Day 15: Molde's Mine!

A wonderfully different high mountain, under ground, cave, boat tour. Sounds strange but was beautiful and educational. They mine marble and have been for over a century with incredible new technology these days to increase production, safety and access while minimizing cost.  That said, they're still struggling for 2 key reasons: 

1. The marble is ground down into limestone (both calcium carbonate) to be used for glossy paper, like National Geographic or photo paper. However, with the radical decrease in paper use due to the internet, volume is dropping like a rock (pun intended).

2. The other user of this beautiful and pure marble is for slabs, sculptures and furniture. Due to its purity, this marble requires diamond bits to cut, whereas Italian marble is much softer and they can use water jets. So, costs are increasing dramatically and competitors undercut their price.  Selling the value of higher quality marble hasn't yielded increased volume. 

As a result, they've expanded to running data centers... now they're data mining alongside their marble mining... (I thought that was a nice play on words).

Enjoy the beauty of our cave boat tour. 

The giant tour bus can fit into these caves since they're also used for giant mining trucks. 
Hard hats and life preservers at the same time! 
The key move was installing bulbs with rotating colors..oooh...
Rickety but functional boats. 
Great reflections. Water was 25 feet deep yet clear as (fill in your favorite word for clarity) and it beats that.  
Making statues from the marble. 
Ceilings were low, but that didn't stop inattentive "standers" from almost getting conked out. 
Purity from this 8.7ph water was supposed to be healthful. Everyone had to drink the H2O cool aid.
Different colored marble with light shining through some thinner slabs. 

Looking directly down into the 25 foot depth... and cool blue!

The afternoon included treadmill, weights, jacuzzi in the pouring rain and a lovely dinner and show...2 rainbows were part of the show. 

Visible on the very right side of this photo is a starting rainbow. 
Dinner included this beef en croute. We ordered this at the Italian restaurant from the French restaurant, since they all share a kitchen. That's a free cruise ship hack for those who want what they want...
The dinner time rainbow was also a treat that's 3 rainbows in 24 hours. 



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