Due to our short visa, we had to take a train to skip most of the 400 km of cycling from Brest to Shanti Dom, a yoga farm with an international volunteering programme about 70 km west of Minsk.
Lucky as we are, it started raining cats and dogs just after we got out of the train to cycle 40 km, but when we finally arrived, we were greeted with a beautiful sunset and rainbow.
Shanti Dom is an old school building on the countryside in the middle of nowhere that a young hetero couple is turning into a yoga farm, with the help of volunteers. Yoga farm means that there is a big yoga exercise room and the life in the project is organised according to the rules of (one school of) yoga, among those a particular style of yoga that is exercised every day, non-violence, and sticking to a strict daily schedule, and that there is a permaculture garden where food is (going to be) grown.
As we had to register at an official sleeping place as part of visa regulations 5 working days after entering the country, we could only stay for one day at Shanti Dom, as we couldn’t register there. We used the day to recover from the exhaustion of taking so many trains really early in the morning with all our stuff, and we got some yoga classes and an introduction to the idea of non-violence in the particular school of yoga that Shanti Dom is following.
