Pyongyang anyone?

Peter Hitchens is a British arch-conservative, albeit an anti-war one. He’s also a thoroughly thoughtful man. His thoughts on travel (in a piece about a recent trip to North Korea) are worth a look:

 
In his marvellous thriller about pre-1967 Israel, “A long way to Shiloh’, Lionel Davidson notes how quickly air travel reduces recent experience to a sort of dream. Within minutes of taking off from the airport, you have already begun to shove the experiences of a few hours ago into the past and into the recesses of your imagination. Had I really seen that, done that, been there?

And so it was as the elderly Ilyushin-62 of Koryo Airways unglued itself from the Pyongyang runway with a growl of its mighty Soviet jets, and propelled me the few hundred miles to Shenyang in China, my jumping-off point. I wished I could have come and gone by train, as I think I would have had a more lasting impression and seen more of Korea, but it was impossible to arrange. Had I been able to travel as a conventional tourist, I might have done it. But - and I won’t go into the details here - I had to make the journey via a curious and rather misty route, without much choice about when and how I travelled.

I made a rule some years ago to try and learn about my own country, and my own life, from seeing other people’s countries. It is tempting and enjoyable to lecture other countries on how they could order themselves better, and I have certainly done it. But that way lies intervention and Iraq (and also our bungled imposition of Western precepts on the Soviet bloc, which helped bring Vladimir Putin to power).

(Italics mine)