The 'floating hotel' rusting away in North Korea

It was once an exclusive five-star resort floating directly over Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Today, it sits dilapidated in a North Korean port, a 20-minute drive from the Demilitarized Zone, the restricted area that separates the two Koreas.For the world's first floating hotel, that's the last stop in a bizarre 10,000-mile journey that began over 30 years ago with glamorous helicopter rides and fine dining, but ended with a tragedy.Now marked for demolition, this rusty vessel with a colorful past faces an uncertain future.The floating hotel was the brainchild of Doug Tarca, an Italian-born professional diver and entrepreneur living in Townsville, on the northeastern coast of Queensland, Australia."He had much love and appreciation for the Great Barrier Reef," says Robert de Jong, a curator at the Townsville Maritime Museum. In 1983, Tarca started a company, Reef Link, to ferry day-trippers via catamaran from Townsville to a reef formation off the coast.