Here's a passage from North Korea: Another Country (a good read cause the lib author is constantly admitting that the North are the "good guys" even though he doesn't like them). The bold section refers to a travel visa being required to leave Pyongyang. I left some additional text, cause the next paragraph has some interesting info on Jong Il.

Also, If you watch the documentary "My Brothers and Sisters in the North" (on YouTube), I believe they talk to a farmer (or some other worker in the countryside) who has a wish to visit Pyongyang, but hasn't gotten a permit yet.

The truth of the North Korean system is to come to understand, finally, that the isolated, cloistered royal family members themselves were foreigners to their own society; they furtively ventured out in one of Jong Il's twenty automobiles (including Cadillacs and Lincolns), or on foot after dark or to uninhabited parks while everyone else worked, and observed this society like the aliens that they were. Compounding their isolation in Jong Nam's childhood years was his father's desire that no one should know about his illegimate son. Like everyone else, to travel outside Pyongyang they needed a travel visa. Everyone is sheltered and compartmentalized so that most of the time, no one knows what's going on. (In recent years, errant glimpses of the life of common people with their emaciated bodies and tattered clothing have brought central officials to tears.)

Kim Jong II is not the playboy, womanizer, drunk, and mentally deranged fanatic "Dr. Evil" of our press. He is a homebody who doesn't socialize much, doesn't drink much, and works at home in his pajamas, scribbling marginal comments on the endless reams of documents brought to him in gray briefcases by his aides. He most enjoys tinkering with his many music boxes, sitting on the floor and opening them up with screwdrivers; at other times he would sit with Jong Nam and play Super Mario video games. He is prudish and shy and like most Korean fathers, hopelessly devoted to his son and the other children in his household—vastly preferring to seguester himself with them, rather than preside over the public extravaganzas that amaze visitors to the DPRK. According to Nam Ok, he orchestrates them, but is bored to tears watching them. The Dear Leader has tired of all the absurd hero worship, too; he told a visitor, “All that is bogus. It's all just pretence." But, like his father, he doesn't stop it from happening. He is a Stalinist, in that he keeps Stalin's hours, working into the early morning hours and then sleeping into the late morning—but these are the same hours his father kept, and that Bill Clinton kept. When the rest of us are sleeping, chief executives desperately husband their quiet time, Kim Jong II more than most.