Miner's Hotel - really

Sala mine museum hotel

On a recent BTV trip to Sweden for Orex Minerals, I discovered an unusual hotel....

There is no view from this hotel room....

Travellers today are presented with many choices.  If you are adventurous, there are numerous unusual hotels in exotic locations offering themed accommodation to meet specific interests. Some folks think it might be nice, to make their bed upon some ice.  The Hotel de Glace in Quebec is one of many “ice hotels” that rise up in cold countries when the temperature drops.  If scuba diving takes your breath away, Jules' Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, Florida presents a bed beneath the surface of the sea. Around the world other examples abound - you could sleep in a castle, a re-furbished prison, or an old railway car. 

A Miner’s Dream

For those engaged in the extractive industries, now there is a home away from home to truly call mine own. The world’s deepest bedroom provides a very quiet night’s sleep at the historic Sala silver mine at Salberget, Sweden, about an hour and a half from Stockholm. The hotel is part of a museum complex built around the celebrated underground mine which produced over 14.5 million ounces of silver during a lifetime that spanned the centuries. Your bedroom is 155 metres underground - a subterranean suite in one of the world’s best preserved mine settings.

The tourist version of the mining experience is cold, damp, and dark, but very beautiful; with mysterious winding galleries, vast caverns, and magical lakes. The mine suite, which opened in 2006, is comfortably located in one of the warmer chambers (18˚ C.). There is elevator access, and electricity. The furnishings are silver toned; the smooth rock walls warmed with chandeliers and candlesticks.

The mine suite is popular, fully booked on summer weekends, at a price of 4,000 SEK per night ($590.00 CAD). The package price for two includes a guided tour of the mine, a comfortable bed, late night dinner, and breakfast the following morning.

Historians believe mining likely began here in the middle ages. There is visible evidence of the ancient practice of breaking rock by means of fire. Written records date back to 1512. Production at Sala peaked during the mid-16th century when Queen Christina’s shaft reached a final depth of 257m and declined steadily from the early 17th century. In 1887 the state terminated its interests in the silver mine and handed it over to a private company. Mining ceased in 1908, making Sala the fifth-highest historic silver producer worldwide. Tumi Resources Ltd of Canada is currently conducting some exploration drilling nearby.


For more information you can contact the very helpful Marketing Director, Ms. Sofie Andersson at sofie.andersson@salasilvergruva.se., or check the website at http://www.salasilvergruva.se/en.

Sweet dreams, but don’t complain about the view!

Observations on Occupy Wall Street

I met a number of interesting people last week on a trip to New Zealand. One is Brent Cook -  a world class geologist, analyst and the editor of Exploration Insights.

We had a great time getting to know each other during a site visit to Glass Earth Gold's (TXS-V: GEL) projects, "down under".  You can see more of my photos here.  I was there for a B-TV  story and Brent was doing his own research into the company.  The BTV story will air later this month on BNN and other networks.

While travelling together to some strange and wonderful places (The Land of the Hobbits), we talked of many things.  This week Brent shared an article with me that he had written hitchiking on one of our mutually favourite writers today, Matt Taibbi.  It's an interesting look at the "why" behind Occupy Wall Street - and what we might do about it.

I happen to agree with what Taibbi and Cook had to say about that last November.


Occupy Wall Street™
(All rights reserved)
The nagging feeling that is beginning to be vocalized here in the US is of the
collective “we” beginning to comprehend that we are getting screwed by this
nebulous interconnected web of politicians, lobbyists, and bankers plus the
Federal Reserve and the Pentagon together with privileged executives running
select corporations who don't have to play by the same rules as the rest of us
because “they” live in an exclusive VIP world that is so far removed from our
reality that we don't even know where to start dismantling it 'cause we don't
even know how the financial engineering worked except that now we owe
China everything and we see that the military industrial complex, while
waving the flag and buying both political parties for their continued power and
material gain, gets trillions of our dollars to kill people we don’t even know
who are using weaponry “they” sold them-- at the same time our kids’ school
budgets are cut, again, and honest teachers have to use their own money to
buy pencils for students who then go home to a mainstream media (bought
and paid for by said nebulous web) that feeds us a 24/7 onslaught of hollow
“news” sound bites interspersed between sex, sports, and soaps brought to
you by the Handlers behind the Curtain of the current, and next, bought and
paid for lot of fools that tell us no real insight or truth, but offer the vagueguarantee that everything will be better—just vote for me; however, we are
slowly beginning to realize that the long-promised trickle down is really just
piss with the proof being that our average real wages have dropped and
dropped and dropped while the VIP group of well-connected rich keep getting
richer pushing our jobs to places where workers live in squalor on poverty
wages paid by polluting companies in a Communist country, and yet our
homes—the middle class American Dream™, are worth less than what we owe
so if we get laid off we get foreclosed on while the banks who engineered the
financial crisis with their leveraged instruments get bailed out to the tune of
trillions of dollars and the culprits walk away with millions in severance pay
(and no jail time) having borrowed from our future to fund their Now, but our
Now is different; we just graduated and can't get a job or afford the
staggering insurance costs from the companies that won’t cover certain
procedures because those profits havta go to the president of the insurance
company who gets a bigger and bigger bonus for every dollar he keeps from
some dying old lady so he can vacation in Saint Bart’s but take note folks,
even Warren Buffett agrees, we are all getting screwed and----Goddammit
we’re pissed off and powerless! ~ Taibibi

That rant is, in a nutshell, what I think is at the heart of OWS™. Matt Taibbi
introduces a valid point in this article: that it’s not necessarily about class warfare
against the 1%, or the notion of individuals getting rich. It’s about the cheating and
corruption that has become ingrained in the system and ultimately, I think, the
debasement of the American Dream™ by those who have been in power for far too long.


OWS™ is obviously a complicated movement; the people involved (some serious,
some slackers) have varied complaints, motives, and agendas. It has no spokesmen
or common goal that I can discern and has been largely hijacked by the media to
push its own agenda (right or left) – so, who knows what’s really what?
From my perspective, what seems to be lacking in the movement is the
acknowledgement that the collective “we” dug this hole ourselves (or at least jumped
right in) and we cannot affect any change without accepting responsibility for our
individual futures. Cross that Rubicon and maybe a real restructuring is possible.
I remind you all that the Comments section at the end of this letter is wide open to
your views (rather than mine), so opine away. ~ Cook


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