Day 3: The Salt Mines

The next day we were taking a night train to Lviv, leaving at something like 10 pm, so we still had the whole day to explore the city. After a nice breakfast, we headed to the train station to store our luggage, knowing that we didn't want to cart it around all day. From there we planned on visiting the Wieliczka Salt Mines, which aren't so very far away from Krakow. These salt mines are a UNESCO World Heritage site, and had been a place I'd wanted to visit since I read about them as a kid. (Yes, I really do love salt...) The guide book (Lonely Planet Eastern Europe) indicated that there should be minibuses leaving from a given intersection downtown, and we decided to go and check out if these minibuses looked remotely babysafe, and then decide if we were going based on that. But first we stopped at a little market and bought some food for a quick little lunch, trying out some street food (like long open-faced subs that we saw everywhere), and these seemingly homemade molded pastries that were being sold by women from little carts in the street:
We were surprised by how much they were charging for these little "pastries", and then surprised by how heavy they were... And of course it's because they weren't pastries at all, but rather smoked cheese. It was really delicious, but we probably wouldn't have bought quite as much had we known it was cheese.

And then on to the salt mines... or so we thought. Lonely Planet let us down in a pretty big way on this one - there were no longer minibuses of any description going to Wieliczka, and none from the intersection in questions. We still wandered around for quite a while trying to find them though, before we asked at the tourist information centre, where they very helpfully gave us information about how to take a city bus out to the town, which was only about a 40 minute ride away. Getting to the bus stop was a bit of a fiasco, mostly because we somehow lost the map they gave us but thought we could do it from memory, and ended up walking around a big block and seeing the bus we wanted drive by us three times while we tried to find the stop. Eventually we did though (after getting directions at a giant fancy mall that had more high end stores than most airports), and we were off!

Luckily we got there shortly before an English-language tour was due to begin, so we didn't have to wait too long upon arrival. We'd already checked the stroller at the train station, as we figured that salt mines were probably not very stroller friendly, which proved to be a good decision, as the tour began by descending 378 stairs to get to the bottom. By the end my knees were really feeling the extra 25 pounds of Béla in the carrier! Check out the view down the centre of the stairwell - it looked like it went on forever...
Yes, mom, I'm a little sherpa.
There were lots of warnings to bring a jacket because it was cold underground, but we found it remarkably comfortable. (We'd read it would be 14 C, but I think it was more like 18 C.)
Here's one of the many statues in one of the chambers we visited. Everything there was made out of solid salt - the carvings, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, with the exception of some wooden support structures. (Wood keeps really well there because all the salt prevents rot.) This statue is of Copernicus, who was, of course, Polish.
These statues tell the legend of the founding of the mine, something about a noblewoman throwing her golden ring down the shaft, and then the riches of the salt deposits being discovered. In this and other pictures you get an idea of how dark the salt rock is - it's something like 92 % NaCl, but the impurities make it look really dark, and it's sometimes called "green salt". Naturally it's refined before use.
Here there were some stalactites of pure salt, really long ones, that reminded me of crystal-growing "experiments" with salt water and hanging strings as a kid.
Here's a chandelier in one of the many chapels. The "glass" in the chandelier is also salt, but it's been purified to appear clear rather than grey-green.
Despite the dark appearance of the "stones", they really taste like salt. Mooo...
This is a bit hard to see, but it's a statue of a miner doing a special job where they'd try to burn off methane build-up using lanterns on long poles. Naturally a very dangerous job, with lots of casualties, and no longer necessary in the still-functioning part of the mine thanks to modern technologies.

There were lots of little models showing how things used to be done in the mine, including the use of horses underground.
Along this particular section of wall you could see how cylinders were drilled in to break off chunks, reminding me of granite rock cuts in Northern Ontario.
One of the more narrow white-washed passages...
Hard to see, but here there was a view down a sort of canyon in the series of tunnels and chambers where you could see down something like 70 meters. Of course it's rather dark, and we're not the best photographers.
Here's a set of the original stairs used by the miners, which were carved out of salt. Of course they get rather slippery when wet and wear down over time, so they've replaced most of them with wood for the tourists.
Here's an underground stream running through the mine, with something like 18% salt in the water (saturated in any case, I don't remember the exact figure).
Hard to see here, but the water was actually sort of a greenish colour. It looks rusty here just because the vessel is rusting (of course).
This room had carvings of the little gnome-like spirits that the miners believed lived underground in the mine.
This was one of the smaller chapels, one of more than a dozen built by the rather religious miners over the years.

But that little one was nothing - this is the Chapel of St. Kinga, which was truly breathtaking. My favourite part was the "tiles", which were designs routed into the solid salt floor.
There were also lots of other carvings though, like in any church, with bas relief reproductions of the last supper, and a giant statue of Pope John Paul II.
Béla loved it, of course. He was quite a hit on our tour in fact, and coped well with the three hour tour, which is longer than he likes to be in the carrier these days. At least in the big chapel I could let him out to run around.
That's the Last Supper on the left...
From there the tour continued, and we went to the Weimar chamber, which was cool for us because Weimar is a city really close to Jena (about 25 km away). Goethe is a really famous German poet and writer who lived and worked in Weimar and surroundings, but he actually came to visit the mine in his earlier career, when he was a German civil servant and was coming to inspect the mine operations. Here he is now!
And here's the sign for the Weimar chamber, which had water in the bottom and a really high ceiling with wonderful acoustics, and we were treated to a piece of music by Chopin (who was Polish) while we contemplated the beauty (and we tried to keep Béla respectfully quiet - he found the echo in the giant chamber rather fun).
At the end of the tour we had supper at the restaurant at the bottom of the mine, which serves up traditional Polish food cafeteria-style, and is meant to be a bit like what the miners get in their cafeteria. Honestly, the food was delicious and quite affordable, and Béla ran around like a mad man, burning off his excess energy, while we enjoyed our meal.

After that we headed toward the exit, which led us by the big event hall with the fancy dining room, shown here. This place is rather classy, and is famous for a big New Year's Eve ball, as well as private functions, including weddings.



Thank God we didn't have to walk back up the stairs! Instead there was a cage-style elevator that brought us up, and which freaked the hell out of Béla. He screamed from the moment the doors closed until the moment we exited, which was actually a pretty long time given that we were 125 m underground. I'm not sure if it was the darkness or the claustrophobia or the creepy elevator operator who he was smooshed in next to, but he settled down as soon as we exited. I haven't noticed him being nervous or upset in other small spaces, so maybe it was just a one-off. And even if he has an irrational fear of cage elevators in salt mines operated by creepy men, he'll probably be able to make it through life without it holding him back too much...

After that we took the bus back into the city, stopped at the high-end mall to pick up some eats for the train, grabbed our luggage, and headed on to Lviv. We'll tell you all about the train trip in the next post.