Trip to Wieliczka Salt Mine

After planning a million different times trying to make our ways to Wieliczka salt mines, we finally organized it successfully and took the bus all the way to the town of Wieliczka. When we got there the really good Polish speakers wanted to take the Polish language tour because it was cheaper, but they ended not doing it because it was about a half hour later. Before we started our tour, we went around to the little shops and I ended up buying a few salt crosses for my father.

We started the tour of the salt mine on time. We had to walk down really deep mine shaft that had a wooden spiraling staircase that you could look down the center of and see how far we really had to go. Unfortunately, there was an old British lady that was struggling to make it down the stairs. She went pretty fast down the shaft for an old lady, but she ended going so slow that she had to go with the group behind us.

We started our tour and had a woman as a guide with a pretty strong accent. Some people couldn't even understand her, but I didn’t have that much of a problem. The first room we saw was a big black room made from mineral salt and a giant statue of Nicolaus Copernicus. Next there was a room with a scene of statues showing St. Kinga the Hungarian princess getting a ring. The legend goes that she was going to get married to a Polish prince and wanted salt as a wedding present. When she was given a big mine in Hungary, she threw her ring in it then went to Poland. When in Poland she stopped near Krakow and told her men to search for salt. Miraculously, they found a huge lump of salt that when broken had Kinga’s ring inside. This made Kinga become a saint and they dedicated the largest underground chapel in the world to her.

The next room we saw had statues exhibiting the hazards that miners faced in the mines. There were statues of guys that would go down into the mine and burn up all the methane gas so that there wouldn’t be any major explosions. Apparently, the men would go down into the mine wearing wet clothing and have fire on long sticks to burn the gas. The statues looked like little gnomes. Then we were lead to another room that showed how they used horses in the mines. Horses would both pull salt on sledges and then were used to turn big wheels to take the salt to the top. I really liked the salt statue of Kazimierz as well.

Eventually we made it where they pumped the water out of the mine. They would have two guys hand crank all the water out. There was even a small pipe that they let us taste the water if we wanted. It tasted salty, of course. Then from there we were lead down to the chapel of St. Kinga which looked like a really big ballroom complete with chandlers made of salt crystals strung together. On the sides of the chapel there were engravings with the most impressive one being the engraving of the Last Supper. There was even a cool statue of Pope John Paul II made completely of salt as well.

After the chapel, there were a ton of other rooms they took us to. A few had lakes on the bottoms of them which looked green from the algae that grew in them after being exposed to artificial light for so long. Another room was an exhibit that had a light show with the music of Chopin playing in the background. The very last room were the gift shops and the restaurant. They were very beautiful and looked mad expensive. The elevator ride up were the old elevators they used to move the miners. They were a little weird because there were two elevators with each elevator car which was double stacked and required people to load it in two shifts. It was a tight squeeze but we made it to the top and finally got out of the mine.