Elblag canal

I’d booked a boat trip along the Elblag Canal, as it’s got a unique feature I was keen to see.

The start of the journey could’ve been on the Norfolk Broads, with the flat landscape, and the channel opening up into wide, shallow lakes:

It was very peaceful, though rather chilly on top of the boat.  It was still early though, and by lunchtime it was another pleasantly warm day

After a few hour’s cruising we came to the canal’s unique feature:

Rather than having flights of locks, the canal has a series of inclined planes.  The boats sail onto a carriage on rails and are then winched up (or down) the slope by water power.

There are five of these on the canal, and we climbed them all in the space of a few hours.  There’s more detail on the canal on the Wikipedia page.

Once we got to the top, there was a wait of an hour or so before the bus to take us back to Elblag. There’s a small museum about the history of the canal, which I had a look around.  There’s some cleverness I’d not appreciated about how the carriages make sure the boat floats over its whole length when it re-enters the water.  It also gave chance to see a boat using the system from the shore:

It’s something I’d wanted to see for ages; I can’t remember where I first read about it – it was somewhere online, possibly Atlas Obscura.   At one stage I was considering doing this trip from there to Sicily, so I could go from a boat that goes on a train to a train that goes on a boat.

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I got to Gdansk (for the second time – but in daylight this time) about 5.  I was pretty tired, not having slept particularly well on the sleeper (and with the early wake-up at about 0530 for Gdansk)

After a quick nap I had a brief wander around the city. I’m not sure what my plans for tomorrow are yet, but it looks like a very pretty city: