A peek at Manpo: in which our correspondent almost visits North Korea.(TERRORISM II)

MAKE a note of this: If someone serves you a bowl of deep-fried sparrows, the best thing to do is pick one up quickly and eat it head first. There are two reasons for this: One, the head is the most psychologically squirrelly part of any animal, so it's best to get that part into your mouth as fast as possible; and two, it's also the crunchiest part of the sparrow, and, as everybody knows, if something is deep fried and crunchy, how bad could it be?

Not bad, really. Especially with a dipping sauce.

I tucked into a bowl of fried sparrows a few weeks ago, in the small river town of Ji'an, in the northern part of China. Ji'an is a border town, and the river that flows through it, the Yalu, has bustling, cheerful China on one side and creepy, silent North Korea on the other. I had come to Ji'an on the unlikely chance that I could get into North Korea by walking across the railroad bridge from Ji'an to Manpo--there's no other way across the river, though it's only 25 or 30 meters wide--and presenting myself and my cash and my disarming smile to the emaciated character who (I imagined) was guarding the border and who would (I imagined) let me stroll the streets of Manpo for the price of a jumbo Kit Kat bar. I'll cut to the chase: It didn't happen.

I had planned a more elaborate visit, of course. I joined a group a few months ago that was going to Pyongyang and a few other parts of North Korea. The North Koreans, apparently, are willing to accept small groups of escorted tourists, which is a lucky coincidence, because small groups of tourists are pretty much all they can hope for, especially in August, when Pyongyang has to compete with Edgartown and Castine for the summer tourist dollar. We were prepared for the propaganda and the ceaseless surveillance, told we would eat "but not well," and in general braced to be barraged by the kind of nonsense that used to irritate travelers to the old Soviet Union--trips to cement factories and spotless hospitals and cheerfully robotic elementary-school classrooms.

Personally, I love that stuff. I have a collection of Chinese propaganda posters from the Cultural Revolution, and I've collected some of the writings of the fiendishly nuts leader of Turkmenistan, who upon taking power after the collapse of the Soviet Union changed his name to Turkmenbashi ("The Leader of All Turkmen") and named a month after his mother. But North Korea eluded and tantalized. I have a wonderful propaganda poster of recent vintage that came to me, via a few handoffs and back-channels, directly from Pyongyang. On the right side, shouting, defiant faces of women of all races and creeds--North Korean, African, vaguely Third Worldly looking headbands, that sort of thing. And on the left, crouching in the lower corner, the mousy, terrified figures of a U.S. and a Japanese soldier. And across the center, the word "No!" in giant English letters, and in forceful Korean script: "21st Century Without Sexual Harassment!" How perfect is that?

But the North Koreans, apparently, don't much care if my jones for totalitarian tourism is satisfied. Word came before I left for Beijing that the flight to Pyongyang had been canceled, and our visit was officially off. There was trouble, we were told, with the recent rains. Flooding, water damage, homelessness--the kinds of things it's hard to explain ...