it's full of pollution from china. it's a seasonal pattern whereby dry sandy desert air from the gobi mixes with industrial emissions feom beijing and blows over to the korean peninsula, coating everything with a yellow-orange dust every spring
Interestingly, I've recently watched Real Life Lore's video on the topic. It's from 2 months ago and later in the video, it talks about the last batch of western foreigners that got in and how the regime almost immediately regretted letting them record and talk as much as they did.
There was also a S. Korean resort ran by Hyundai, from 1998 to 2008, which got shut down and nationalized after an incident had the N. Koreans shoot and kill Park Wang-ja, a 53 year old woman.
Some observers say this is an easy way for Pyongyang to earn money. While foreign tourists are allowed in, tour groups largely tend to come from China and Russia, countries with whom Pyongyang has long maintained friendly relations.
NK is a bad enough place to visit without worrying about everything. It’s the ultimate in mismanagement.
Management says it must happen, so it happens, or we tell them it’s happened. When someone gets hurt because it actually didn’t happen, there’s a cover up.
They do have a tourism industry, composed of ideological "true believers" (not that big of a group), tourists wanting to experience the unique culture out of curiosity (or - in the more recent years - also to produce social media content), and tourists interested in the unique architecture.
In the overwhelming amount of cases, it also goes well enough, because it is a welcome avenue to get foreign currency for them, and despite what some may believe, the state is still fully within the dynamics of capital accumulation. (Other examples are: contractors in construction, where they have unique know-how in monumental constructions, which is also one of the places where the exploitation of their populace as wage labourers can become visible to the outside world - and selling stamps and other collectibles in demand for being "exotic" as they are from NK.)
But then, every now and again, you have cases like Otto Warmbier.