Visit Krakow & the Old Town – Part 2

Part 1 of the Visit Krakow Blog posts mentioned a couple of reasons why we decided to visit this Polish town. Part 1 also includes picture galleries from our wandering around the Old Town and our trip to Oskar Schindlers factory.

I suspect most folk who head to Krakow do plenty of walking, it’s that kind of a place.

Knowing that was going to be the case we packed accordingly including making sure we had suitable footwear, which made good sense as our next trip included more wandering around the Old Town, walking to the central train station and then taking a train out to the incredible Salt Mines at Wieliczka.

What about the weather?

In the week prior to our trip temperatures in Krakow had been down around -9c or so with a reasonable amount of snow, whilst we don’t mind the cold we hoped it wouldn’t snow and that for the most part it would be dry.

It’s not often the weather is wrong, more so it can be a case of the wrong clothing, but it’s true to say had we been down at the near double digit minus temperatures then taking our big and super warm coats wouldn’t have been ideal given their bulk and our preference to travel pretty light.

As it turned out the weather was good, relatively mild and with temperatures pretty similar to the UK. We had just a little rain whist there and even then that was just light drizzle, so all in all weather conditions were pretty ideal for February walking. The photographs in the first picture gallery are from our morning walk to Krakow’s main rail station.

Ticketing for rail travel is straighforward (and pretty cheap), with multiple purchase options: self service machines on the platform, a manned ticket office or purchase on the train, and it was the onboard purchase option that we chose and that we opted to use on each occasion we took the train.

We did purchase our ‘tour’ tickets for our visits to the Salt Mine and Auschwitz online and used the helpful hotel staff to print them off for us.

Picture gallery 1

Pictures in this set are from our walk to the the railway station. Clicking on any of the images below will open a picture gallery that can be clicked or scrolled through.

Krakow

Wielicza Salt Mines

There are some things in life that you really have to experience to appreciate the full effect – sometimes it means doing things or seeing things for real.

As good as photographs, videos, virtual tours etc are sometimes they just can’t quite capture the magnificence, grandeur or scale of a place – there are so many places I can think of that have come into that cactegory and our visit to the Wielicza Salt Mines is one of those.

It’s more than impressive and no surprise that the mines are Unesco listed with excavations having been carried out on the site for over 700 years.

It’s pretty deep

There are actually nine seperate levels in the mine that go down as deep as over 1,000 ft, but for a variety of reasons a visit to the mines doesnt allow you to decend to the deepest point but it does allow visitors to go down to the 443 ft level … which is still quite a way below ground.

Quite extraordinary

Over the many centuries that salt has been mined, the subterranean chambers have been carved and decorated by the mine workers – even to the point of making vast cathedral like chapels with carvings of scenes from the New Testament – it really is staggering.

Just about everything is carved from salt, even the grand ornate looking staircases – there plenty of online information and you can find out more at this link.

It’s a popular place, and in fact its one of the most popular visitor attarctions in Poland. It really is worth a visit and is only about 40 minutes or so from Krakow on the train.

Picture gallery 2

This second set of pictures features the Salt Mine at Wielicza. Clicking on any of the images below will open a picture gallery that can be clacked or scrolled through.