The fact that North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump were at loggerheads in the winter of 2017/18 is a slight understatement. Kim took Trump’s threats as an opportunity to organise new missile tests on a weekly basis and had Trump’s propaganda point out: “the entire United States is within range of our nuclear weapons, and a nuclear button is always on my desk. This is reality, not a threat.” Trump responded as only Trump can, turning up his daily invective and threats even further, calling Kim a “little rocket man”, threatening total nuclear annihilation and personally pointing out to Kim that his nuclear button is “bigger and more powerful” than Kim Jong-un’s.

Now there is general agreement that a china shop is a bad place for an elephant. However, when two elephants are fighting bitterly over which of them has the bigger trunk, china shops are in a really bad place and even President Trump’s advisors agreed in the autumn that one tiny mistake by the presidential elephants was enough to not only shatter the delicate peace in the Far Eastern china shop, but also to drag the whole world into a nuclear holocaust.

The venerable “Time Magazine” was so shocked by this controversy that they started to put together a North Korea special at this time. They wanted to give readers a glimpse behind the scenes of North Korea amidst the furore and dark threats and were now looking for photographers around the world who had had the opportunity to lift the mysterious curtain that still surrounds North Korea today. During this search, the editors came across me and asked me to send them the photo from North Korea that had moved me the most during my travels. I then sent them two and didn’t hear anything for a long time. However, the special has now been published – and now that the nuclear holocaust is off the table again, at least for the moment, and the two Korean presidents are crossing the border together in the most beautiful harmony, no longer showering each other with threats but with kindness, you can enjoy the beautiful route in peace.