Bike trips to Belarus
I've already written about Switzerland and Hungary, which leaves Belarus.
We went there on 🚲 twice, once spontaneously, and the other time more deliberately. Cyclists get to skip the line at the border, which is nice, but the process is still far from perfect. Which booth to go to, and how to do it without waiting in line — is completely baffling. You have to hand over your passport at 🛂 without any inserts or covers, so that you don't slip them a bribe. By the way, interesting question. Do people still give bribes to traffic 👮♀️👮♂️ in Latvia? If you know, write it in the comments.
The first ride to Mount Mayak and around the lakes
The first ride was mostly free of hardcore stuff, to Mount Mayak, and around lakes Strusta and Snudy.
⛰ Mayak is a 45-meter hill, which after my travels this year seems like a trifle. Still, every place is beautiful in its own way, and the human 🧠 always compares everything relatively. Because of that, it's pretty cool to ride even to nearby spots. Especially since the view from the ⛰ is wonderful: lakes and fields all around, and from the 🗼 you can see it all for miles and miles. True, we had to buy a ticket for the tower for a whole euro. Which, of course, after Italy, where we paid a minimum of five, brings out a ☺️.
On the first day, there were no special MTB obstacles in our path, except for a detour into the thicket right at the start. There we quickly rolled into such a swamp and dense underbrush that we had to turn back. Near the end we mashed through a short section of an interesting bumpy forest, but nothing genuinely difficult.
Around lakes Strusta and Snudy there are a ton of named camping spots. They are called very officially and Cyrillically "Tourist Stop", and their names are extremely varied: "Vyselki", "Pesnyary", "Mezhozernaya", "Talaka", "Peratsyag" and a hundred others. Interestingly, you have to book them in advance (with the park administration), and the number of allowed 👨👩 is limited. It's probably good for the ecology when it's so strict, but it still reeks of something authoritarian. This is rare in Latvia, I think. For example, our well-maintained "Latvian State Forests rest areas" (LVM atpūtas vieta) are free to visit, and there are quite a few of them. If you just want to pitch a ⛺️ on the shore of a lake on state land, you can do that too. With 🔥 it's a bit trickier - in some places or at certain times you can't build fires.
We had to ride around the lakes on the most nightmarish dirt road for quite a while. I don't know what the deal is with road graders in Belarus, but in Latvia the dirt roads were good this year, and in Estonia they were simply wonderful. But here we encountered many, many kilometers of a classic "washboard". On top of that, I forgot my pills at the overnight stay, and as sunset approached I was suffering a lot. It felt like we just had to tough it out a little longer to the finish line, but then we rolled up to a rather wide and deep river. There was a bridge across the river on the map, but in reality all that was left of it were wooden supports.
River crossing with bicycles
The previous part of the ride through the Braslav district ended with us rolling up to a river with the remains of a bridge. It looked quite deep - up to the neck, if not more. What to do? I checked the map. To the left is Lake Strusty, and to our right are as many as two lakes with the curious names "midnight hair and midday hair". It turned out that if we want to bypass the river, we have to backtrack a long way, and drag ourselves around these lakes for another 20km. Such situations arise quite often when planning rides, albeit in different formats. As Alfred Korzybski told us back in the early twentieth century, "The map is not the territory." Here, without any philosophical undertones, we experienced this powerful thought firsthand, so deep it penetrated right to our guts. We are hardcore soldiers, and we decided to bash straight through the river. After all, these are true MTB adventures!
Right about that time, a fisherwoman and fisherman were returning to the shore nearby. After mulling it over, we decided that asking them to ferry a bike on a rubber boat was dangerous. We still exchanged a couple of words with the fishers to explain that we didn't have swimming trunks and we were going to cross the river buck naked.
I'm not particularly shy about nudity. The reason isn't totally obvious. I am an atheist, a rationalist, but at the same time a rather trusting person. When secular psychologists and philosophers tell me that there is nothing all that special about the human body, let alone anything sinful, I believe them. Of course, the explanation has to be logical and reasonable, humanistic, and consistent with the scientific picture of the world. From this, it directly follows that the human body is just meat, skin, and bones, packaged into an aesthetic or not-so-aesthetic shape. Sexualizing the body is optional. And even if the shape isn't aesthetic, everyone has the right to be who they are, because humanism hasn't been canceled.
The fisherwoman replied to us, her ethical framework also permits nudity (though not in such lofty words). The sun had turned red and swollen, and there was no point in waiting. We quickly took off our clothes, shoved them wherever we could. We grabbed our trusty aluminum steeds, and our gear. One of us couldn't swim. For him, dragging a bike up to his neck in the water across a river with a current was a real surge of adrenaline.
Did the current sweep us away into the hair lakes? Or did the fisherman fish us out? You'll find out in the next part.
Forest MTB and the safari park fence
Despite the current, we courageously conquered the river. The fisherman helped us haul our bikes onto the shore, and in return we helped him put his boat onto the roof of his car. Our adventures ended there - it was practically a stone's throw away to our overnight base. The next day one of the team members left us, and Garik and I were left as a duo. Riding on dirt roads was boring, so I planned out some of our favorite forest MTB. Unfamiliar terrain, you can expect anything you want. As it turned out, what you should expect is an absolutely unbelievable amount of horseflies, mud, thickets, and generally the absolute toughest conditions we ever get, except maybe rain. I was swearing constantly, because the puddles were unbelievable, the mud was getting stuck everywhere it could, and completely prevented the bike from rolling properly. We got stung by nettles, were totally bitten up, and expended a monstrous amount of effort. It would have been the hardest MTB ride, if not for my trip in Italy, described in the previous parts.
Nevertheless, we eventually rode out of the swamp, bought some smoked fish in a village (from Belarus) and headed to the lake shore to eat lunch. We even managed to take a dip. Our buddy offered to come pick us up at the border by eight, so we tried not to dilly-dally. Unfortunately, a wire fence three meters high appeared on our path, and the detour was another ten km, if not twenty. A farmer we met had warned us that a fence was waiting for us, but we decided to check it out anyway. By the way, a goose was following the farmer around like it was tied to him, and the man informed us that the goose goes everywhere with him, on any business.
On the fence itself there were menacing signs saying that entry was forbidden, and that this was some kind of hunting? territory. We have a typically male problem: a lot of bravery, and not much sense. Naturally, we climbed over the fence, and even dragged our bikes along with us. And all because we didn't want to let down our buddy, who by our estimates should have already been on his way. So we're riding through the dense thicket, thinking that a bullet is going to fly into us at any second. We didn't know what kind of place this was. Eventually we made it to the exit, which was mercifully only closed with a deadbolt, so we didn't have to climb another three meters with the bikes. Looking around shiftily, we left the territory. We found a sign saying "Safari Park" and finally realized what kind of place this was: we weren't at risk of dying.
