2009: Journeys 2 (Belarus)

Visa to enter Belarus: $277
Mandatory Foreigner Traveler Insurance: $8
Bus ticket to Minsk: $13

Russian Translator: priceless

The bus clunks into gear with a loud jolt and backs carefully over the potholes. We leave Vilnius right on time. It is the first part of this leg of my trip (Vilnius, Lithuania to Minsk, Belarus) that has gone according to plan. As it turns out, it is the only part.

I spent much of my time in Vilnius taking care of logistics… not my favorite part of traveling at all. First I had to find a travel agency that would handle my visa request. The Belarusan (not Belarussian!) government requires that all US visitors receive a formal invitation to visit the country. Since I didn’t know anybody there and I don’t speak Belarusan, or at least Russian, the quickest way to get one of those is by going through a travel agent. And not just any travel agent, but a travel agent who knows how to process Belarusan visa requests.

How do you find a travel agent who knows how to process Belarusan visa requests from Lithuania? If, as it turns out, the address for the one recommended in your otherwise quite reliable Lonely Planet guidebook happens to bring you to a boarded up construction site, it becomes a matter of trial and error.

Booking a hotel was also a challenge. The hotel never replied to email… well, of course, their keyboards are in Cyrillic letters so how could they? But I didn’t think of that until after I’d arrived. The lady at Estravel (aka Belarusan-Visas-R-Us) was well worth her fee. My 24-hour expedited visa still took four days, and involved an unexpected price increase, but at least I got it.

An expedited tourist visa for a US citizen going to Belarus now costs $277, by the way. In case you were thinking about going. The recent increase was in response to The Crise. If the decadent Westerners responsible for this global crisis want to poison Belarusan society with their discredited ideas and dollars, well, they can come. It’s a free country, isn’t it? But they should certainly pay for the privilege, especially if they are in such a hurry, or so lacking in foresight, that they ask to put a rush on it.

Well, all the searching, calling, delaying and filling out of paperwork took time, and I ended up missing the “don’t-miss” KGB museum in Vilnius, but never mind… I’m going to Minsk. They have real, live KGB walking the streets. Who needs a museum?

I didn’t do much at all in Vilnius, in fact. My timing was lucky – Kaziukas, a big traditional fair, took place while I was there – people from farms and villages all over the country come to Vilnius to celebrate Spring. Never mind that it snowed half the time… the party went on. Streets all around the center were packed with people selling things, some of which were really interesting and uniqe. Apparently, anybody could participate. Booths went from the elaborate – a smoked fish booth shaped like a boat that rocked and swayed as if it were in the ocean – to very simple… men and women standing between booths selling whatever they could display on their necks or arms. I bought some homespun Lithuanian wool for my mom, and almost bought a life-size egret hand carved out of linden wood. Beautiful, but not very practical for a backpacker. I also couldn’t resist trying some ham and other cured meats, which were delicious, and a loaf of dark Lithuanian bread that must have weighed several pounds. The streets were also filled with music, with people from eight to eighty playing whatever instrument they could play for whatever coins people might toss into their hats. Folk dancers were everywhere and you couldn’t just watch – their job was to pull people in from the crowd to keep things lively and make sure people worked up an appetite. Lunch was sausage and sauerkraut with kasha (groats) and hot wine or beer.

Somewhere along the way I met Eva, a French translator whose home is in Vilnius but whose heart is in India. We hung out together a couple of times while I was in town, and she treated me to a wonderful massage straight from the ashram. It was exactly what I needed at that point, having just spent two days on trains to get from Gdansk to Vilnius.

I guess I wasn’t quite ready to leave Poland, because I really wanted to go through the Mazurian lake district, the northeasternmost region of Poland, on my way to Lithuania. If you look at a map, that makes sense, but it’s not the way you’re supposed to go, as it turns out. Going that route from Gdansk meant a journey of two days on four separate trains, with an overnight in the border region of Suwalki. I’d read about the Mazurian lake region in several different places. Discriptions always point out that it was here that the glaciers of the last ice age most recently retreated, and that this was the last part of Europe to convert to Christianity from paganism. As if these were the region’s most recent developments and nothing much of interest has happened since. And actually, that is what it feels like as the train snakes around the many deep frozen lakes of Mazuria. As if the retreating glaciers had exposed some primeval force that wasn’t really supposed to come to light. It was kind of spooky, in fact, and I don’t even believe in that kind of stuff.

Anyway, I didn’t do much tourist stuff in Vilnius, and the buildings all pretty much look the same so there wasn’t even much to look at architecturally. Someone got the brilliant idea about ten years ago to redo every building in town in plaster and paint. Religious buildings, cultural buildings, government buildings, shops… everything, no matter how old or how new, it seems, whether made of wood or brick or stone, was plastered over and painted in a combination of browns, beiges and whites. A few buildings of color stand out, but the overall effect reminded me of an American style strip mall where every business, whatever its character, has to conform to a certain look. Or, as Eva’s friend described it, the whole city looks like a series of fancy iced cakes. I don’t find this look very interesting. I am eager to move on to Minsk, where architectural styles suffer from a different kind of conformity.

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It isn’t long before the bus arrives at the border between Lithuania and Belarus. We stop at a bus bay, the driver shuts down the engine and we wait. The other passengers fidget with their travel documents. Well, I don’t need them in my hand, I say to myself… when the border agents get here I’ll have plenty of time to pull them out. Wrong! The driver yells something and suddenly everyone is pushing and scrambling to get off the bus. I grab my backpack and scramble with them but I still end up toward the back of the line.

It’s a slow line, but it moves. The man in the booth is surly. Everything he says sounds loud and angry. He makes everybody nervous and I’m sure we’re all thinking the same thing… god I hope he doesn’t find any reason to yell at me. When I’m up he examines my passport, cross checks something or other, looks at me, looks at my picture, looks at me again, then slams his inky stamper into my passport and I’m done. After 30 minutes or so we’re all back on board. Not so bad.

The bus moves forward for a minute or two and then stops. A stern looking woman in green military uniform and black laced boots comes on board. That’s when I notice that the other passengers are still fingering their passports. Mine, along with my mandatory certificate of Belarusan foreign traveler insurance, is already back in its place in my moneybelt. She walks down the aisle, not stopping at anyone, just looking to see that we all have our documents ready to go. I get mine back out again just in time and she passes me by with just a glance. Another minute or two forward on the bus and we stop a third time. Everyone gets up… we’re getting out again. With our luggage this time. Right… that last stop was just to leave Lithuania. We still need to enter Belarus. And we need to go through customs.

Of course. It’s been a long time since I crossed a sensitive border by land. It’s not just that we left Lithuania, we left the EU… depending on where you’re going from and to, border crossing hassles are either a thing of the past or vastly more intense than they used to be. Leaving Lithuania for the “Soviet time capsule” of Belarus is not one of the hassle free routes.

Most of the passengers are really pushy – no-one wants to be last in line, and for good reason as it turns out. I don’t do a great job of holding my own so I end up toward the back once again. I don’t have any problems with my passport, but customs is another story. I am one of the last three to go through, and by that time the customs officer has gone away. We wait, but there is no sign of him. A chatty Turkish guy is standing there next to a small pile of luggage; he’s talking with me casually about something while we wait then, mid-sentence, peeks down the hallway where the customs official disappeared. “You know, he may not come back for a while.”

“Really?” I look at the Swedish professor behind me to make sure he heard, since we’re both in the same predicament.

“And the buses don’t wait if it takes too long… they just go and have you get on the next one.” The next bus? The next bus isn’t for four hours. I and the Swede behind me both have copies of the long customs declaration form – in Cyrillic script only – and have our bags lined up on the conveyor belt for inspection. We look out at the bus… everyone else is already on board. The customs officer is nowhere to be found.

“Do you have anything to declare?” the Turk asks me.

“I don’t think so. Just my personal stuff. What about you?” I ask the Swede.

“I zhink zhey want to know about our personal electronic devices. I have a laptop.”

“So do I.”

“And a camera,” he adds.

“Me, too.”

“If it’s just your personal things,” the Turk says, “I wouldn’t declare them. You’ll get delayed, and then your bus will leave.” We look at him, uncertain. “That’s what happened to me,” he adds. He looks like he’s been standing there for a very long time.

“I got here yesterday.” He emphasizes the “yesterday” as if to say, you two straggling tourists are lucky you got here while the guy was on a break and if you’re smart you’ll take advantage of the fact that he’s not back yet and get the hell out of here while you can.

Yeah, we get it. So, with a bit of hesitation, Lars and I grab our bags and our blank customs forms and head for the bus.

Just in time. But before we pull away the bus doors open again and who gets on but our Turkish friend. He takes a seat across the aisle from me and we end up chatting half way to Minsk.

I say Achin and I chatted halfway to Minsk. That’s not because we were quiet the rest of the way, it’s because we only made it halfway. About 70 kilometers from Minsk, along a snowy, two-lane highway, the bus suddenly stops for no apparent reason. The driver and his assistant get out. “Maybe a cigarette break,” we say.

The driver comes back inside and tears up a piece of the floorboard. He lays down in the aisle and curses under his breath. His assistant is outside opening access panels and kicking at them.
“I guess now’s a good time to tell you that I’m cursed,” I say to Achin. “At some point, on every trip I take, some vehicle or other breaks down.”

“So it’s your fault?”

“Yeah. In Vietnam it was a minivan. The next year in Thailand it was a boat. I guess in 2009 it’s this bus. Sorry.” We go outside and have a look. By now the driver has pulled a piece of duct-taped tubing off of somewhere and the bus is piddling a river of green fluid. He whacks at things loudly for an hour or so while people walk around in the snow and get in the way. Finally, the assistant pulls out a moneybox and starts refunding people the price of their tickets. I think it’s a nice gesture until I realize that the people getting their money back are giving up. They’re going to hitch hike the rest of the way. I don’t want to do that, so I get out of line and join Lars, who is contentedly working on a presentation he’s due to give the following day in at the Technical University in Minsk.


Lars and I end up being the sole holdouts who don’t mind waiting for the bus company to send another bus. “How long will it take?” he asks the assistant in German. “Ah,” he shakes his head and chuckles at the response. “About four hours,” he translates for me. The same bus we would have joined if we’d gotten stuck at the border. “But I’m not in a hurry,” he says, “are you?”

I’m not, and I really don’t like the idea of hitch hiking – not anywhere, and especially not in a country I’ve never been to before. Lars has one apple and I have two slices of the heavy, Lithuanian bread I bought at the Kaziukas fair. We share our meager lunch supplies and settle in to wait. We agree to stick together until we get to Minsk. This turns out to be a good thing for me because the bus leaves us at a different station than the one I’d expected. Not the station on my map that is a pleasant walk of half a mile from my hotel. Not the station that has a currency exchange office so that I can change some money and take a taxi. No, this station is just somewhere in Minsk… I have no idea where.
A professor from the Technical College arrives to pick up Lars and I have my first encounter with Belarusan hospitality. Lars is already four hours late, and the professor has had to interrupt his afternoon to come pick him up here at the… wherever we are. But he would not dream of leaving me there, even though he has never met me before, and drives me right to the door of my hotel. As inhospitable as their government tries to make itself, most of the people I meet Belarus are kind and helpful, and the city of Minsk turns out to be one of the most interesting in my entire trip so far.

Scrumptious Belarusan hot chocolate