Monday, 24-June-2024


Satiated after having an amazing meal in the underground dining area of the Mines, I pressed onward.

I was now 125m (410ft) deep, and had a few hours before my second tour of the day… but I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do with that time. During the Tourist’s Route tour, our guide had mentioned two options that had caught my attention – The Museum Route, and the Graduation Tower. One aboveground, and one directly off the restaurant and included in the price of the Tourist’s Route tour.

I started off with the Museum Route tour – since it started right at the exit of the restaurant I’d just gorged myself in, and I didn’t quite want to leave the cool salty air of the mines just yet. I’d been braving the heat of the summer ever since leaving Iceland (though with a lovely respite in the Baltics!), and the cold air was feeling absolutely glorious.

Getting to the route was pretty simple – I walked out of the restaurant, and I stood in line. Yup, simple.

Soon enough the tour guide arrived, said her greetings, and we headed further down into the depths. This time we didn’t take any staircases, though, simply following a tunnel that sloped gently downward (if it even descended at all). She showed us a few chambers off to the side as we walked, before we came to the main exhibit of the tour – the Wieliczka museum!

The Museum wasn’t particularly large, being made up of maybe a dozen small rooms with displays and placards. A small city museum, I’d probably have spent about an hour and a half in here if I’d been left to my own devices.

I wasn’t left to my own devices, however, as the rules were pretty clear that no one was allowed to explore the mines on their own. Something about Balrogs, I think. Instead of perusing at my own pace, then, I was part of a whole group visiting the museum together… with a tour guide at the head. A tour guide who, with no significant offence intended, may have been training for a marathon in parallel with guiding.

Instead of an hour and a half, we finished in just about 40min.

True story – I didn’t even get to read the placards until I went through the photos for this post. I had opportunity to quickly snap pictures of about 2/3 of the exhibits, and even then the guide was making it pretty clear that I was holding up the whole group… either myself, or a pair of guys from the UK who were dressed in what I assume was period-appropriate outfits. They were awesome, and between the three of us I think the guide came close to simply hogtieing us all and dragging us behind her in the spring to finish the tour.

It bummed me out quite a bit, if that wasn’t clear.

There were so many interesting things on display – from minerals and interesting finds, to historic documents, to tools that had been used in the depths and recovered for display. Heck, there was even a hologram of the Papal seal, stored with the signed document from the Pope’s visit… in a chapel that frankly felt less at home on Earth and more at home on a mining asteroid, or perhaps the Elemental Plane of Earth.

Our guide did give some interesting factoids, of course, but they were mainly washed away from my mind by the simple fact that I was always rushing to try and see some of the historic memorabilia that the tour was supposedly about.

Regardless, the adventure lasted 40min, and soon enough I was heading topside, out of the comfortable dark caverns and salty air, back into the bright light and flowered scents of the world above…