Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Mark Hyman asks, “Have you visited North Korea, Bouvet Island, or the Crozet Islands?”

The answer to this is also, no, no, and no.

I almost technically set foot in North Korea at the DMZ. If you visit the DMZ, you can step inside the building where the cease-fire was signed, and you can technically step over the line into North Korea. However, the day I was scheduled to go, there was an ice storm, and they closed it to tourist access.I’ve also looked into doing a proper trip to North Korea, but I’ve just never pulled the trigger on it.

As for Bouvet and Crozet islands, they are extremely hard to visit. Extremely.I know some extreme travelers who have tried to visit Bouvet on a ship, on a trip that cost well over $10,000 per person and weren’t able to land because of weather. No one lives there, and there are no regular ships that visit.

Crozet is similar, except there is a small French scientific outpost on the island.

These islands, along with Herd and Macdonald islands in the Southern Indian Ocean, are some of the hardest places on Earth to visit. A ship might only visit some of these islands once every five years if even that.

To visit these islands is an incredible undertaking in time and money, and not something I have any plans to do.