June 9th: to Krakow

To get from Budapest to Krakow by the most direct route means crossing the full width of Slovakia. This was a surprisingly pleasant journey, on normal roads rather than motorways. The countryside was green and gently undulating to start, getting steeper and more picturesque as we crossed into Poland through the lower slopes of the Tatra Mountains.

Krakow itself was little more than an hour from the Polish border and we found our campsite quite easily.

Our first trip out was to the salt mine at Wieliczka near Krakow. The photo shows a typical underground passage from the total of 300 kilometres of galleries on several levels excavated in over 500 years of mining. The two hour guided tour of course covers only a small fraction.

You read that Stalin sent political prisoners to the salt mines, so it could be expected to be a terrible place to work. Not so; the galleries were wide and the salty atmosphere healthy. The wooden props are perfectly preserved by salt so don’t rot and become unreliable. Compared to coal mining, it’s much more pleasant, and here in Poland it was reckoned to be a good, well paid job.

But there were dangers from methane gas as in coal mines. Below is a reconstruction of how they dealt with it, by igniting the gas near the roof where it collected. This could itself cause a damaging explosion if the pocket of gas was bigger than expected. We were told that such an even happened in this very cavern, as evidenced by the still blackened roof.

The salt was shaped into cylindrical rolls weighing around one tonne and dragged or winched to an assembly point before being hauled to the surface. The reconstruction here shows a worker dragging a cart of salt, called a dog because of the noise it made. The guy looks like he’s wearing a space suit from a 1950’s sci-fi film about mining on Mars.

The mine has a unique feature: a church carved out of salt in a huge cavern. A few photos will illustrate but can’t really convey its size. The first is the pulpit.

Next, a copy in relief of Leonardo’s The Last Supper, size about 12ft by 6ft.

These chandeliers are also made of salt, approx. 6 ft across.

I always thought rock salt was too soft a material for carving but the guide said it’s as hard as marble and hard work to excavate. So watch out you don’t lose a filling with your fish and chips.

The next photo, near the end of the tour, shows a small underground lake where tourism in the mines first began. The plaque says early 19^th century. The visitors, wealthy, prominent people, were ferried down the tunnel to disembark in a grotto. One day one of the boats capsized trapping the occupants underneath. Because of the very high salt content of the water they could not dive out from under the boat and suffocated when the oxygen ran out. So the trips stopped and tourism went into mothballs until recent times.

The usable space in the mine is vast. There are shops, a cinema, a health farm- even a concert hall. We had lunch down there too in the big cafeteria where you would perhaps expect pay higher prices, but was actually very reasonable, for example tomato soup + roll was the equivalent of £1.20.

We had climbed down to a depth of about 150 metres on wooden steps at the start and during the tour, but at the end gratefully returned to the surface in a small cramped lift.

It was an unusual and informative trip, and certainly well worth its salt.