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The principal point of access to the river gorge is OJCOW , 25km from Krakow (and served by most - but not all - Krakow-Olkusz buses), the national park's only village and filled to bursting with local school groups in season. Developed as a low-key health resort in the mid-nineteenth century, it's a delightful village, with wooden houses straggling along a valley floor framed by deciduous forest and craggy limestone cliffs. Just beyond the car park where buses stop is a small natural history museum (mid-May to mid-Nov Tues-Sun 9am-4.30pm; mid-Nov to mid-May Tues-Fri 8am-3pm; 2zl), where you'll find mammoth tusks, the jaws of prehistoric cave bears, and a modest collection of stuffed local fauna. Immediately beyond is the PTTK regional museum (Mon-Fri 9am-3pm; 2zl), located above the Ojcow post office, which contains prints of the village as it looked in the nineteenth century, and a corner stacked with local folk costumes, notable for the extravagantly embroidered and beaded women's jackets. Overlooking the village to the north is a fine, ruined castle (April-Oct Tues-Sun 10am-4.45pm, stays open later at the height of summer; 1.50zl), the southern extremity of the Szlak Orlich Gniazd and an evocative place in the twilight hours, circled by squadrons of bats. There's not much of the castle left, apart from two of the original fourteenth-century towers, the main gate entrance and the walls of the castle chapel. There are excellent views over the winding valley, and a path through the woods which leads up to the Zlota Gora campsite and restaurant. A few hundred metres north up the valley from Ojcow castle is the curious spectacle of the Kaplica na Wodzie (Wooden Chapel) straddling the river on brick piles. This odd site neatly circumvented a nineteenth-century tsarist edict forbidding religious structures to be built "on solid ground", part of a strategy to subdue the intransigently nationalist Catholic Church. These days, it's only open for visits between Masses on Sundays. Heading south from the village takes you through a small gorge lined with strange rock formations, most famous of which, about 15 minutes out from the village, is the Krakowska Brama (Krakow Gate), a pair of rocks which seem to form a huge portal leading to a side valley. Before reaching the Krakowska Brama you may well be enticed uphill to the right by a (black-waymarked) path to the Jaskinia Lokietka (Lokietka Cave; late April to mid-Nov: daily 9.30am-4.30pm; 5zl), some thirty minutes' distant, the largest of a sequence of chambers burrowing into the cliffs outside Ojcow. According to legend it was here that King Wladyslaw the Short was hidden and protected by loyal local peasants following King Wenceslas of Bohemia's invasion in the early fourteenth century. Around 250m long, the rather featureless illuminated cave is a bit of a let-down if you've come expecting spectacular stone and ice formations. Individual travellers will have to wait to join a guided group before being allowed inside.
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