Cycling from Minsk to Warsaw by Bus

5, covering Belarus’ capital Minsk and Poland’s capital Warsaw We are here again to give some details to those who are wondering about our daily Ramadan holiday trip plan and route.

Belarus was one of the places that we did not have a special interest in, but that tickled us when we saw that it was not marked on the map yet.. We are talking about a country that stands upright between Russia, Europe and the Baltics and has a surface area of ​​207,595 km².. It is curious in its human nature, but due to the fact that Turkish citizens have the opportunity to enter without a visa, the plane tickets are too expensive, and it is touted as the hometown of the “most beautiful girls in the world” in our country, and it does not attract female travelers as a place popular with Turkish men. This is a country we always leave for later.. While we were thinking about what kind of action we should take, and if we take out Minsk in the meantime, we came up with a brilliant idea that we will explain in detail in a little while

We bought our plane ticket to go to Minsk and back to Warsaw, and we would like to add an additional day to the 4-day Ramadan Feast. we broke off and added. Our plan: 1 night 2 days Minsk, then 1 night bus ride, finally 2 nights Warsaw! We chose our flight tickets from Lufthansa via Frankfurt, because it provided us a significant savings compared to non-stop flights.. Would we do it again though? NO because when the plane took off from Istanbul late, it caused us to miss our connecting flight to Minsk at Frankfurt airport, waiting for 6 hours unnecessarily at the airport and wasting 1 day of our vacation.. We will discuss Frankfurt airport separately and share with you how to spend time at the airport in the next blog Fortunately, when we arrived in Minsk, we realized that we didn’t miss much by losing 1 day here, but of course, you don’t feel like this while killing time at the airport.

Minsk, 6 It is a very pleasant place with its wide lane streets, 4-5 storey buildings, modern and polite people, large parks and gardens.. You feel in Europe while walking on the streets, but when you step into the building where you stay, you suddenly find yourself in Russia.. ( St.. The house we stayed in St. Petersburg was in a similar old, worn out building with a coop-like elevator, so this time we are residents.. ) Old buildings facing into a large courtyard with playground and car park are often hidden from wide streets by a walkway.. However, on the contrary, this is a place where even the old city center is not old enough.

You can check the details in our Minsk Travel Guide.

Gorky Park, which is 5 minutes from the house we stayed in, was included in our Minsk city tour. We started in and were able to throw ourselves home without getting drenched, finishing this park and the old town just before it rained.. Without leaving our landlord, who made a gesture and gave us an extra 2 hours due to the day we lost, to empty the house, we grabbed our luggage and set off to go to the bus station where we would take the bus to Warsaw.. Although the bus station is within walking distance, as a weather victim, we preferred to use UBER, which costs 7 BYN, or about 16 TL, without taking any more risks, and we reached the bus station in 10 minutes.

Between Minsk bus station and train station. There’s a mall called Galileo. The location is superb because whether you are traveling by bus or train, this is a shopping mall with a McDonalds open until morning and many stores until LCWaikiki.. Although we do not like shopping malls, it is definitely a useful option in such cases.. In addition, the AVM’s 2. Don’t forget to take food with you from the supermarket on the ground floor.

It is almost impossible to find someone who understands English inside the bus station.. So much so that we had to show the word Warsaw in their own language from our phone to the lady we could not get along with at the ticket office.. Thankfully he wrote us how much we would pay on a piece of paper and somehow understood the word credit card and was kind enough to hand us the pos machine.. In the end, we barely managed to get our one-way bus tickets for 44 BYN per person, or about 106 TL.. You can entrust your luggage to these offices, which are open until 23:00, for 4 TL.. After we left our luggage, we had planned to walk around the rest of the city until the departure time of the bus, but because it was raining, we had to join the hop-on hop-off tours.. Although it is not a method we prefer, it can be a savior for such situations.. We paid 30BYN, approximately 72 TL, for this tour, which lasted approximately 1.5 hours.. Buses leave from the opposite corner of the Galileo shopping center we mentioned.. The departure times of the buses, which depart 4 times a day, are 11:00, 13:30, 16:00 and 18:30.

There are many buses from Minsk to Warsaw, such as Goeuro, Eurolines, Ecolines.. Ticket prices range from 20 euros to 40 euros.. We recommend that you buy your ticket online as soon as you make a plan.. We thought that there wouldn’t be much demand anyway, but when we got on the bus and realized that we would be sitting in unrelated seats, we realized that we almost couldn’t find a place.. By the way, seat numbers were written on our voucher-like bus ticket given to us at the box office, but since we did not understand their language, we thought we would sit in the empty place, so we got the best seats.. When the real owners of the seats we were sitting on arrived, we understood the situation with the help of only 1 person who spoke English.

The wide area stretching from Minsk not only to Warsaw, but also to other countries such as Germany, Estonia, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine. there is a bus and train network. We used our right in favor of the most adventurous and low-cost bus.. Now we are talking about this experience if you are ready

First of all, exiting Minsk was as difficult as the entrance for us.. It is mandatory to have travel insurance covering the days you will stay in Minsk after landing at the airport.. You’ll notice right away before you get in the passport queue anyway, everyone line up in front of this travel insurance box office first thing.. We entered the 1-3 day price range and paid 2 Euros per person.. Prices increase in direct proportion to the number of days.. Anyway, when we were done in this queue, we realized that we didn’t get immigration card on the plane and people were busy filling out these forms.. When we asked an official, we learned that if we were going to continue to Russia, we had to fill in the cards or there was no need.. We were naturally exempted from going to Poland.. When it was our turn in the passport queue, 4 different officers were called to the cabin one by one and showered us with questions.. The primary problem is that we have difficulty in understanding English, but another problem is that our route is really irrelevant Finally, we managed to convince the staff by showing our booking.com reservations and our return flight ticket from Warsaw.. The question was actually very simple, Why Minsk? Why Warsaw? But there is no explanation, “We were wondering and we came!”. We spent almost 2 hours at the border before the bus could enter Warsaw.. First, an officer walked around the bus, then they got us off, checked the bus, and directed us to the passport control point on foot.. As at the airport at the entrance, we were the last one at the exit from Minsk, because the officer could not compare the photo in the passport with Merve.. He called exactly 5 officers to the box office to get approval.. Merve could not convince her uncle that the photograph belonged to her.. No matter how much he made gestures, showed his ears and teeth and took shape, he couldn’t save us and the other 40 people on the bus from waiting here for half an hour.. We did not understand what this uncle’s problem was, but in the end, come on, let’s go, I felt sorry for you.. For such cases, you should actually carry a copy of the photo on your passport or visa with you.

After a 5-minute bus ride from Minsk, we arrived at the Warsaw border.. This time we took our luggage from the bus at the border of Warsaw.. An officer, who opened the suitcases one by one and examined them, as in the times when x-ray was not yet invented, asked if there were cigarettes and forced the people to eat the food in their suitcases and allowed the entrances.. We were lucky this time. The procedure to enter Warsaw scared us a little because of our Minsk experience, but this side of the border was not as difficult as we expected, they said, hurry and go.. The other 40 people on the bus were also quite surprised because we were obviously held responsible for the delay and we could see in their eyes that they hated us

We have both a 1-year Schengen and a 10-year American visa in our passport and almost all the pages are filled with entry and exit stamps. Despite this, we could not understand why we had such problems in a visa-free country, but it was an adrenaline-filled experience.. We may be deceiving ourselves by saying, “The bus was very uncomfortable, we wouldn’t be able to sleep even if we went non-stop and calmly”, but we had to experience this too.. It was an experience we did not experience in our previous border crossings, now we have a story about Minsk.. Isn’t it great

By the way, Warsaw exceeded our expectations and we liked it incredibly. You can examine our article about Warsaw, which is one of my favorite cities, as a place we say was worth all the trouble, in the travel guide section.

Life really requires taking risks and drawing a route out of the ordinary.. This way, you have different stories to tell and unforgettable memories.. We recommend it