[travel] Welcome to Belarus

[mattbell]

The Lonely Planet guide to Belarus advises you to hide the Lonely Planet guide to Belarus when entering Belarus because the Belarussian government considers it subversive material and will confiscate it.  Ah, Animal Farm is alive and well.

The government is of course taking this action on behalf of the people. 

I'm planning out my itinerary for the next couple of weeks.  It's looking like:

- Finish Greece (a couple more islands, plus some trips inland from Athens)
- Fly from Athens to Riga (Latvia) for under 100 euros. 
- Hit the Baltic states (Latvia/Lithuania/Estonia), then go down to Krakow by bus or train.
- Spend a few days seeing some of the stunning sights there (the underground salt mines, concentration camps, and the city itself)
- Hop a train to Lviv in the Ukraine, which is supposed to be beautiful.
- Spend a few days in and around Lviv, then go to Budapest and Prague. 

Comments

[merovingian.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the thing that makes the Belarus government consider the book subversive is the line about how you should hide the book.

[factitiouslj.livejournal.com]

Lonely Planet probably didn't want to put that line in, but had to to make sure it would be accurate.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

I believe Richard Feynman had the same problem when he sent letters home to his girlfriend from Los Alamos during WWII. The censors censored any mention of censorship because they didn't want to let on that they were working on something important enough to merit censorship... as if it wasn't obvious from the black lines through words they didn't like.

He kept trying to send her word puzzles because she liked them, but the censors wouldn't let them through, and he couldn't tell her *why* he couldn't send them.

I read the book many years ago, the reality may have been slightly different than I remember.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Because of your talk of Belarus and the Baltics, I read "Finish Greece" and "Finnish Greece", which made me momentarily wonder if there was some unknown collection of southern islands that for some weird quirky historical reason belonged to Finland, and you were going to check them out before going up north.