Well it wouldn’t be a trip without a hiccup would it now? When planning this trip originally, I was going to fly from Vilnius to Minsk rather than catching the train but soon opted for the latter simply for ease. During the train booking, I completely forgot (until this morning when I was checking everything) that in order to enter Belarus without a visa, you must fly in and out of Minsk National Airport. If you wish to travel over the international borders via any other means, you still need to obtain a visa prior to your trip otherwise face deportation, little contradictory to the word ‘visa free’, don’t you think?
Annoyingly, I discovered this a hour or two after todays flight to Minsk had departed (it had to be the day that the flight departure time was 09:25am instead of 6:40pm) hence we have another night in Vilnius before catching a 35 MINUTE FLIGHT tomorrow evening simply to cross the Belarusian ‘checkpoint’! One positive of this situation is that tomorrows flight cost less than £190 for all 4 of us!
As a result, we only have 1 day to explore Minsk so a strategic plan has been devised to make the most of it hence you may not hear from muggins for a while (well until I return to the UK and sort my life out!) but we will still be Instagramming/Tweeting until home time on Wednesday…
(Definite lesson learnt here that if a country says it is ‘visa free’, it may not mean that you can travel over any old section of the border!)