from Hacker News

The forbidden railway: Vienna-Pyongyang (2008)

by 1317 on 5/19/25, 6:45 PM with 77 comments

• by lqet on 5/20/25, 7:36 AM

  Really great posts, with fascinating pictures.

  If anyone is interested in a beautiful rail adventure with much, much less risk, I highly recommend the round trip <Western Europe> -> Zagreb -> Belgrade -> Bar -> Kotor -> Dubrovnik -> Split -> Zagreb -> <Western Europe>. This makes for a really nice 4 week trip. (The Bar -> Split leg is done via bus.)

  When we started this trip in early summer 2015, we expected it to be a nice and relaxed adventure - and it would've been, the landscape simply was beautiful! But then the refugee crisis happened. We saw trains in Belgrade and Zagreb that were so full that people were basically glued flat to the windows, we walked through the enormous refugee camp in Bristol Park near the old main station in Belgrade, we had to fight for tickets while train employees were simply ignoring us because they thought we were refugees trying to sneak into the train, and we had basically all ours trains cancelled on our way back. We got out of Croatia with one of the last busses before Slovenia closed the border for several days and embarked on a very strange 16 hour bus journey from Zagreb to Munich which included being held for hours at the Slovenian border station, and being inspected by German border police in full gear and with MP5s. I remember a female passenger had some problems with her passport, and she was taken away at the Austrian / Slovenian border and we continued without her.

• by geye1234 on 5/19/25, 9:11 PM

  If you wanted to explain to someone what the 00s-blogging phenomenon was all about, and to given them an example of the best of it, you may well point to this.

  Photos of NK like these are incredibly difficult to come by. What a beautiful country.

  Also, I admire his courage. In several photos, military people are staring at him, as they may well be. He was lucky as well. He states he hid the photos in a zip file in his C:\windows folder when leaving the country, having deleted them from his SD Card.

• by ch4s3 on 5/19/25, 7:21 PM

  The follow on posts and photos are amazing. The photos of crowds of North Koreans are really interesting, as were the earlier station photos. The material culture of the place is kind of fascinating.

  It's also kind of mind boggling to contemplate the lives Arirang performers[1]. What must that be like?

  [1] https://imageshack.com/i/exNHDHTVj

• by saubeidl on 5/19/25, 10:20 PM

  Reading this made me nostalgic for the old internet and sad about what it's become since.

  I miss the days of blogs and forums and authentic content like this.

  Today it's all hyperpolished platforms filled with clickbaity influencers. Every step of the way, somebody's trying to extract as much money as they can.

  I can't help but think that we in this community played a big part in turning it into what it is now and that thought fills me with regret.

• by ValentineC on 5/19/25, 9:31 PM

  I think I spent maybe 2 hours appreciating the author's journey.

  This has been one of my best reads of the month, and I hope that I'll one day get to visit Pyongyang myself, without the US visa waiver issues that come with it.

• by bananaboy on 5/19/25, 11:18 PM

  This reminds me a bit of Paul Theroux’s “The Old Patagonian Express” where he tries to make a trip from the northern US all the way to the southern tip of South America. It’s a great read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Patagonian_Express

• by mNovak on 5/20/25, 2:06 AM

  This was a really great read (read the whole travelogue), and I'm really glad these photos are still being hosted. I always wonder how long the shelf life of this sort freely published content will be. Even within the blog, he includes links to blogs or photos of others he encountered, and most of them seemed dead.

• by edm0nd on 5/20/25, 2:53 AM

  some more links from the same author

  The start of our trip with the North Korean train (still inside Russia):

  http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/09/irkutsk-skovoro...

  Approaching the border between Russia and North Korea (the last kilometers inside Russia):

  http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/09/khabarovsk-khas...

  Inside North Korea:

  http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2008/09/tumangan-north-...

• by Klonoar on 5/19/25, 7:34 PM

  I think I probably refer a stupid number of people to this post each year when the topic of trains and/or North Korea comes up. Read it when it came out and always found it fascinating.

• by suzzer99 on 5/20/25, 2:12 AM

  What a crazy place to see the Pacific Ocean for the first time in your life. The point where the Russian, Chinese, and N. Korean borders meet has to be one of the weirdest, most fascinating, most forbidden (for most of us, and especially Americans) places on earth.

  Maybe someday tourists will be able to stand on it like the 4 Corners in the US. Well I guess technically it's in the river. But they could rig something up.

• by gus_massa on 5/20/25, 1:37 AM

  Old discussions:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11139896 (155 points | Feb 2016 | 30 comments)

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2155794 (124 points | Jan 2011 | 19 comments)

• by Tabular-Iceberg on 5/20/25, 5:30 AM

  This reminds me of a rail trip I’ve always wanted to take: Western Europe to Singapore, which may not be as geopolitically interesting, but may be the longest possible continuous rail journey.

  When I first had the idea there was still a gap in the way in Southeast Asia, but it looks like it may have been closed now: https://www.seat61.com/map-of-train-routes-in-southeast-asia...

• by timonoko on 5/20/25, 6:34 AM

  Recent visit by Russian aviation blogger is much more interesting: https://youtu.be/uKEsg6dxi2k?si=kC1JWsBxE8hKhGcP

  It is quite obvious that happy citizens walking back and forth on PjongJang streets are part of massive Potemkin Village playact.

  Also I like this blogging style. Most others want to insert their fat face and stupid comments into every frame.

• by te_chris on 5/19/25, 8:31 PM

  This is one of the best bits of the internet and should be at the top.

• by peterburkimsher on 5/20/25, 1:53 AM

  Want to see photos of the labour camp in Chegdomyn? Went there in 2010, then on a tour to Pyongyang in 2011.

• by cenamus on 5/19/25, 7:18 PM

  Fascinating article, didn't know the border is/was that open via Russia

• by starik36 on 5/19/25, 11:25 PM

  A throwback to more hopeful times. The new internet really did a number on us.

• by lynguist on 5/20/25, 10:19 AM

  Thank you so much for sharing this, it scratches a very particular itch I have! I love such routes and travels and plans and pictures and the writing about it.

• by IG_Semmelweiss on 5/20/25, 4:46 AM

  long read, interesting journey.

  The author wonders aloud several times about the contents of the huge piles of passenger boxes constantly blocking the train corridors. Most coming from russia I'd love to peek in !

  Fascinating that they really had the freedom to go about in the middle of nowhere once they reached the 1st station in NK from a seldomly-used point of entry. Bold move!

• by ubermonkey on 5/19/25, 10:08 PM

  Pretty sure I read this when it was new. Wild.

• by sira04 on 5/19/25, 9:51 PM

  Is there anyone who has archived this into a PDF or ebook format? I'd love to save and read it in another way.

• by oatsandsugar on 5/19/25, 7:25 PM

  did he end up going?