Just 15 minutes up the road from the ostrich farm are the Cango Caves. We made it, once again, just in time for the tour to begin. Don’t know how we keep lucking out that way.
There are two types of tours at the caves. One, is the normal walking tour, and the other is the adventure tour. The difference is, on the adventure tour, you are taken to the end of the caves and then you get to crawl, shimmy, and squeeze your way through a labyrinth of tunnels to get back. Although normally this would have been the chosen tour for Kelsi and I, we had a limited time schedule, and with Kelsi’s busted knee, we were not about to crawl through any cave tunnels.
Either way, the caves were incredible. The first cavern that you enter is huge. It has stalactites and stalagmites, such as Cleopatra’s Needle, or the Giant Organ Pipes, that date back to 650 and 800 thousand years ago respectively. They are massive! Apparently the Cango caves holds the records for larges stalactite formations on earth. Very impressive.
In the first cavern, they used to set up full orchestras to play inside. The music would echo throughout the cave and the audience could either sit, or wander around, hearing the music from different areas. Unfortunately, the orchestra music had to be cancelled in the 90’s. Too many people were exploring the back caverns of the cave and vandalizing the area. They pulled off stalactites that were thousands of years old, and etched their names into walls. It’s sad when just a few people ruin something for so many others. I imagine the orchestras must have been incredible!
From there we continued on to the second cavern. There we came across the petrified weeping willow tree which was the oldest formation in the cave at 1.5million years old.
We continued deeper into 10 different rooms, until finally our tour came to an end. Each room had something amazing to see, and some sort of story behind it.
All in all, the tour was an hour and we were glad to have done it. We weren’t even sure that morning if we could fit in the caves and still drive all the way to Swellendam by evening. But the stop was worth it!