206/365: Salt

206/365: Salt, originally uploaded by Magic Madzik.

July 25th

The Wieliczka Salt Mine is another wonderful place to go. It's been in operation since at least the 13th century and is now nine levels and 327 metres deep, with over 300 kilometres of corridors running underground. Once again I took my foreign friends to visit it, taking both the regular tourist tour and then later a special walk through parts of the mine which are not open to tourists. Unfortunately they forgot to tell us that we could not bring any battery-operated cameras due to the methane- any spark from an electrical switch is a fire hazard down there. I suppose most of the time it was too dark to take photos anyway. All we had for light were our headlamps.

The photo above is from the regular tour, which is fantastic all by itself, but the off-trail tour really complements it. I heartily recommend it to anyone planning to visit Wieliczka.