There were some places further south that we would have liked to visit but we didn't know of any campsites in the area so we decided to push on to Krakow. This involved travelling 200km (120 miles) on major roads and we soon remembered why we normally avoided them. There was lots of traffic, lots of lorries, roadworks and hassle. The initial part of the journey was especially frustrating with many queues caused by the roadworks and towns that would soon have by-passes but hadn't yet. We nearly turned off on more minor roads but after Tarnow, the road improved.
We arrived in Wieliczka, a small town close to Krakov, shortly after 14:00 and after parking Henrietta we hurried to the local mine. Not coal, gold, silver nor any other precious metal but something of huge value in the Middle Ages – salt. At one time salt provided one third of the Polish state income and it was incredibly important to them. The salt was deposited some 13 million years ago when the sea in this area evaporated. Archaeological excavations in the town have uncovered evidence that 6,000 years ago the Neolithic inhabitants were boiling water from the local brine springs in order to produce salt. The springs dried up in the early Mediaeval times and wells were then sunk to collect the brine. In 1280 they started to mine the salt and after extracting 7.8 million tonnes using 12km of tunnels mining stopped in 1996 when the mine suffered a major flood, caused by the mining activity, that resulted its closure for over a year. A small amount of salt is still produced but only from the brine that is pumped from the mine to prevent it flooding. The mine has been a tourist attraction for hundreds of years and has attracted a host of celebrities including many European monarchs (the mine was owned by the Polish Royal Family), Copernicus (the astronomer, educated in Krakow) in the 15th century and Pope John Paul II both as a schoolboy (he was born locally) and when he was Archbishop of Krakow. John Paul was also due to visit as Pope in 1999 and all the preparations had been made, including a special vehicle to take him from the lift to the King's Chapel, but he was too ill to travel.
We had to wait for half an hour for the next English language tour but were soon walking down the seemingly never-ending 380 steps. The first impressions of the mine were nothing like coal mines nor the gold and silver mine that we visited last month in Slovakia. It was clean and dry and the walls shone like marble. The deposit is rock salt and it is as hard as rock, with the miners using wedges to split the rock just as they used to with marble and building stone. In the early days, the salt was broken up and transported in barrels and later, large slabs were often shaped into cylinders to allow them to be rolled the long distances to the shafts. The salt was known by the miners as 'green salt' because, in the yellow light from their tallow lamps, the grey salt looked green. The salt is of a high purity and can be used without the need for refining – we were told that every visitor was allowed to eat salt from the walls on the way up to a limit of 2kg! The salt sculptures were however out of bounds. These were all made not by professional artists but by the miners themselves and were very impressive. They included kings and queens and many of those celebrity visitors but the highlight of the visit had to be the King's Chapel, a vast hall created in the rock salt. There was the altar, alter screen, columns, statues of the crucifixion, the Virgin Mary and Pope John Paul II and many relief sculptures of biblical scenes such as the Last Supper lined the walls. Everything, including the floors, was carved out of the rock salt – it was quite awe inspiring.
The tour ended in another large hall where there was a state of the art conference hall and large restaurant, all over 100m below the surface! We were told that, included in the ticket, there was an optional tour of the museum with the same English-speaking guide that would leave in 15 minutes time – we were the only two people out of the 40 people on the tour to take up the offer. The museum was fascinating with exhibits such as samples of crystallised salt (including a blue and white sample of pure salt, the colour resulting from a distortion in the crystal structure); the narrow gauge railway used to transport royalty and visiting dignitaries; models of the mine and a number of huge horse-powered winding mechanisms. The museum is on the third level at 135m and is the lowest part of the mine open to the public, but the mine actually reaches a level of 327m at its deepest part. As we had the guide all to ourselves, we were able to chat about lots of subjects as we wandered through the tunnels. I asked about the number of employees and was told that there were 700 – a similar number to Foster Yeoman that ran two quarries producing over 5 million tonnes of rock each per annum! Given that the mine is no longer producing, I found this rather surprising although it did help to explain the £13 ticket price. There was an army of cleaners (the whole of the tourist route was cleaned every day and we saw a number of cleaners in the museum) and the mine, even the areas not visited, had to be maintained but I was still struggling with the concept of 700 employees. Our guide took us to the lift cage that took us rapidly back to the surface. Our visit lasted for a total of over three hours and was actually good value for money even though it was the most expensive attraction that we have visited on the Odyssey.
We had a surprisingly easy drive through Krakow to our campsite that was on the eastern outskirts of the city. Camping Smok is set on a hill but has level pitches and very good facilities. The site is sprinkled with apple trees and, having been guided to a pitch under two trees, we were sprinkled with apples. Actually, 'bombarded' might be a better description, as they made a terrific noise when they fell on the van, especially on the bonnet where the greater drop allowed them to reach a higher speed. I thought about suing the campsite owners if they created any dents in Henrietta but in the end I decided just to eat the apples.
Photos: Some of the skansen buildings at Pastewnik Camping; One of the many salt sculptures in the mine; The very impressive King's Chapel; The train main for the King and subsequently used to transport important visitors, sadly not including us!
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