Planning your own trip to South Africa? Read more about my Garden Route itinerary here.

While in Oudtshoorn, South Africa, I stop by the Cango Caves — an impressive series of caverns located about 30 minutes outside of town.

Tours depart every hour on the hour. I do not purchase a ticket in advance because I’m there in the off season, but during busier months the website suggests it’s a good idea to purchase ahead of time to avoid waiting.

There’s about 4 kilometers of caves in total, only about a quarter of which are open to the public. They offer two kinds of tours: the Heritage Tour, which is the standard option — it takes one hour and costs around $8 USD per adult. Then there’s the Adventure Tour, which takes about 90 minutes and costs around $10 per adult (requires a certain level of physical fitness, which is to say you crawl through several narrow passages… or so I’m told). I did the Heritage tour but I’d love to hear from anyone who’s done the Adventure one to find out how different it is.

We gather inside the main entrance as a guide splits our large group into two, with another guide taking the second group. Even split in half there are a lot of people so it’s hard to stand close enough to hear all of the guided commentary.

They’ve put money and effort into building infrastructure within the caves, as evidenced by these stairs below:

This is the largest cavern in the whole place — it’s called Van Zyl’s Hall. Isn’t it breathtaking?

We’re given several minutes here to walk around and take photos. At one point, our guide gathers us to turn off the lights so that we may experience total darkness — the same conditions under which a local farmer first discovered this cave in 1780. Over the years musical events used to take place here, but visitors abused the access by tearing off small stalactites that had taken MILLENNIA to form. So nowadays the only way to visit the caves is on a guided tour.

How impressive is this stalagmite? (Geology refresher course: stalagmites grow up from a cave’s ground, while stalactites grow down from a cave’s ceiling. I have to look it up every time… my brain does not want to remember that info.) This one is called Cleopatra’s Needle and it’s believed to have been forming for over 150,000 years. It’s hard to even wrap my mind around that time frame.

This next portion of the cave is really cool — it’s called Botha’s Hall. Some of these formations are over 500,000 years old. To put that in context, dinosaurs roamed the earth 65 million years ago. These formations started a half-million years ago. Our own lives are barely a blip on that timeline!

We press on, going further into the caverns:

This one has neat lighting — it’s called the Rainbow Chamber. There are rock formations here that sort of look like a devil and an open Bible.

We turn around and return the way we came, passing one more time through Van Zyl’s magnificent hall:

For under $10, I could not recommend this tour more. It’s very neat and easily worth an hour of your time if you’re traveling along the Garden Route in South Africa.

For more cave photos, check out this tour of the Kelly Hill Caves on Kangaroo Island in Australia from my travels two years ago!