From the sky, the land around Pyongyang, North Korea, looks green and inviting — Ireland with rice paddies. But when the drivers of the Gumball 3000 rally step off their chartered Air Koryo jet at the Pyongyang airport, the reality is almost lunar. Standing under a huge portrait of the "Eternal President," Kim Il Sung, security agents in military uniforms scowl at the delegation of moguls (PayPal cofounder Ken Howery, Russian billionaire Dmitry Zelenov), Middle Easterners (Saudi real estate magnate Amro Kayal, Kuwaiti prince Faisal Al-Sabah), and models (Nicole Dahm), who all stare back in Mutually Assured Distraction. Carefully, we fill out customs forms asking us to declare all "killing devices," "publishings," and "exciters" — which sound fun, whatever they are — while officials look through our digital cameras and collect our cell phones and passports.
Welcome to Day Four of the Gumball, a weeklong, 3,000-mile mad dash marking its tenth anniversary with the most ambitious route ever: San Francisco to Beijing, with a sharp right turn through Kim Jong Il's utopia. Entry costs are upward of $120,000 — car repairs, speeding tickets, and bribes not included — and the schedule goes something like this: dust the world's greatest roads by day, party in the world's greatest hotels by night. Sure, a Communist state with nuclear pretensions is an unorthodox destination, but Gumball founder Maximillion Cooper spent two years meeting with the entire North Korean cabinet, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and even Kim Jong Il himself. "You don't turn down these sorts of offers," Cooper tells me. "I'm trying to unite people, and this is opening the doors to a peaceful dialogue. What is Condoleezza Rice going to achieve in a one-hour meeting?"
Stripped of any ability to communicate with the outside world — not to mention the only document that will get us out of here — the group of about 50 piles onto buses (we left the cars on the Chinese mainland for fear of wrecking them on unkempt roads) and head for the Mass Games, North Korea's version of the Olympics, passing gray, forsaken neighborhoods along the way. I'm seated next to a pretty 21-year-old government minder named Pak, who has never met an American (and, frankly, seems rather underwhelmed by her first).
Me: So...have you ever heard of Angelina Jolie?
Pak: No.
Me: Michael Jackson?
Pak: No.
Me: What do you think of Americans in general?
Pak: We love the Americans if they love peace and join us for the independent Korean course.
We pull up to the May Day Stadium, a gold-plated marvel that seats 150,000. "This was constructed under the wise leadership of our Great Leader..." she begins as we go inside.
