The next leg of my trip is to the Hermit Kingdom. I’m standing here outside the boarding gates of Air Koryo’s flight to Pyongyang, the capital of DPRK where I will have no internet, no SIM card to connect to the outside world and no external influence of any kind. I am told the calls from the hotel lobby are about 4 Euros per minute. I will be looking at the world from inside out.

And my first experience of the journey is flying its national carrier: Air Koryo.

Air Koryo was recently named the world’s worst airline by Skytrax (via North Korea’s Air Koryo is named world’s worst airline yet again). It is an old Russian Tupelov aircraft which in less than 2 hours’ time, will bring me inside the hermit kingdom.

Excited. Nervous. And everything in between.