My tourist guide, Hayley, had a choice of two things to do today, visit the Auschwitz Concentration Camps or the Wieliczka Salt Mine. Although visiting the concentration camps would have been a way to honour those murdered there and to keep their memory alive, I didn't feel in the right frame of mind for something that I knew would be very emotionally disturbing, so took the easy way out and decided on the salt mine.

On entering the mine I wondered whether I'd made a bad choice. I hadn't considered that a salt mine would be underground and that underground is synonymous with claustrophobia. Walking down the 378 steps of the narrow timber staircase made me feel very anxious, but I persevered and eventually we arrived at an open area. The first thing that struck me was the colour of the salt walls…it was a grimly dark grey colour, not white like I imagined it would be.

The workings of the mine where portrayed by life size figures of workers hard at work with picks and shovels and horses pulling wooden carts along the now rusty rail tracks. The mine is filled with incredible salt carvings and statues, many of them religious, created by the miners. One of the chapels, which was at least the size of the Kingaroy Town Hall, has an amazing reproduction of da Vinci's The Last Supper carved into the salt wall, and the story of Jesus' life depicted in a series of mural carvings in the wall.

The tour was very unique and interesting but I was very pleased when we arrived back on the surface.

Once back at the hostel we changed and headed off to the church to listen to the chamber music. What a treat…we were seated on lovely timber pews on an uneven stone floor, with amazing music reverberating around the lovely old building…quite magical.

I decided that as it was so cold, and I'd never tasted it, that we should try to find somewhere selling mulled wine. We found a very flash restaurant (well it had white tablecloths) and indicated that we didn't need to eat but were after some mulled wine. I'm not sure whether they weren't happy that we weren't eating or what, but the wine was terrible, nothing like I imagined it would be. We both counted thirteen cloves in our small cup of wine…it was too overpowering…Hayley couldn't even finish hers. I was very disappointed to say the least, and any mulled wine recipes I've found since, has only had between four and ten cloves for a 750ml bottle of wine.