My third and final day in Bled was my birthday (happy birthday to me, happy bir...) and the weather was forecast to crap out later in the day. Not necessarily a problem as I had to return to Ljubljana at some point today anyway, and for now it was all good.

So once again I jumped on the bike, and with the legs still quite tired from yesterday, I headed only a few kilometres out of Bled to the neighbouring town of Radovljica. The town is just a town, but at its southern end is its old town centre which is a really cool little area.

Very cool indeed (though not in terms of temperature - it was seriously bloody warm today!).

The view looking out from the old town. I've seen worse :)

Radovljica is famous for its gingerbread, and is also home to a beekeeping museum hehe - very random. I didn't go in but I did buy some honey :) I've no idea what the planes are all about there.

With the dark stuff moving in, I headed back into Bled, returned the bike (cheers), and just made it back to my hostel as the heavens opened.

I stayed around for an hour until it cleared, and made a move back to the bus station. The following day involved about 15 hours of trains up to Krakow, leaving Ljubljana at 5:45am, hence my need to spend the night back in Ljubljana. So, back to the military barracks and the prison, and apparently they knew it was my birthday ;) Actually it was also the birthday of the hostel itself hehe, but I did get a free drink at the bar.

I wandered back into the city centre for dinner at this place with a life-sized cow stuck to its ceiling.

View out the train window in the middle of nowhere, Slovenia.

Seven hours later I arrived in Vienna, Austria. The station wasn't very central and I only had an hour's stopover, so there wasn't much point trying to go see anything. And besides I've been to Vienna before.

About six hours later again we crossed from Austria to the Czech Republic and finally into Poland, at which point immigration officers boarded the train, and the friendly Polish man with the sidearm here spent half an hour interrogating a Taiwanese chick sitting across from me hehe.

After a long day of trains I found my hostel, showered, and went straight to bed! The next day, my first of two in Krakow, had a dodgy weather forecast whereas the following day was due to be all good. With that being the case I decided to do an excursion outside of Krakow that I had been planning to do tomorrow since it wasn't weather dependent. So, a quick few shots of the main old town square, but all this had to wait.

And this was the excursion: the Wieliczka Salt Mine. The other main Krakow excursion is the Auschwitz concentration camp - a Nazi German concentration and extermination camp operated during World War II where over a million people lost their lives. However, I have already visited Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich, and I didn't see the need to visit another.

As for the salt mine, it's in the town of Wieliczka a short way south of Krakow, and continuously produced table salt from the 13th century all the way up until 2007 as one of the world's oldest salt mines. It is believed to be the world's 14th-oldest company still in operation. The tour starts with a descent down 64 flights of stairs; good for the knees.

At some 100 metres underground, the guide took us through a maze of mineshafts, with rock salt everywhere. The mine reaches a depth of 327 metres and is over 300km long - the tour covers only 3.5kms and reaches a depth of about 130 metres.

The mine's attractions for tourists include dozens of statues like this carved out of the rock salt, and various displays illustrating the life of the mine's workers back in the day. They even had a horse stable down there!

The display on the left there shows a fella with a torch burning off flammable gases in the mine that could otherwise cause major explosions. This was obviously one of the more dangerous jobs hehe, and often these chaps didn't make it home for supper. Given the dangers of the job, the miners did a lot of praying apparently, and so there is an entire chapel that has been carved out of the rock salt by the miners themselves - unreal! That's some bloody impressive work!

Many of the massive underground chambers needed supporting like this to prevent collapse.

After the two-hour tour some of us had a feed at this restaurant some 100 metres below the surface, before catching an elevator back to daylight. So that was something a bit different. The Wieliczka Salt Mine was placed on the original UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites back in 1978, so it's worth the visit :)

Back in Krakow I met up with a mate from the train yesterday and her chum who was already in town. At the recommendation of some other guy we met on the train we all went out for dinner at this central restaurant, the name of which translates to “peasant food” hahaha! It was pretty bloody good though! Video here of a guy (I think) singing nearby, with a woman's voice.

Tomorrow then, my one full day in Krakow, and my last full day of the trip.