It was early summer, a time for rice planting and balmy weather, yet North Korea’s first ski resort was open. Masikryong is a complex of nine slopes, imported ski lifts, and grand ambitions to host international tournaments. The nine-floor chalet had a mahjong room, swimming pool, sauna, and spa, complete with peculiar Japanese full-body driers. Its shop sold European ski gear, cheeses, chocolate cake, and Spam—most of it expired—plus a 16-liter glass bottle of traditional snake liquor, with two suffocated serpents tangled up inside. Besides the staff, there was almost no one there.

Masikryong is one of North Korea’s newest and most opulent tourist ventures, and on a recent eight-day trip to the country, my tour group and I were paraded around the site as if we were potential investors. The entire ski resort was built in 10 months by the country’s military under what our guides called the “wise leadership” of young ruler Kim Jong Un (photos show the ski-less Kim in a lift chair). The chalet looked distinctly alpine, and we suggested to our guides that perhaps the leader was inspired by his time studying in Switzerland. They seemed surprised, claiming not to know of the Kim brothers’ European studies, or even that Kim had siblings. For now, North Korea’s leader may be almost as much of a mystery to his own citizens as he is to the outside world.

The Hermit Kingdom is, paradoxically, in the midst of an unprecedented tourism push (one that was reportedly put on hold last week out of concern about Ebola). Since Kim Jong Un came to power in 2011, several prestige projects have sprung up in North Korea: a waterpark, a dolphinarium, an equestrian club, a shooting range replete with live pheasants. These cheerful and contemporary sites are on an ever-expanding list of permitted destinations for foreign visitors. And there are more in the pipeline. Pyongyang Sunan International Airport is undergoing expansion. There are plans for an underwater hotel complex in Wonsan, a sleepy resort town by the sea. Soon, the regime hopes 1 million foreigners will visit the country annually—a number that would put North Korea roughly on par with Sri Lanka as a tourist destination. Still, that’s just a fraction of the 12 million tourists that visited South Korea last year.

While its goals are grand, North Korea’s tourism industry has gradually grown since it first opened up in the late 1980s, and the nation is no longer the world’s least-visited country (Libya, Afghanistan, and Moldova, among others, receive fewer foreign tourists). Nowadays, for all North Korea’s diplomatic isolation—not to mention its recent arrests of tourists—it is surprisingly easy to go. Western tour operators estimate that the Hermit Kingdom gets 100,000 or more yearly visitors (about the same as Bhutan), the vast majority from China. And in addition to frequenting North Korea’s conventional tourist stops like monuments, war museums, and mass athletic performances, tour operators can increasingly go off the beaten path (though always as part of an official tour), offering cycling, golfing, and hiking. In July, the country’s pristine coastlines saw some of their first surfers.

Simon Cockerell, the veteran tour leader of the British-run, Beijing-based Koryo Tours, which has taken tourists to North Korea since 1993, now whisks about 2,000 visitors a year to the country, a quarter of them American. Andrea Lee, a Korean-American who runs Uri Tours, a boutique, New Jersey-based operator that arranged my trip and played a role in the first of former NBA star Dennis Rodman’s visits to North Korea, said in an interview that she was in the country during last year’s nuclear test and didn’t even notice it. Tour operators insist that as long as tourists obey local laws, North Korea—a country with virtually no crime or terrorism—is one of the world’s safest places.

And indeed, the three local guides who boarded our tour bus as soon as we landed in the country promised that we had nothing to fear. The two basic rules—no disrespecting the leaders, no photographing the military (except, apparently, at the tourist stop along the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, where pictures are occasionally tolerated)—sounded almost disappointingly simple. North Korea’s tourism strategy, the guides told us, is aimed at showing that North Koreans are “not crazy, not dangerous, just different”—a catchphrase they repeated throughout the trip. We headed straight from the airport to Pyongyang’s grand monuments: a triumphal arch that our guides boasted was 10 meters taller than Paris’s, and the colossal statues of North Korea’s founding president, Kim Il Sung, and his son, Kim Jong Il (Kim Jong Un doesn’t yet have a statue). We paid our respects with two bouquets of fluorescent artificial flowers before lining up in front of the bronze giants and bowing.

Like most tourists, we stayed at the Yanggakdo International Hotel in Pyongyang, which was completed in 1992 and features glass elevators, a revolving restaurant on the 47th floor, and a mysteriously inaccessible fifth floor. The building includes a 24-hour tailor, Egyptian-themed nightclub, and Macanese-run casino, as well as a beauty parlor in the bunker-like basement—virtually every amenity imaginable, except for Wi-Fi. There seemed to be no reason to leave (and anyway you can’t—it’s on an island). In the morning, city-wide wake-up alarms jolted me out of bed as the sun rose over Pyongyang’s pastel skyscrapers.

The showcase capital is in some sense a living museum of the Cold War era. The communist kitsch—handpainted propaganda posters, grim workers’ uniforms, socialist catchphrases—was everywhere. But there were also signs of foreign, modernizing—even capitalist—influences. One restaurant played a Korean version of the 1980s Europop hit “Brother Louie.” There are so many imported cars that the city is experiencing its first traffic jams. At the country’s international airport, citizens returned from abroad carrying boxes of new Sony Bravia flatscreens through customs. Even the souvenir shop at the DMZ sold Coca-Cola, and a foreign resident—the city now has around 600, mostly from China and Russia, according to expats I met in Pyongyang—testified that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is available in shops (given U.S. trade embargoes, these products likely arrive via the flourishing black market).