Day 9 - Heat and Wieliczka salt mine

The heat was pretty staggering today in Cracow, despite being used to the scorching heat of Abu Dhabi, we did sweat a bit. The temperature didn't dip much during the night, remaining in the high 25 which made for a fairly sweaty night in the van. We ended up using the solar shower in the dark to enjoy a refreshing guerilla shower, one of the nicest ever.

We slept in a bit until 10am and had to skip the morning coffee because we ran out of gas and Poland doesn't stock the gas bottles that we have (obviously...). We had a quick chat with our neighbours, a family of 4 + dog that has been on the road for 3 months through scandinavia & Italy. They planned to stay another 7 months traveling around. And we headed up to Wieliczka to view the salt mines. The plan was to do Wieliczka and Auschwitz in the same day as it's like 1h away but nothing prepared us for the sheer affluence in Wieliczka. People, people everywhere. Anyway, we're here we might as well queue and visit the thing.

The salt mines were once Poland's greatest source of income and employed a lot of people. The salt was extracted from those mines ever since the 1600s and was then shipped by boat (over the Orava, then the Váh, then the Danube) all the way to the Black Sea. The salt was transported on wooden rafts called Pltka. I didn't quite get why the mine salt was better than the sea salt extracted by evaporation, in any case, they told us it was the best salt in the world (or something along those lines). The visit is a succession of rooms carved into the rocks into which the ancient miners have carved statues of various scenes and famous people.

The scene were the girl tosses her ring in the mine

King Kazimierz the Great

It culminates into the St. Kinda Cathedral carved entirely in salt, which would be a lot nicer if there were fewer people. But then again, we're there as well so we are part of the problem.

Pictures weren't exactly allowed so I took pictures kind of stealthily or at least tried so some pictures are super bad. The visit then goes to a succession of rooms each bigger than the other which is a bit humbling considering you get to 125m below ground in those immense rooms. They have some really intricate carvings in the rocks everywhere in the mine which I find absolutely fascinating.

There is also a hotel and a wellness thing so you can spend the night as it allegedly helps with people who have breathing issues. All in all the visit was interesting but maybe not as mind blowing as we expected it to be and the 1h30 of queuing to get the (30e) tickets in the scorching heat kind of put a damper to our excitement. We headed off at 18h ish and drove towards Owsiecim to spend the night within reasonable distance from the actual city.