Sunday, August 25

We drove on to Idrija.  We stayed in a humble little room over a bar (TripAdvisor) some 6 km out of town, up a hill.  As we were getting ready to go to sleep, a bunch of people musicians arrived to the bar below, with an accordion.

Through all of this, we were continually chatting with our friends who went to Hisa Franko with us:

Received 25 Aug, 2019 22:01:24 Dave Oppenheim
The Wi-Fi here is called TP-LINK. I wonder if the admin login is default too. No Wi-Fi password needed.   Also, here they use no top sheet. The duvet is too hot and using nothing is too cold. A sheet would have been just right.

Received 25 Aug, 2019 22:01:49 Emmett
Byos

Received 25 Aug, 2019 22:02:01 Dave Oppenheim
And there are mosquitoes.

Received 25 Aug, 2019 22:02:50 Emmett
Our airbnb host is ridiculous

Sent 25 Aug, 2019 22:02:52 Hisa frankers
and a tuba

Received 25 Aug, 2019 22:03:23 Emmett
Oh you play the tuba to scare off the mosquitos

If Ibn Battuta had had chat, he would never have got anything written.  Or maybe much more.

Monday, August 26

Several years ago, on the way back from NAMM, we attempted to go to New Idria, an abandoned mercury mine east of Hollister.  We never reached it, there was an impassable pile of asbestos dust.  Idrija is what that was named after, which had the second largest mercury mine in Europe (after Almaden in Spain, which another mine in the Bay Area was also named after).  The mine in Idrija closed down about 20 years ago, but it is of course open for tours.  Like the tour of the silver mine in Potosi, we were issued protective gear (this time only a jacket and a hard hat).  Unlike that tour, this mine was easy to walk through standing all the way up, and there were no workers scurrying by as we explored.  It was interesting to see deposits on the walls of cinnabar (mercury ore), and tiny inclusions in the rock of liquid mercury.

Our guide had backpacked through South America around 2000 but did not go into the mines at Potosí.

The part of El Tío is played here by Prekmandlc the dwarf.

Then we went to another building several blocks away, the smelter.  It had a fairly comprehensive museum detailing all the things mercury is used for, and showing the history of the Idrija mine.  We walked up into the smelter, though there really wasn’t much left to see.  

The guide at the smelter was funny, though.  When you meet somebody in a faraway land, you speak slowly, but you also listen slowly, and you aren’t parsing for irony and zingers the way you listen to Emmett.  So he got the drop on me at first.  I don’t remember the conversation — another characteristic of witty talk — they must have had wall-to-wall secretaries at the story conferences for “Your Show Of Shows”.

After a bite of lunch featuring Idrija’s signature lamb dumplings, we went to the museum and saw many historical exhibits, including several showing Idrija’s history as a center for lace-making.  Apparently lace was an industry which permitted money laundering from the mining industry.  It also was Women’s Work.  Since the mines closed, gender became redundant, and now boys do lacework, too.  One of the guides said that boys even win some lace competition but I can’t find evidence for this on the merciful Internet, p.b.u.www.

We arranged with the museum guy to meet us at a historic water wheel a few blocks across town.  We tried to drive there.  Google sent us around tight curves and down a bike lane.  Fortunately nobody seemed to care.  The water wheel was immense — 10 meters in diameter.  It had been used to pump water out of the mine.

We drove a short distance away to “Wild Lake”, a curious tiny lake by the side of the road.  The curious part was that it was in a very small box canyon, with a fault at the far end.  And beneath the fault, there was an underground cave, full of water.  We would frequently see ripples from the cave on the surface of the lake.  A sign next to the lake showed the various dives into the cave which have happened, people have gone quite deep into it.

We had dinner at the Hotel Jozef Restaurant, and went back to our little room.  I like Hotel Jozef.  Don’t be put off by the second floor view of the Hip Hop Petrol station — HJ manages to avoid most “view restaurant” tropes, like high prices and tiny creative portions.  The salmon came with carrots, not broccoli (as was on the menu) because they hadn’t any broccoli. Our guide at the mercury mine told us this afternoon that nobody here grows carrots because they pick up mercury from the tailings.  Hopefully these carrots came from upstream.