Welcome to the Hotel of Doom: The 3,000 room monstrosity in Kim Jong-Un's starving dictatorship no foreigner has stepped inside... until now
It’s 5.45am on an icy winter’s morning and I am jogging through the pitch-black, potholed streets of one of the strangest and most sinister cities in the world. I’m shivering but I can’t tell if it’s from cold or fear. Or both.
This is Pyongyang, North Korea, where foreign visitors are banned from going out alone. I’m in my running gear, a dark woolly hat down over my head to hide my features, and I’ve just escaped a comfortable but heavily guarded tourist hotel nicknamed Alcatraz. Dawn is still an hour off.
Mercifully for me, there are no street lights here. Thin people in drab, dark clothes plod along – some of them carrying large sacks of coal or wood on their backs. Even in the wealthiest part of North Korea, it seems, people forage for fuel.
