I set my alarm for 7.30am which is pretty early for someone who didn’t get to her boat until gone 10pm but I needed to run over to the Carrefour for bread for breakfast and then, having eaten it, I needed to walk 11 minutes down the road to get the bus to the salt mines. I had a ticket for the Tourist Tour at 10am, having heard that it’s one of those places you should get to early.

Well, the mine is pretty incredible. We were led through three levels over an hour and a half but there are actually a lot more levels and we only got to about half its total depth. We saw passages and chambers and salt lakes, bits of old machinery, public licking spots, salt sculptures, all sorts. We had a couple of stops on the way down – there’s a chamber with a shop and cafe two-thirds of the way through where we lost “the mother”, who turned out to be “Irene’s mother” who’d wandered on with the English-speaking group in front of us. At the end, we were left in a big red-lit chamber to find out own way out, which meant that we could shop or go to the underground restaurant or to the museum or just queue for the elevator. I assumed the elevator was near the queue but we had probably at least another kilometre of striding through more passageways, getting mixed up with groups going in at least two other directions until we reached the lift – not the one our tour guide had pointed at on the way down, either. Despite them counting us through the gate, there were 8 too many to fit in the elevator so the guide who’d brought us had to wait. At the top was a shop but after I’d dithered over what to buy, if anything, the card system went down. Turned out it went down all over the complex, so I had to get some cash out right back at the beginning of the tour to buy some salt and an ice cream and I bet that ATM went dry pretty quickly, since it’s right next to the ticket desks and their card machines weren’t working either.

I’d arrived at the mining town not long after 9am and it was 2.30pm by the time I got back to Krakow, so I headed straight for Wawel Castle, which is almost right opposite my boat. It’s a natural limestone hill which has had fortifications on it for hundreds of years. You can just wander around and look at everything but you can also book tours. I went for the Between the Walls tour, which was pretty short but at least got me out of the sun, which took me below ground into the medieval bit of the walls and into the gap between the inner and outer defensive walls, which featured “how defensive walls work”, “how Wawel Hill came to be”, “how the dinosaur died out” and “the dragon under the castle”. By the time I emerged into the sun again, it was a little less sunny and a bit more cloudy and I was running out of energy. I made my way back down the other side of the hill, crossed the river and finally ate the lunch I’d been carrying around all day. Then I lay on my bunk for a while as the rain hammered down outside and when it was finished, I ran across the road to the Carrefour for some chocolate and some juice for breakfast and decided, since it was dry and pretty warm, I’d walk down the river to look at Wawel Hill in the dark and then cross the river and walk along the other side and look for the dragon (which does not photograph well in the dark). So that’s what I did.

Tomorrow’s job is to get that dragon in daylight and to get up to the Old Square. I have more time than I thought before I have to get back to the airport so I don’t have to get up too early and I already have the bread for tomorrow’s breakfast so I can have a slightly lazier morning than I had today.