Monday, 24-June-2024

Coming up next are four posts about one place – A place near and dear to my heart… or more accurately, a place that I’ve kept in the back of my mind for as long as I can remember.

The Wieliczka salt mines of Poland.

I can’t tell you when I first heard of them, though my memory tells me that I’d heard that they had inspired Peter Jackson in his direction for the Mines of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring… Looking online today, I can’t find anything to corroborate that memory, but I’m keeping it as my own. So… 2001 era, nearly 20 years.

The culmination of 20 years of desire to see the underground caves that had inspired Dwarven architecture throughout fantasy – from Lord of the Rings to Dragon Age, from World of Warcraft to The Witcher, and countless others.

While planning out my trip through Europe a few months back, I realized that the only way into the Wieliczka salt mines was with a guide – not something that I’d expected, but something that made quite a bit of sense in retrospect. Don’t want the tourists getting lost in the depths of the earth, when they forge onward too greedily and too deep, do we? Who knows that they could uncover in the depths…

So, tours.

I looked into it, found two tours available, and booked them both. The Tourists Route first, as the longer and more spectacular, and then the Miner’s route as a second tour – getting a little more in-depth into the mines and miners themselves, vs. the beautiful chambers that they carved.

The next four posts will go through the details, but for now… here’s a few of the highlight photos to whet your appetite.