North Korea -

"No Westerner's seen this before." Would that nagging, heinously-flawed conceit that had bugged me throughout my travels in Asia be rendered true, here, in North Korea? My excitement simmered as our aged Volvo saloon hammered down North Korea's empty east-coast road towards Korea's spiritual heart, the sprawling complex of granite valleys and peaks of Mount Kumgang

"Mr Willoughby," Mr Kim, the elder of my two guides, said at the previous evening's dinner in the port-city of Wonsan. "You will be the first Western tourist into this part of Korea." We were crammed into a restaurant tucked under a heavily-eaved building opposite our hotel (I had instructed Mr Kim the Younger dinner was on me if he could find somewhere, anywhere better than our dour hotel canteen).

In a room barely big enough to stand or lie down in, my guides, driver and I sat cross-legged on a baking-hot floor, sweating so much from the heat and rice wine we were soon better dressed for swimming than eating. Two extraordinarily-fresh basketball-sized steaming spider crabs were hurled onto our table as 'dinner'. Picking over their exploded exoskeletons, I discovered these delicacies were tasty enough to explain the naval battles North and South Korea have fought over them. It was then, Mr Kim the Elder revealed, "This will be our first time into Mt Kumgang, too" to which we toasted the evening power-cut.

Next day, still flushed with rice wine, I watched the pristine beaches lined with electric fence fly past the car. Of the few dozen Westerners to reach Mount Kumgang in the last 60 years, none – so I thought – had reached Inner Kumgang. With another road checkpoint hurdled, we turned off the coast-road and began a long, uphill scrabble along a series of cliff-hugging tracks, our Volvo as the vanguard of exploration.

Kumgang's fame sources from a very different calm, from the scores of Buddhist, and later Confucian, temples and monasteries that flourished here from the 6th century. Its splendours and spiritual significance for Koreans were written about in many aged accounts of pre-division Korea talking of the Korean, Chinese and Japanese pilgrims who trekked here over the centuries. But from the early 20th century, Japanese colonial rule, then Communism and the Korean War of 1950-53 choked off the flows, emptied the monasteries and razed the sites. Kumgang's proximity to the border dividing Korea (the ironically titled Demilitarized Zone) led its valleys and stone peaks to be tensely becalmed by army personnel.

Only butterflies, birds and troops disturbed the air until the late 1990s, when inter-Korean relations warmed enough for ferry-trips to begin from the South. Kumgang's divided into three areas, Sea of, Outer and Inner. And it's the last that was last to open. Inner Kumgang is still infested with army divisions and protected by roads bad enough to wreck vehicles, as we found when the exhaust was knocked off our car. While the gang busied themselves fixing it, I slipped up a dirt track towards a village, snapping butterflies as my 'cover'. Just yards from the village gates, Mr Kim the Younger caught up, hurriedly tapped my arm and pointed back to the car. Catching his silence, I mouthed, "Why?" His eyes widened to the village and its rows of green trucks, jeeps and howitzers I hadn't spotted. We tiptoed speedily away.

Another half-hour of picking across a plateau of farmsteads and hillside mines – gold, I was told – passed before the final checkpoint appeared. An army guard wheeled back the rusting barrier and we cheered over the final cliff into Inner Kumgang's valleys.

The prize of exploration flickered into view through throngs of pine trees – the gorgeously rebuilt 7th-century Phyohun Temple. Two monks toured us around it and into the Manphok Valley beyond, with its every rock and around its pooled stream covered in Korean, Chinese and Japanese script carved by pilgrims over the centuries. More recently a huge dedication to the North's leaders has been gouged out of the hillside.

In this granite canyon of tranquillity, the explorer's nirvana appeared. Clinging onto a rock face a hundred feet above the stream was a minute box of a temple, the 7th-century Podok Hermitage, supported by a long bronze pole. If I could just get inside, that bastion of solitude only ever occupied by one Buddhist monk aeons before, then surely some kind of 'first' of recent years would be recorded.

"Well Mr Kim, this is it! First Westerner to this bit of Kumgang in decades, eh?" I exulted to Kim the Younger. He then told me a Dutchman and some Russians were here only months before. "I could not correct Mr Kim (the Elder) in public." But he consoled me, "You are the first British here", before adding, "I think."

If not the first, I certainly won't be the last. The North is, slowly, surely, opening up. The more people ask to venture further into North Korea, the more the routes become routine. Hitherto inaccessible areas get used to tourism, and its benefits, and reveal more of their natural and historic treasures plus – much more importantly – the people within. Then mutual understanding can be created. And it is discovered we are far more normal and alike than we might think.

Some visitors play up the fact that they're 'guided', being only shown the good stuff, never the bad, and their guides continually exhort them to be 'impressed'. I cannot think of any guided tour in the world that takes in a disaster area, or where 'impressive' sites and facts aren't central to it. Nor did I feel it my place to contrast the 'impressive' show by dragging up North Korea's problems, like the famines; maybe my guides were personally affected. In fact, seeing that I wasn't there to interrogate or gloat, they spoke openly about the problems facing their country; its political isolation; its troubles with the US and Japan; its crippling energy shortages and sanctions.

Only once did my guides let me down, at a lakeside hotel midway between Kumgang and Wonsan. The Lake Sijung hotel specialises in hot-mud treatment where the staff clad your ailing body parts in near-scalding black sludge for an hour, followed by a massage. This treatment is popular with visiting Russians. Russians also like to party – hard. And everyone knows refusing an invite to a Russian party causes heinous offence.

I warned my guides about this as one such Russian knees-up broke out behind our group as we stuttered through a multi-course meal punctuated by power-cuts. And, as a great Russian fist slammed a tumbler of vodka before me, my lightweight guides used a power-cut to slip away to bed. We kept the whole hotel up until the manager orchestrated his own power-outage, but the boozing continued until everyone – guides and all – were roped into our pitch-black party. Robert Willoughby is the author of the Bradt Guide to North Korea (www.bradt-travelguides.com)