September 25, 2013
Vilnius Part One: Organising a Belarus visa
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I must admit that the first couple of days in Lithuania were not the most thrilling of the movie. The weather was much improved, sunny and with a tailwind, and the going was good across very flat farmland and occasionally through villages of brightly coloured wooden homes. It was, with the exception of the woman I saw milking cows by hand in a field, just a bit on the boring side. So we'll skip ahead to Vilnius.
In that city I found myself staying with a most wonderful woman named Virginija who had seen that I was looking for a host for a few days and sent me an invitation via the couchsurfing website. Now in her fifties with four grown up children she was still an active member of the couchsurfing community, frequently hosting people in her apartment that she shared with her husband and one of her daughters. I was delighted to have the opportunity to stay in one of these Soviet tower blocks having seen so many recently and this one was amongst a sea of them on the outskirts of Vilnius. Virginija made me feel welcome straight away and I was given my own room with a computer in it that I could use.
This computer was of great benefit because my primary concern during my time in Vilnius was to try and organise a visa so that I could visit the neighbouring country of Belarus. Like most people I didn't actually know anything at all about Belarus, so the first thing I needed to do was to research a little bit about the place. I soon discovered that it has held on to its Soviet roots and has a crackball dictator, who in the past was best friends with Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi and who was now in full support of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. I'm not sure I'd be best pleased about that if I was Bashar, given how well things turned out for those other two. In fact, thanks to its crazed dictator, the United States government lists Belarus as the only remaining 'outpost of tyranny' in Europe. In other words, I wanted to pay this place a visit.
But getting a visa was not going to be easy. Everything I was reading suggested that Belarus did all it could to avoid encouraging visitors - the visa was expensive and hotels had to be booked for every night of my stay. I even read articles by people who had tried to get a visa with hotels legitamitely booked but had been refused on the grounds that the hotels were not non-refundable (ie could be cancelled) and that the embassy required sealed letters signed by the hotel managers saying everything had been paid and was non-refundable. It all seemed a bit much, I mean, what did they think I was going to do, cancel the hotels and camp in the woods? But there was a potential way around some of this beurocratic nonsense; it sounded like I could possibly find a travel agency in Vilnius that could book the hotel and organise the visa for me, increasing the cost somewhat, but taking away the risk of rejection almost completely.
The next day I set about walking around Vilnius looking for travel agencies. I found one almost straight away and the woman said they could help. I gave her my details and my planned itinerary, which was to cut across through a corner of the country entering from Lithuania and exiting to Poland with just a one night stop in the city of Grodno (sometimes written Hrodna). She checked the hotels there and found the cheapest one (which wasn't very cheap because it still had to be on the official list of allowed hotels for visitors, ie the expensive ones) and came up with a total figure for the visa, hotel and her services of almost two hundred euros. Once I had picked myself and my chair up off the floor I thanked her very much and told her that I would like to ask around at some more travel agencies and give her my answer that afternoon.
I walked around the city and found a few other agencies, but none of them could help me with a visa for Belarus. I was trying to work out whether I could justify spending two hundred euros on a daytrip to a dictatorship and I had actually just about come to the conclusion that I could. Sure it was a lot of money, but I felt certain that it would be a really interesting place to see and the chance for me to see it was unlikely to come around again soon, and what's money really? So I was thinking to go back and get the process started when I stumbled across another travel agency where I was told that they could help me. Again I explained my itinerary, leaving out the part about the bike of course, and they looked up the hotel (which was the exact same one) and came up with a total figure of 135 euros. I said "Yes please!"
It was a Thursday and the Belarus embassy would take a week to process my application from when the agency submitted it and so the agency told me that I could collect my visa a week on Friday. Presumably nobody from the agency could be bothered to go the embassy on Friday though because I got a message that day saying that actually I could collect my visa a week on Monday. This gave me all of ten days to twiddle my thumbs anxiously in Vilnius waiting for the Belarus embassy to make their decision.
But Vilnius is a nice city and I had a very nice host. That Thursday was in fact my birthday and we had a nice dinner together - Virginija and her husband, myself, and a Polish girl who was also couchsurfing. I found it really amazing how kind and generous these people were and I was also really inspired by Virginija, who grew up in Soviet times and was therefore not allowed to ever travel west. She told me about how she always wanted to travel when she was younger but couldn't and how she was making up for it now, doing seven or eight trips a year and staying with couchsurfing hosts herself. She had such a passion for life, it was fantastic. It was a lovely evening and there was a cake for my birthday and I blew out the candles and wished for a Belarus visa.
I spent the next couple of days exploring the city and meeting with a few people from the couchsurfing website, from whom I learnt about Lithuania. Vilnius really is quite a nice city with a large old town and a cathedral in the centre which resembles the Leaning Tower of Pisa outside the Parthenon. The ruins of a castle stand on a hill above this, and on a bigger hill above this is the three crosses. Its all terribly lovely.
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I was thoroughly enjoying the company of Virginia and her family but I did feel that staying there for ten days was probably pushing the boundaries of acceptability and I was also keen to see a little more of Lithunaia. So at the start of the next week I packed everything back on the bike and headed off for a short tour of the surrounding surroundings.
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