Expectations are an underappreciated influence in the way we experience a site and so managing them to an appropriate level ahead of a visit can sometimes be the difference between pleasure and disappointment. I find this is true even more so with natural sites where there is less guarantee of seeing the "highlights" when it comes to wildlife. On my recent trip to Belarus I was (briefly) tempted to not bother visiting at all due to time constraints and the generally poor reviews of this site from the Belarusian side. Thus it was with very low expectations that I set out for a visit on a sunny but cool Tuesday morning in May 2025.

In Belarus the Belovezhskaya Pushcha National Park is very popular and well known within the country and widely advertised as one of its highlights. There are plenty of tours on offer but it is also easy to visit on your own with 7 "direct" buses a day from Brest. Some truly are direct for the 1.5 hr journey but others, like mine, had a transfer to a waiting bus in Kamyanyets adding only a few extra minutes. The bus drops you off at the entrance to the park a few km north of Kamianyuki. This is where it got a little confusing. Entering the park requires a ticket but there were a lot of different options and prices. You could buy an individual ticket for each hiking or biking trail, the museum, father frost estate, open air "zoo" and other excursions. What to choose? My bus had been full and with a steady stream of more arrivals I opted to not bother with the language barrier and hassle of the ticket booth and then separately renting a bike or joining an excursion I wouldn't understand and seemed a little hokey anyway. In the end I just got a ticket for a hiking trail from a kiosk and finally entered.

It's important to note that the core zone of the WHS is smaller than the national park boundary and the area around the entrance including the hotel, restaurants, museum, father frost village and animal pens can be considered as the national park "economic zone" outside the WHS. The official map is not clear but as far as I can tell many of the trails that loop directly to the east and west of the entrance are also excluded from the core zone. It seems that the northern hiking trail "dokudovo" and points farther north will reach just inside the core zone. I only had to show my ticket for this trail once (because I was passing the entrance to the animal pens and the lady there thought I was trying to sneak in) but otherwise you can access any of the trails once in the park, the only difference between hiking and biking is the length of the loop.

I'm not sure where everyone else went but I quickly found myself on my own and spent several nice hours walking in nature on the edge of a forest in places and along open fields in others. In some of the fields there we little observation lookouts set up and a few bison feeding stations which are used to supplement their diet. I had no expectation of seeing any true wildlife (the little zoo seemed in average condition and had all the main local species present) but I enjoyed the birdsong and fresh air and was not disappointed by seeing only 1 deer. It never felt like I had entered "an untouched and ancient woodland" as the forest is often described. It seems that Poland is still the better choice for that.