A Forest Drive

While reading about the recent historic meeting at Bialowieza on the Polish-Belarusian border, I remembered visiting this part of the world when driving with a friend in an old Renault 9 with British plates from Helsinki, Finland, to London. England, via Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Germany and Holland in the late autumn (November) of 1991.

It was an unusual sort of drive – while Estonia and Latvia had more or less readjusted and grown calmer after the events of earlier in the year, in Lithuania the roads were still patrolled by Soviet army units, and the possibility of being stopped, arrested, or becoming involved in some military activity was still there, though receding with each day that passed. The main difficulty we encountered in Lithuania was getting out of the country into Poland – at Lazdijai-Ogrodniki, for example, we found ourselves waiting in a long queue of cars stretching for over half a kilometre up to the Soviet checkpoint. When I walked up to the heavily fortified and barbed-wired checkpoint, the Soviet (ethnic Russian) duty officer told me that while he was prepared to let us through (as Western “tourists” we could jump the queue, he said), on no account would we be able to pass through the Polish border control. This proved to be correct, and when we challenged the Polish official on duty, showing him our British passports. he merely threatened us with his sub-machine gun. We had no success at the other crossing-points we tried. Finally we were told we would have to enter Belarus, and drive all the way down to Brest, where we would have no difficulty in crossing into Poland. However, we couldn’t get petrol for the journey – all the (three) filling stations in the Lazdijai area claimed to be “empty”. Eventually some Lithuanian soldiers we talked to told us that we should go to the nearby filling station and say that we were British embassy personnel travelling on urgent official business. Amazingly, this worked without proof being required, and we got a full tank of high octane, for which we didn't even have to fork out any rubles.

So, after crossing the Lithuania-Belarus border, and making a fruitless detour through the Belarusian end of Suwalki, we set off south, to Grodno, and then in the afternoon, as the light began to fade, drove down what seemed to be a fairly decent road which on the map, at any rate, looked as though it went straight to the town of Pruzhany. But this road gradually became poorer and poorer, the surface more and more potholed. By now it was completely dark, but we decided to press on. Eventually, the road became a kind of forest track. There was forest all round – the ancient Bialowieza Forest, which is the only remaining part of the immense forest that once spread across the whole of the European Plains. We moved at a snail’s pace for what like seemed like endless kilometres along the narrow dirt track, bordered on each side by dense coniferous forest. Every so often, there was a “surfaced” stretch – the surface consisting of ancient, tiny cobblestones, which made the driving even slower and more difficult. These were apparently village roads, though we saw very few houses, and almost no people, except at one strange intersection, where an onion-domed church and a bakery came eerily into view. There were six or seven people outside the bakery, and they looked like something from a Tolstoy play – men in peasant costume, with tunics, belts and high boots. My friend went into the bakery, and she proudly returned with a loaf of black bread. We asked for directions to Pruzhany and Brest, and were told to keep driving along the narrow road.

Eventually we hit the Pinsk-Kobryn-Brest highway, and reached Brest at about 11pm. The Intourist hotel we found, after making inquiries, was taken over that night by a wedding party. We were told it was too late to give us a regular meal, but the wedding guests – there must have been about fifty of them, all at long tables in the hotel dining room – invited us to share in the wedding meal, which was quite elaborate, and certainly better fare than we would have got on a regular weekday evening. After paying a hundred and fifty US dollars, we got a room for the night, and next day made the crossing into Poland with only the usual hour-long vehicle search at the Soviet (now Belarusian) customs ramp.