“this is what my evil lair is going to look like. But with more computers and stuff”

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Warsaw – Krakow

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After exiting pretty quickly from the My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding campsite**, we made our way out of Warsaw to the only other major place in Poland, Krakow.
Warsaw, whilst we didn’t see much of it, was a lot more built up than I was expecting. Whilst it was a little ‘dusty’ shall we say, it had a lot of skyscrapers and shiny buildings. Meg managed to negotiate us out without too much problems, and we settled in for what we knew would be at least a 5 or 6 hour drive.

After a little bit of driving around Krakow in the early evening we tried to find these famous salt mines (something I am very averse to, and a bit aggrieved that the sat nav did not include Poland), but we were limited to a road atlas, an ipad with the hotel map saved, a lonely planet centre of town map, and a compass on the iphone. It took a lot for Meg to co-ordinate all of these with me constantly shouting out street names and ‘left, right or straight on. LEFT, RIGHT or STRAIGHT ON’…

However, the Salt Mines were well worth the mucking around trying to find. I am not sure if I have been over enthusiastic with places in this blog, or perhaps the complete opposite, but they genuinely were awesome. It was huge. We saw 1% of the tunnels and caverns, and together they stretched 400km. There is something just difficult to comprehend about these huge halls/atriums/open spaces that had been hand cut out of the rock 130m underground over a few hundred years. At one point Meg was “we must be finishing soon. They’ve clearly shown us all their good stuff”, yet we kept going from one massive space to another. I was like a small boy in a toy shop – literally too much to take in & comprehend about the scale, the depth, the hand carvings, how many people must have worked down here over a 400 year period….I’m going to stop. I am getting carried away. Hopefully, if you ever go to visit you’ll not be like, “err, really Jon. You really thought it was all that?”

In the early evening, we had a wander into Krakow as this seems to be the way we’re seeing these towns at the moment. However, Krakow was a lot livelier than Tallin and Riga. It had a great central square, a massive castle, and everyone was out eating drinking and generally being tourists. Even though a lot of the old buildings needed a lick of paint, it just seemed to ‘work’ in Krakow. I think I could live here for a little while.

It was agreed we’d see some more in the morning, so that was the only excuse I needed to head back and catch some Olympics. If there’s a British athlete in the semi or final, then I am all over it. I never thought 10m syncronised diving could be that engaging…

 

 

** - the reason I say this, is that the place was packed full of English Mercedes, Range Rovers, BMWs, and all parked next to caravans. Upon closer googling inspection there were in fact a lot of English cars brought into Poland 5-10 years ago (apparently cheaper/more reliable 2nd hand), but it has recently been outlawed, so this assumption/slight slandering is purely based upon the reasoning that very few people with that apparent wealth would choose to stay at a campsite, under a motorway bridge, in the middle of Warsaw?