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?"