The barriers of language and a great deal of rock, all taken with a large pinch of salt

The Foreign Service Institute, which trains US diplomats, has produced a list of the world's languages ranked in order of difficulty for English speakers to learn. Polish, along with the languages of the three Baltic States is among the hardest only being beaten by Arabic, Korean, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. The use of diacritics means the Polish alphabet has 32 letters which complicates things. Road signs are a constant source of wonder.

It really isn't easy

This was all brought home to me in the village of Tarczyn where we had overnighted. A quick stroll to the local pharmacy the following morning brought us into contact with an old boy who was fascinated by the spaniels and began asking questions in Polish. Had this been France, Spain, Italy or a number of other countries, I might have picked up the odd word and understood the gist of what he was saying. But this time I was completely stumped. It was only after a great deal of pantomiming that I realised he was asking me how much a Springer Spaniel puppy would cost. Bizarrely he wanted to know in US dollars. Eventually I wrote the figure on the notepad app of my phone to show him before we shook hands and parted. 

Heading south on the S7 motorway, it will be nice when it's finished, we arrived in the city of Kielce, dropping  anchor in a car park next to a former limestone quarry which has been turned into a geological park. A walkway has been constructed and we wandered round with the Spaniels admiring the various textures and colours in the towering rock face. We were also taken by the amphitheatre with its retractable roof, built into the side of a hill and used for numerous artistic performances and festivals. 

A row of busts......

The next morning we plotted a course through the park to the old part of the city. On the way we were intrigued by an eclectic collection of bronze busts alongside the path, probably 30 or 40 in all. It seemed to be a celebration of the performing arts with poets, composers, musicians and painters among the busts created by a variety of sculptors. Among notable Polish figures we also spotted Salvador Dali. Marc Chagall, Leonard Bernstein, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix. 

....one of which is of a great guitarist

The high point of the walk was the summer residence of the Bishops of Kraków, which towered over the city, complete with an ornate formal garden in the 17th century Italian style. The building itself is a mixture of Polish and Italian architecture, a marriage that seems to work well. In Kielce, as elsewhere in Poland, it is impossible to escape the brutalities the country has suffered in the past. The city was the centre of Polish resistance to the German occupation and the hills around it were used by partisans to harass the invaders. Consequently many of the city's inhabitants lost their lives. Like other Polish cities the local Jews were herded into  ghetto and here were joined by Jews transported from other parts of the country. In 1942 the ghetto was liquidated and the survivors sent off to be gassed in Treblinka.

Katyn is seared deeply into Polish history

The country lost a generation of academics and military officers

Another atrocity was commemorated at a memorial, not far from where we were parked. In April and May 1940, some 22,000 Polish military officers and academics were brutally murdered by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in the forest of Katyn in Russia. For the next 50 years the USSR denied it had anything to do with it, finally acknowledging its responsibility in 1990 and blaming it all on Stalin. The memorial lists the names of dozens of inhabitants of Kielce who were among the dead, many of them professors and academics.

With a pretty good road ahead of us we decide to push on to Kraków where we arrived late in the afternoon. As with Warsaw we had managed to find a small car park, complete with 24 hour security, within a short distance of the old town. We took the Spaniels down to the River Vistula, the very same waterway that had provided us with our first dog walk in the Polish capital. On our way back to the van we passed the New Jewish Cemetery, an 11 acre burial ground begun in 1809 and containing some 10,000 tombs. It was desecrated by the Germans during the occupation but has been lovingly restored since the end of the war. Two other Jewish cemeteries, created in the 1920s and 30s were completely destroyed when they were utilised as the site for the notorious Kraków-Plasźow concentration camp.

The New Jewish Cemetery reminded me of Highgate

The one faint ray of light in the city in this era of darkness was an industrialist named Oscar

It is difficult to escape Schindler references in Kraków

Schindler. It is impossible to escape Schindler in Kraków. On our walk with the pups this morning along the Planty, the strip of parkland that follows the line of the former defences of the old city, we discovered the name of  the Australian writer Thomas Keneally on a park bench, the man whose fictionalised novel of Schindler's life became the basis for Stephen Spielberg's film, Schindler's List. Schindler's enamel factory, which still stands in Kraców, employed over a thousand Jews whom he protected from deportation and certain death. 

Kraków's Cloth Hall is stunning

Kraków is much more of a tourist magnet than Warsaw. The medieval market place with its ornate cloth hall in the centre is one of the largest in Europe and the streets of the old town are well worth a stroll. Rattling trams vie with white carriages, drawn by ornately decorated horses ferrying tourists around the streets. We were recommended to try an obwarzanka, a jumbo pretzel-type product, being sold at a number of stalls around the city but, I regret to say, we found it rather dry. But, all in all we were very taken with the place and wished we had more time to explore.

A civilised way of seeing the city

Salt statues are a feature of the mine

Our final stop of the day was the small town of Wieliczka which boasts one of the world's oldest salt mines where production started in the 13th century. We left the spaniels in the van and spent a couple of hours walking though a fraction of the 178 miles of tunnels created out of solid rock salt. On the way we passed underground lakes, and statues carved out of salt. One of these was of St Adjutor who is, apparently, the patron saint of drowned people. Appropriately he was standing in a lake. My first thought was that if saints were all they are cracked up to be, he would have saved them from drowning in the first place. 

The piece de la resistance was the stunning St Kinga's chapel, hundreds of feet down in the mine and carved out of the salt. Even in mid-October the car park was packed with coaches from Poland and beyond and tour groups busily negotiating the tourist tat stalls and descending the 200 feet into the ground. 

St Kinga's chapel, 100 metres underground, can be hired for weddings

Tonight we have broken with tradition and are in a paid camping area, albeit our only companion is a German motorhome a few yards away. Tomorrow we head south for what will probably be our last night in Poland before we cross the border into Slovakia. Poland has made quite an impression on us and we have decided we must put it on our list for a future visit. Hopefully we may be able to say hello and goodbye in Polish by then. 

Images of Kraków

St Mary's Tower.  

A short break in the Market Square

Many of Kraków's buildings survived the war

The Planty is a great dog walk