is at least vaguely familiar with China – think pandas, the Great Wall and duck pancakes – and Japan – sushi, samurai and Sony – but the majority of people would draw a blank if asked to generate a similar cultural summary for Korea.

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I became fascinated by North Korea: it was seeing the famous satellite photo- graph below of the Korean peninsula at night. Seoul and its suburbs are resplendent, the whole of the South is peppered with pockets of illumination, while only Pyongyang registers in the North.

The photo is a striking visualisation of the isolation the North Korean government imposes on its country. As recently as 1945 these were the same country – the same people, the same culture – and it is only their divergent politics which can account for this asymmetry. Light means houses, offices, street lamps and factories. In other words, it means life. In a country of darkness, nothing is brought to light and nothing comes to light. Muffled under a blanket of darkness, the people are voiceless.

Despite the government’s efforts to hermetically seal the country from outside influences – earning the country the name the 'Hermit Kingdom' – it is surprisingly easy to visit. Approximately 1500 Western tourists do so every year, the majority of whom go via European companies based in Beijing which charge astronomical prices for the novelty. It is much cheaper to join a Chinese tour group from the border city of Dandong. Once you arrive in North Korea you are handed over to the government-run Korean International Travel Service (KITS) anyway, so your choice of tour operator is arguably of little consequence.

I e-mailed the company in Dandong saying that I’d like to go and they told me to turn up at their office the day before departure with my passport, the money, a passport photo and – oddly – my student card, apparently to prove that I wasn’t a journalist. And that was it. Done. “We’ll meet you at eight o’clock tomorrow morning to go to North Korea”. That’s when nerves struck me, the gravity of what I’d done sank in and I began to feel sick.

That night I walked along the Yalu River, the natural boundary between China and North Korea. On the Chinese side, elderly women danced in unison to music blaring out of a portable speaker while men practised calligraphy on the floor with giant brushes. It was busy and frenetic, but it was a comforting chaos compared with the eerie silence and darkness across the river. North Korea was revealing nothing.

In fact, it seemed almost as if every Chinese activity there had been designed to augment the contrast. Chil- dren played with sparklers, families watched a fountain light display and bored-looking hawkers tried to sell glow-stick necklaces...all in the shadow of their silent neighbour. One boy – as he skated past on his LED skateboard, changing the track on his iPod – singlehandedly produced more light than the entire other side of the river. The NASA photograph and the isolation it connotes felt so real.

Couples lit paper lanterns and lifted them into the sky. They drifted upwards across the river and past the Broken Bridge (of which the Koreans never repaired their half) so freely that the idea of a border seemed redundant. The Yalu River is not particularly wide – there’s even a stretch called ‘One Leap Across’ – but which side of the river you are born on determines so much. North Koreans often defect, crossing the river, but, if discovered, China forcibly returns them to their home country, where it is known that they, and perhaps their family, are taken to work camps or killed.

The lanterns danced gracefully into the distance until they were nothing but pinpricks in the sky; North Korea had extinguished their light and maintained its darkness.