Resort season is here, business is booming and this time North Korea is not going to be left out
As holidaymakers descend on resorts for the season’s peak period, North Korea is getting in on the act with the opening of its Wonsan Kalma coastal tourist zone.
Resort season is upon us – that bit of the summer when you can feel the world wobble on its axis as those who love a little rigour in their holidays overpack their Rimowas and head to warmer, or at least latitudinally different, climes. Resort season is not just summer-holiday season, mind you. Resort season is to summer what the left and right banks of the Gironde are to the appellations of Bordeaux: different grapes grown in different soil, Chateau Cat vs Chateau Dog (naturally, they’ve been called more anatomically specific and less politically correct names, too). Resort season, then, is a micro-season: when those that hanker after a form of holiday enclosure exercise their air miles and look forward to a happily confined world of swimming pools, club sandwiches, exquisite cigarettes smoked in sunshine, snoozes under breeze-rippled parasols, all-day rosé and – if they’re packing children along with the latest book in The Thursday Murder Club series – the shriek and splash of water slides. Resorts come in all sorts.
Normally, you know it’s resort season because Giles texts you to say that he can’t do lunch “because…” and sends you a picture of his condensation-y glass of Montrachet at the Marbella Club, a vintage-ruining ice cube louchely tossed in, just to show off. But this summer, resort season was kicked off by a most unusual international news item that didn’t involve any louche ice cubes but did feature Kim Jong-un, of communist-dictatorship-and-nuclear-weapons fame, sitting primly in a foldable chair to watch one of the few non-malnourished North Koreans – that aren’t members of his own family – fling himself down a big yellow water slide and explode into a swimming pool like, well, a portly pink torpedo. You could call it the first North Korean bomb that the world has actually – and very much, literally – seen in the flesh.
From the UAE to Mexico and from Disney parks to The White Lotus-style luxury, resorts are becoming wildly more popular – and stupendously better investments – than ever before. Kim Jong-un has obviously seen the chlorinated splash marks on the wall and wants a bit of the action too, thanks very much. The water-slide launchpad photo was one of a suite of pleasing images that pictured the dictator opening the Wonsan Kalma coastal tourist zone on North Korea’s eastern shores. We also saw him looking charmingly 1950s-dad-at-the-seaside in a black suit and smart shoes while smiling nervously at the tide, waving winningly at the inauguration celebration and looking positively plutocratic on a high hotel balcony, doing classic bants with his similarly suited and uniformed personnel. His daughter, in a cream skirt-suit, was there for the duration and looked very sweet if a little nonplussed. Maybe she just hasn’t tried the water slide yet.
Kim’s got the right idea with Wonsan Kalma because resorts, like dictatorships, need firm borders. When I reported on Benidorm for Monocle some years ago, it felt resort-ish because there’s a routine to its frenzy. But it’s a real town that you can drive in and out of, visit for the day – you can even go to the boring Spanish bit to nurse your hangover. But real resorts require walls to effect an exclusivity entirely dependent upon the type of place it wants to be: classy and a bit cheesy, such as Marbella; pornographically tropical like the Six Senses Yao Noi outside Phuket; real and mad like Mar-a-Lago, or fictional and insane like Estrella de Mar, the resort in which JG Ballard’s Cocaine Nights is set. Ballard had it right because the anti-hero of his novel is a charismatic, murderous tennis coach. Every resort needs one. In this instance, the baseline-bothering Bobby Crawford also encouraged the resort’s once-sleepy denizens into orgies that remind me now of those anatomically precise other names for the left and right banks in Bordeaux.
If you’re reading this on holiday, look around you. Are there staff in crisp, liveried polo shirts smiling by the kitchen pass? Are men lollingly taking Zoom calls while trying to keep out of range from the splashy pool? Are women with just-done nails and hair smoking behind big Celine sunglasses? Is the sock of tennis balls on clay becoming akin to the waves lapping happily in a mindfulness app? How is the wine and how many? Do you know what day it is? What month? Welcome, readers, to resort season.
Bound is Monocle’s contributing editor.
