Chongjin

I’ll admit I didn’t think we’d actually make it to Chongjin. Lia and I had been warned, more than once, that the city sits on a short list of places in North Korea that occasionally cracks open to outsiders and then, just as quickly, closes again. When our guide confirmed the itinerary the night before, I lay awake in our hotel room in Pyongyang running through everything I’d read about the place — third-largest city in the country, a port the Japanese built up during the occupation to move iron ore out of the Musan mines. None of that reading prepared me for the sound of it: the low industrial hum that never really stops, even at the edges of the city where the apartment blocks give way to scrubby coastal hills.

The Kim Chaek Iron and Steel Complex is the first thing you notice, honestly, before you notice much else. Our van slowed near it and I pressed my forehead to the window like a kid, watching steam rise off the stacks against a sky the color of wet concrete. Our guide told us it’s named after a military commander, said with the kind of civic pride I imagine a Pittsburgh local might use for a steel mill their grandfather worked in. I didn’t take a single photo I was fully confident about — we’d been told to be careful around anything that read as strategic — but I remember Lia grabbing my sleeve and just nodding at the scale of it, the way the complex seemed to swallow an entire section of the horizon.

What surprised me most was the coastline. I’d pictured Chongjin as pure heavy industry, but we ended up walking along a stretch of the port in the early evening where the water turned a soft gray-gold and fishing boats sat low against the piers. For a few minutes it looked like any other aging port city I’d wandered through in my twenties — Le Havre came to mind, oddly, or parts of the Basque coast before the tourists arrived. Then a loudspeaker crackled somewhere behind us and the illusion snapped right back into place. That contrast, gorgeous and unsettling within the same ten minutes, is the truest thing I can tell you about Chongjin.

We ate dinner that night at a small restaurant our guide clearly chose with care, some kind of grilled fish with a chili paste that Lia still brings up whenever we talk about North Korea. I don’t know when, or if, we’ll get to go back — access to Chongjin has always been unpredictable, tied to permissions that shift without much warning. But I’ve carried a strange fondness for that city ever since, the kind you feel for a place that let you see something it usually keeps to itself.

When to go: September gave us mild, walkable weather along the coast, though I’d check current tour permissions closely before planning around it — Chongjin opens and closes to visitors with little notice.