Young Pioneer Tours
Blog
Welcome to the Young Pioneer Tours Blog, the place where we we keep you informed about everything YPT, from current tours, to future tours and a whole lot of eclectic stuff in between.
YPT first started blogging in 2008 and are considered the best North Korean Travel blog that there is.
But, as Young Pioneer Tours have expanded our locations, so have we expanded our blog. Now we have one of the best travel blogs in the world!
And while most of our content is about the numerous destinations we go, including travel guides and what to pack, we also delve into more serious subjects such as the safety of certain destinations, as well as how LGTBQ+ friendly the places we visit are.
While the vast majority of our content is produced in-house, we are always on the look-out for guest bloggers and writers. Want to write for us? Then simply get in touch.
You can also check out our sister publication YPT Life.
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What it’s like to visit Chernobyl, Part 2
10 April 2016 / by Gareth Johnson
Continued from Part One The neatly arrayed trees lining the road that we used to enter Pripyat stood in stark contrast to the haphazard growth that had begun reclaiming the nearby buildings. What looked to have once been a convenience store was p …
What it’s like to visit Chernobyl, Part 1
10 April 2016 / by Alistair Riddell
Overcast skies seemed suddenly appropriate We hadn’t seen the sun for two weeks. On the six-day train ride from Beijing to Moscow it hadn’t mattered much – half the time had been spent guzzling cheap vodka frantically purchased during our 20-minute sto …
8 Reasons to visit Central Asia
3 April 2016 / by Caitlin Graham
8. You’re intrigued to find out what Soviet toilet paper is all about. It’s like elastic sandpaper, and until you’ve experienced it, you probably can’t imagine it. It’s not thin and flimsy like some of our cheaper versions of toilet paper would be, in …
Otto Warmbier – Jail Sentence Statement
16 March 2016 / by YPT Team
Young Pioneer Tours are fully aware of the recent sentencing of Otto Warmbier that was announced by KCNA on Wednesday the 16th March 2016. This should be viewed in similar context of previous cases of Americans being sentenced in the DPRK. We are conti …
There’s beauty in the bizarre – What you’ll see in Turkmenistan
10 March 2016 / by Gareth Johnson
One year ago, I crossed the Iran/Turkmenistan border by foot and arrived shortly thereafter in Ashgabat, the capital of one of the world’s least visited countries. The place sees fewer foreign visitors a year than Afghanistan and North Korea. A lot has …
It’s not quite a dog eat dog world – The tail of another Korea
9 March 2016 / by Gareth Johnson
The people of Yanji really like dogs. They have a street devoted to them, and the city is home to an annual dog festival. Yanji does not like dogs the way you might like dogs, because what they like about dogs is eating them. Now b …
We go through this so you don’t have to – A research trip gets weird
7 March 2016 / by Gareth Johnson
We aren’t usually into tourism hotspots, so new locations need a test run. We trust only our eyes to confirm that a hotel didn’t close a year ago, or if a train is running instead of gently rotting. These trips are almost always a success. Occasionally …
Independence Day is a big deal for any country, but some do it better than others.
4 March 2016 / by Gareth Johnson
For our first tour in Africa, we knew that we had to do something truly special. Initially, it seemed almost too good to be true; two rarely visited and intriguing countries, close enough to each other on the map, both with distinctive Independenc …
Soviet Pepsi and Alcoholism: How to drink in Central Asia
27 February 2016 / by YPT Team
There is an old joke in the former Soviet Union that in the late 1970’s Pepsi opened its first bottling plant in the Crimea, then part of the USSR. A representative of Pepsi asked the USSR Minister of Food what the most popular drink in the USSR was. H …
