Oddities

Extreme Travelers

Sure, I’d like to go to North Korea if I could. But I don’t know if I’d do this:

Monty Anderson got word that the trip was on two weeks after rushing home to California from Ukraine for emergency open-heart surgery. He didn’t ask his doctor if it was OK to take another trip so soon. He told him he was going.

Eighty-year-old Joan Youmans heard about it when she picked up her phone messages after a trip to Indonesia. She canceled a few doctors’ appointments and booked immediately.

When Joe Walker learned the trip was a go, he said he “just gave them my credit card number and told them to fill in the amount.” Cost him seven grand, he figures.

That desire to poke their noses into unusual spots drove them to board an Air Koryo flight from Beijing to Pyongyang, buckling up on a creaky, Soviet-made Ilyushin 62 for the 90-minute trip. The airliner has averaged a crash every two years since coming into service in the early 1960s, a safety record that may explain the exclamation mark on the glowing red “Fasten Your Belts!” light above the seats.