Dzianis Dudzinski has visited 100 countries — he shares which ones impressed him most. But he saves his most desired country for later
Today, Dzianis Dudzinski has a hundred countries behind him. He lived among African tribes, crossed the Darién Gap jungles, and sat on the bank of the Amazon in a city he had dreamed of since he was a child. But he still hasn't gone to the main country from his childhood world map: he wants to leave room for a dream.
Host Dzianis Dudzinski has visited 100 countries. Photo here and further: interviewee's archive
Dzianis Dudzinski told "Nasha Niva" about his favorite places in Belarus, solo travels, and the countries that surprised him the most.
«In childhood, it was easier to fly to the Moon»
— When I was five or six, the first adult book that fell into my hands was Jules Verne's 'The Mysterious Island'. First, my grandmother read it aloud to me, and then I continued by myself. It was my first introduction to adventures, travels, distant countries, jungles, and islands," Dudzinski recounts.
Then came other books by Jules Verne, Daniel Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe', the film 'In Search of Captain Grant'. And finally, the books by Polish writer Alfred Szklarski about Tomek Wilmowski "finished him off".
— It was the 1980s. Back then, it was easier to fly to the Moon than to go traveling. People who had traveled to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, or Yugoslavia were like gods. They had stories for months about how they had been abroad.
One of his main childhood dreams is also connected with the books about Tomek Wilmowski.
— I always wanted to go to Iquitos. It's a city in Peru, in the very heart of the Amazon. No roads lead there — you can only get there by boat on the Amazon or by plane. I read about it in childhood in Wilmowski's book, which I am now rereading in Polish.
Many years later, he finally got there.
— I sat on the bank of the Amazon, opened a bottle of beer, and realized: I hadn't let that boy down. I had promised myself that someday I would see this city. And I saw it.
«Your head is a pot of soup, stuffed with impressions»
Dudzinski undertook some of his travels alone. He says there's a special pleasure in that.
— Everything you see, everything you decide, every next step you take belongs only to you and depends only on you.
Even when traveling with friends or loved ones, you have to find compromises.
— A friend wanted to drink beer — and you sit with him for half an hour. Someone wants to get up at eight in the morning, but you'd prefer to sleep until ten. If you're alone, you only do what you want.
He considers moments when he is alone with a place particularly precious.
— You sit on Machu Picchu and don't tell anyone: «Look how cool it is here». You just absorb everything. You remember the history of this place, think about the people who lived here, walk these streets. And all of it belongs only to you.
No less important, according to him, is the journey back.
— When you go there, you live in anticipation. And when you return, there are so many impressions that it's impossible to process them immediately. Your head is like a pot of soup, filled not with soup, but with impressions.
Usually after such trips, Dudzinski says, people become silent.
— When we go there talkative and cheerful, everyone sits on the way back with a gaze into nowhere. You are so overwhelmed by everything you've seen that you simply keep silent.
«Who can recall what there is in Mongolia now?»
To the question about the countries that created the biggest 'wow' effect, Dudzinski answers almost immediately: there were two such countries — Morocco and Mongolia.
— Someone told me: «Let's go to Morocco». But for me, Morocco was… Well, I'd read about it, but I imagined something like Egypt. And I thought: well, Morocco is Morocco. And it's far to go, North Africa.
One of my favorite countries today is Morocco. And it has everything. For example, the snow-capped Mount Toubkal, the highest mountain in North Africa. We went there, with crampons, everything as it should be.
The city of Essaouira especially stuck in his memory.
— One of my most favorite cities in the world overall. On the ocean shore, a cold ocean. White houses.
Dudzinski also recalls a three-day horse trek along the Atlantic Ocean.
— When you gallop under the sun along the Atlantic Ocean on horseback — that's something incredible.
Mongolia was no less of a discovery.
— Who can recall what there is in Mongolia now? Moreover, there are only two more or less large cities there — Ulaanbaatar and Murun. Everything else is something completely different.
They had to travel around the country in old Soviet 'bukhankas' (loaf-shaped vans).
— There are no roads there. You can't eat or sleep in that 'bukhanka' because it's shaking all the time.
In one trip, the group crossed Mongolia from the desert to the northern regions.
— We traversed Mongolia: from the desert, where there was a camel crossing, through the foothills, and to Northern Mongolia. From sands and plus 50 degrees — to reindeer herders and northern reindeer.
They had to spend nights with local residents.
— You sleep in these shelters with the reindeer herders, you eat with them. It's cold, raining, plus five degrees. Everything is leaking. The stove works but smokes. You're suffocating, coughing. But it's awesome.
«In the Darién Gap, the four of us ate one Snickers for two days»
Dudzinski calls the Darién Gap his most difficult journey — a stretch of jungle on the border of Panama and Colombia, where the Pan-American Highway is interrupted.
— The Pan-American Highway is a system of roads from Alaska to the southernmost tip of South America. And it is interrupted in only one place.
According to him, there are several reasons: drug trafficking, cartels, impassable swamps, and difficult terrain.
— All cars and trucks traveling on the Pan-American Highway simply turn onto a ferry at some point. They bypass these 90 kilometers by water, and then return to the road.
Getting into Darién is also not easy.
— It's a military zone. Scientists, ornithologists, herpetologists are allowed there. American soldiers come there to train in the jungle.
To get permission, the company of four friends had to show resourcefulness.
— We printed out badges for ourselves. I took badges from «Slavic Bazaar», some papers with stamps. We arrive, and they ask us: «Why do you want to go there?» And I start laying out all these papers. They don't understand what's written there. But it looks serious.
At military checkpoints, these papers came in handy more than once.
— Our guide showed them something, they called somewhere, clarified something. And only after that did they let us through.
The group did not attempt to cross the gap itself.
— This is one of the most inaccessible territories on Earth. We did not go through the entire Darién Gap — it is very dangerous. But we still covered 20-25 kilometers.
The last point that can still be reached by transport is the village of Yaviza.
— You ride in these minibuses. Here someone is breastfeeding a child, here are chickens, here are goats. Someone is already nauseous from the heat. And that's how you get to the last point — the village of Yaviza.
That's where the asphalt ends.
— We got out somewhere around eight in the evening. It was dark. The bus turns around and drives back. And we stand with our backpacks in the middle of Yaviza.
Accommodation was found with a local resident, Doña Maria.
— We run around this village, looking for Doña Maria. And she says: «If you want, the keys are in a glass near the entrance. Come in, choose a room and stay. Pay later». She's lying somewhere in a hammock and asks not to be disturbed.
Before heading into the jungle, the group stopped at a local tavern.
— Like in cowboy movies. We walked in — and the music immediately stopped. Everyone looked at us. Latinos in white shirts, all with machetes. We ask: «Can we drink something local?» They pour us some cloudy drink into someone else's glasses, without even washing them. I say: «Guys, don't be shy». We drank it down in one gulp — and that was it, the music turned back on, we became one of them.
In Darién itself, life quickly boils down to the simplest things.
— A mountain stream. You spend all your time near it. You take water from there to drink, you wash yourself there, you wash clothes there, you cool beer there.
Everything necessary had to be carried on their backs.
— We were told: here's the last store where you can buy canned goods, rice, something else. Buy everything now.
But even that wasn't enough.
— And someone remembered that a Snickers taken on the plane was in the backpack. For the first time in my life, I saw four adults eat one Snickers for two days.
And that's what he remembered no less than the jungle itself.
— Nobody cares about you there. There are no restaurants, no canteens. There's just you, what you brought with you. And the jungle around.
«My friends call it Dudism»
After a hundred countries and dozens of major journeys, Dudzinski says that the main result for him is not in the number of places visited.
— You become calmer about others' shortcomings, about others' misunderstandings, about others' flaws. You become more tolerant.
Gradually, he says, a special attitude to life emerges.
— Whatever happens around you, you're like: oh well. You acquire a certain Buddhist calm.
Dudzinski believes that it was travel that helped him find this state.
— My friends call it Dudism. I never get angry.
And he explains it very simply:
— You know how vast the world is. You've experienced it not only with your eyes but with all your senses. You were cold in Northern Mongolia. You were hot and humid in the Amazon jungles. You lived among the tribes of Southern Ethiopia.
You arrive in a village where people wear loincloths, paint themselves, and hunt. You pitch your tent and live alongside them.
He was particularly struck by how differently people can perceive things that are ordinary for us.
— You're sitting by the campfire, and then you see a person come out of your tent with a phone in their hands. They sit down next to you and ask: «What is this?» You show that it's a phone. They fiddle with it a bit more and then leave.
We brought soap bubbles, pencils, candies. And we also took socks from the plane. Why would we need them? One boy got these blue socks. At first, he even tried to eat them. Because before this, we had taught the children to unwrap candies.
Then Dudzinski's wife Katya helped the boy put them on.
— He sat and just looked at these socks on his feet. We say: you can walk in them, you can take them off and take them home. But he just didn't understand what they were and lifted his legs up.
«Please, don't touch Vitsebsk»
Among Belarusian places that stuck in his memory more than others, Dudzinski names Dzyatlava District and the Shchara River. He explains that it's because of the people — he had many friends in those places.
Dudzinski unhesitatingly names Grodno as his favorite Belarusian city.
But he feels hurt about Vitsebsk.
— From a city that had a very interesting, fairytale-like, cozy potential, they made something plastic and panel-like," he explains.
In his opinion, Belarusian authorities often do not know how to carefully work with historical heritage.
— When they undertake something, everything turns into some kind of matryoshka doll, a refrigerator magnet, some kind of nonsense.
Dudzinski admits that he visited Vitsebsk many times during the «Slavic Bazaar» and observed how the city changed.
— I always wanted to say: please, don't touch Vitsebsk. At least leave it as it is.
He is particularly irritated by the desire to make historical places «more beautiful» at any cost.
— Many guests will come to us, so there will be a beautiful plastic facade here, there will be metal tiles, and here instead of cobblestones, we will lay tiles or pave everything with asphalt.
Similar feelings are evoked in him by the attitude towards historical monuments in general.
— I really dislike all this bloated, matryoshka-like stuff.
As an example, he mentions Mir Castle.
— When I was a child and came to Mir, there was history. There was a feeling of an authentic place. But now this history has been turned into some kind of lubok (folk print), and I feel sorry.
This is especially noticeable after traveling to other countries.
— You see how reverently people treat their old buildings, their history. But here, very often, there's a desire to repair everything, decorate it, make it «better».
At the same time, Dudzinski himself admits that he misses Belarus primarily not because of its cities, but because of specific places and the memories associated with them.
Another Belarusian place that unexpectedly deeply captivated Dudzinski is Yastrembel. There, he was particularly struck by an old manor house that is gradually falling into ruin. «A wonderful marvel that could become a true landmark of the place,» the host describes the manor.
He returned there several times again.
— Every time I said goodbye to the building. Because somewhere they wrote that they would do something. And we know how they restore things here. There will definitely be metal tiles, plastic windows, and all the rest.
«If I go to Australia, I won't have any dreams left»
Despite a hundred visited countries, one big dream of Dudzinski still remains unfulfilled.
— Central Africa is in the plans. Congo, Uganda, Rwanda. Mountain gorillas live there. You can visit them — with guides, of course.
But there are things he consciously postpones.
— I have two dreams left in life. To attend a Depeche Mode concert and to go to Australia.
Both stretch back to his childhood.
— Australia is my most favorite continent, my most favorite country, which I have never been to. In school, I redrew the map of Australia on graph paper. I knew all the more or less large cities by heart.
But he's not rushing to either the concert of his favorite band or the country of his dreams yet.
— I don't go to Depeche Mode concerts and don't even think about going to Australia. If I do that, I won't have any dreams left.