Part of my series of videos on North Korea from my April 2012 visit, for now unedited and in the order I took the videos.

Today’s videos happen to cover infrastructure.

Pyongyang Roadside

This video shows the view out of a tour bus of a typical Pyongyang street. You can see the (in)famous Ryugyong Hotel, a subway stop entrance, and Pyongyang’s typically empty roadways. You can hear our guide’s voice over the bus’s speaker.

Potholiest Highway in the World

This video shows the view from our bus of the highway with the most potholes I’ve ever seen. I think they called it the Children’s Highway, or something like that. Though about ten lanes wide, vehicles often have no smooth lane to drive on. I suspect roads need sublayers to handle water, freezing, heavy loads, and such and that they built this road by just laying a top layer with no foundation. Then a few winters and lots of heavy trucks destroyed it.

Sometimes it looks more like a cratered lunar surface than a road. Sorry it’s so dark but that’s when we were there.

I can’t imagine how North Koreans feel about such a disaster remaining unfixed for so long and having to bring foreigners over it.

You can also see the industrial trucks that you see so much of in North Korea. I’m sure the road and the trucks mutually destroy each other.

West Sea Barrage near Nampho

Did you know a barrage is a type of dam which consists of a line of large gates that can be opened or closed to control the amount of water passing the dam? Neither did I, but we got to tour North Korea’s West Sea barrage near Nampho. This video shows a model of it that I recorded in the way I love to record models like this — like we were flying through it.

North Korea makes tons of models like this and dioramas. I’m not sure why. You’ll see more of them in other videos.

I took this video in a presentation hall near the barrage.

Stills

Here are a few stills of the West Sea Barrage behind us.

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