The long, hard road out of Kim's Kingdom

By Nopporn Wong-Anan

CHIANG SAEN, Thailand (Reuters) - It is a journey that would tax even the hardiest of travelers.

Six days on trains and buses across China, three nights trekking through malaria-infested jungle in eastern Myanmar and a white-knuckle speedboat ride down the Mekong to Thailand.

Such is the determination of those escaping North Korea.

Han Yeon Sil did it while seven months pregnant.

"I had been told the trip was difficult, but it was nothing compared to what I went through in North Korea," she said shortly after setting foot in Thailand and being arrested as an illegal immigrant -- all part of a masterplan to get to South Korea.

"I was told that when we disembarked we had to get arrested because the police would send us to South Korea," she told Reuters in a police station in Chiang Saen, a now sleepy border

town once central to the "Golden Triangle" heroin trade.

For 36-year-old Han, who traveled with four women companions aged between 19 and 36, Thailand is the final leg of a three year, 2,000 km (1,250 mile) odyssey from destitution and misery under Kim Jong-il to the dreamed-of freedom and luxury of Seoul.

DESPERATE PLUNGE

Her tale is typical of many fleeing the isolated communist state, and her reasons are economic, not political.

Han worked for nine years in a state tobacco factory until 1997, when she married and was forced by law to quit her job.

However, when her husband died a few months later, she was kicked out of the state guest house where she lived and became homeless, wandering from town to town in search of anything to eat -- leaves, branches, grubs and rats.

"I wanted to stay alive so I had to eat anything I could find on the street, even leaves or rats," said Han, who appeared well-fed after two years of living in China.

After seven years as a beggar, she heard a better life could be had in China on the other side of the Tumen river.

In 2004, she decided to go for it.