A Stone's Throw: Oudtshoorn: Crawling Through The Cango Caves

The view of the Indian Ocean from our room in the hostel.... Backpacking can be a hard life man!

Go crawl through some giant, half explored caves.
Ride an ostrich.
Play with baby cheetahs and leopards.
Dive with crocodiles.

My to-do list for the day read off like a Christmas letter praying to the most generous Santa ever for "awesomeness" incarnate under the tree. Granted, it also might have been a wee bit ambitious to think I could have squeezed it all into one day.

After our adventures along the coast in Tsitsikama, Tracie and I headed along the coast towards Wilderness. This quaint little beach town welcomed us with open arms and a torrent of rain, as we miserably ducked inside our hostel more soaked than we had hoped. This was no night for camping, so we bit the bullet and paid for two beds.

That night I did my research and came up with the aforementioned laundry-list of dreams to tick off my list the next day. Oudtshoorn, a dusty little Afrikaans-speaking town about an hour from the coast, had some really great attractions. Like most things I plan, it didn't go quite the way I had mapped it out in my head...

We got a late start after agreeing to give a couple fellow backpackers a lift out there with us (one was an Australian who had seen a man next to him eaten by a bull shark while swimming only a few days earlier... needless to say he could have used a pick-me-up!), and after dropping them off in town for a festival, Tracie and I finally made it to the caves (albeit, just in time to wait for another half hour for the actual tour to start).

Our tour finally started and we were just absolutely floored by these beautiful caves! They were huge and so beautiful, it was like being inside a dripped wax sculpture the size of a cathedral. The caves led through twisting passageways, up sheer faces and through tiny crevasses barely large enough for a person to fit through. The air was hot and muggy, and got worse the deeper went. Not at all a place for those with even mild claustrophobia.

Our 90 minute tour ended up lasting over 2.5 hours thanks to some slow moving tourists who got stuck in a tight spot called, "The Postbox." So by the time we crawled out of the caves, hot and sweaty, we were WAY over the time we had scheduled for the caves and it was pretty obvious that ostrich riding was out of the picture for the day, much less attempting to play with cheetah cubs!

So, Tracie and I hopped in our car and zipped back into town to enjoy the festival. We picked up some Kudu sausage and strolled through the quaint little town munching on greasy game meat until we met up with our friends whom we had dropped of, at the beer garden just as the sun began its last descent.

It had been a long day, and even though I was a little devastated that my plans hadn't all worked out, we all decided to head back to our hostel on the coast for the night. There's always tomorrow to go riding giant pre-historic looking birds and play with jungle cats!