My first sleeper train and the first country on this trip that requires a visa. Could be interesting....
Ok... Good start, I have a ticket. Well I hope it is a ticket as I can't read a word on it and it cost me 250 zloty
The train is on the board and I see I have to go to platform 2.
I get to platform 2 and find out that each platform has two tracks, and what's more each track has numerous sectors. I use the little map on the platform, to locate the correct sector and wait for the train. The details of the train don't appear on the board until about 30 seconds before the train pulls in.
Not very helpful!
Not very helpful!
When the train arrives it turns out that I am in the wrong sector anyway! Nothing a quick jog down the platform won't sort out.
Getting on the train is surreal. They are playing, what I assume is traditional Belarus music. My female compartment has three bunks, I am in the middle one. There is a lovely older women in the bottom bunk. She talks to me in Belarusian. I talk to her in English. A younger woman dumps her bag, scales the ladder and hops onto the top bunk. I don't hear a peep out of her until we are pulling into Minsk and she needs help finding her sock. Again we communicated via signs and she looked happy enough when I handed her sock up.
Apparently it tales 6 hours to drive from Warsaw to Minsk, why is this train going to take 10 hours? Well, we stopped on the Poland side of the border and had our passports checked. That took about one hour. We then went 100 meters down the track and had our passports checked by the Belarusian officials. Not sure what he said to me but I pointed at my Russian visa as that is my destination after Belarus, he seemed happy with that and added my passport to his pile and disappeared. I waited for half an hour expecting to be thrown off the train, but the passport was returner to me eventually. Customs officials also checked the inside and outside of the train thoroughly at this stage. We then went backwards for about half a mile and that's when the hammering and shunting started. Then gauge of the tracks in Belarus is different to the gauge of the tracks in Poland, and whatever they had to to to the train to make it viable for the Belarus took about three hours and was really really noisy. I fell asleep at some point and must have slept really soundly as I only woke up when we had the "wake up" knock on the door half an hour outside Minsk.
oh... and I actually fell out of the train when alighting in Minsk, to a huge gasp from the waiting crowd, (they were waiting for their loved ones, not me, I was just bonus entertainment)