Bicycle touring Belarus: Minsk airport to Maladzyechna, Polatsk to Grigorovshchina

Years ago (like 30?!) I was on a Tashkent-Moscow Aeroflot flight that landed on a clear winter day in Minsk. All I could see was endless forest — “what’s it like down there?” I wondered. That day we spent about five hours at the Minsk airport until the weather improved in Moscow and we could continue to our planned destination.

This year Ebru, Ferda, and I bought tickets on the daily charter operated by Belavia from Antalya to Minsk. As summer started, we watched the weather with increasing trepidation. Throughout July Belarus and Poland were getting continuous heavy rain, and flood warnings were issued with almost every weather forecast. We arrived around midday on July 30th to partly cloudy skies.

As usual it took too long to go from boxes and bags of equipment to looking like bicycle tourists.

It had been raining off and on while we were putting the bicycles together and appeared to almost stop when we started riding. Hahaha, just passed any roofs or buildings to protect us from the rain, it started pouring. We quickly got quite wet, and just as quickly the rain stopped. Incredibly this was the heaviest rainstorm during our nine days in the country.

Minsk is about five hours by bicycle west of the airport. We camped one night on the way to the city, but first we bought fuel for our stove and stopped at a market in the village of Sokal for dinner supplies. Clearly we’re not in Turkey anymore where village markets are certainly not stocked like this:

If you’ve been between the airport and Minsk, you might be wondering how it could possibly take five hours of riding. Well, we found roads like these:

Minsk was pretty leveled during WW2. We saw no historic buildings. You can, however, admire Soviet architecture. We didn’t seek this out as some tourists do but still came across a few Soviet reminders on our wanderings.

Here’s Lenin himself in Independence Square.

This monument was across from our apartment in Victory Square, accessed via an underpass full of war murals.

Our apartment, which we rented from a kind and helpful woman named Marina, had neoclassical Greek columns on the balcony.

From that balcony we looked across on Victory Square.

The interior looked to be straight out of some Soviet spy movie from when I was a kid.

Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald lived in a such an apartment before he moved to Texas. Here’s the building where he lived in Minsk.

We were excited to visit Mir and Nesvizh castles and perhaps even get as far west as Hrodna on a slightly roundabout but fairly short ride to Vilnius from where Ebru was flying back to Antalya. It was a surprise, however, when Marina told us the Lithuanians had closed the border to bicyclists. Our original plan had been to use the Privalka-Raigardas border crossing, and I knew that that border had closed shortly after we bought our tickets to Minsk. Marina’s news about the Šalčininkai–Byenyakoni border crossing came as a surprise to me because I had been keeping an eye on its status. Well, as it turns out, the English language page (which said bicycles were allowed) that I had been reading had only about half the information of the Russian language page. In Russian there was conflicting information — first a repeat of what I was reading in English, followed by new information (for me) which stated fairly clearly that bicycles weren’t allowed.

We wasted quite a bit of time in Minsk figuring out what to do. Could we show up at the border and ask a car driver to take us across? — I had to do that once crossing from Poland to Ukraine. Well, perhaps not, because people in cars were waiting up to four days to cross the border. What about a bus from the Belarus border town and across to the Lithuanian border town? Well, no, those buses were completely full and sold out many days in advance. I’ll spare many details, but we learned the Latvian border at Grigorovshchina was open for bicyclists and decided that was our best option.

Finally, we had a little time to look around Minsk.

The first restaurant meal we had in Belarus was the Lido buffet which made it easy to order. We tried blini, a couple fish cakes, a skewer of large pork chunks, a couple salads, mushrooms, potatoes, and a couple beers.

Potatoes seem to be something of a national dish.

The funnest thing we did in Minsk was go to the circus. It was a little bit of a pain to buy the tickets before we left home, but that was a good call because the show was sold out. There were juggling gymnasts, a fantastic couple on the trapeze — how many times did she fly through the air and (thankfully) he caught her?, a fabric flyer, a troop of Mongolians launching off a springboard only to land on the shoulders of someone who’s already on someone else’s shoulders. None of us were so keen to the see animals — dogs, cats, birds, and seven tigers — though I must say it was impressive to see the tigers walking around even if it’s not the place I really want to see tigers.

On the way out of the city, we stopped at this church called Царква Покрыва Прасвятой Багародзіцы. It might have nice frescoes, but they were obscured by scaffolding for restoration. The guide was friendly and talkative even though I couldn’t understand what he was saying (in Russian).

Our camp that night was at a reservoir that is commonly referred to as the Minsk Sea. I put on all my clothes, including my wool hat and down jacket, and wondered how cold it’d be two months later when we were planning on returning to Antalya.

The change in border crossing meant that we were heading NW to Maladzyechna instead of SW as originally planned. Here’s what we found.

Dang, it’s flat out there, you’re probably thinking, and, yes, you’re right. This two-month tour (spoiler! we arrived back in Antalya exactly two months after that camp at the Minsk Sea) was one of the flattest bicycle tours I’ve done.

In Dubrava we ran into a young couple on fixies (with no brakes!) who had taken the train to Maladzyechna and were riding back to their house in Minsk. It was 5pm, and they still had 80km to go but didn’t seem at all worried.

We spent the following night at a hotel in Maladzyechna and left by train to Polatsk in the morning. Our detour to the Latvian border meant that we didn’t have enough time to ride all the way to Vilnius. The train was the solution.

Maladzyechna has a nice pedestrian street from the train station to the 12-story comfortable Soviet-style hotel where we stayed. Along the way we sat down at a restaurant only to discover it was Georgian cuisine rather than Belorussian. We had hinkali, haçapuri, and ojakhuri in addition to mushrooms and soup which seemed perhaps less Georgian.

The train from Maladzyechna to Polatsk took nine hours.

The longest stop was in Krulieŭščyna where we got off and walked around a bit.

Thanks to osmand we found the remains of the foundation of a church (Падмурак касцёла).

The main tourist attraction in Polatsk in Saint Sophia Cathedral, but, as usual in Belarus, it was locked, and we couldn’t get in.

I also found these two buildings interesting.

Ebru must have understood this sign correctly

because she found us a good place to camp.

It was more of the same riding to get to the border.

On our last morning in Belarus we woke up in fog in Piervamajskaja and headed off on a road that was apparently no longer maintained. At times it took three of us to push one bicycle through. Thanks to our train chicanery we weren’t in a hurry.

Thank you, Belarus, for the friendly, helpful people and lots of apples.