From the Wilderness into the Caves
Wilderness, a small village on the coast. It almost feels like you are in Austria.
We find a good place to camp, high up in the hills, watching over the town. We stay a few days before we start our trip to the Cango Caves.
Cango Caves: (Wikipedia)
The Cango Caves are located in Precambrian limestones at the foothills of the Swartberg range near the town of Oudtshoorn, in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The principal cave is one of the country’s finest, and best known, caves. Although the extensive system of tunnels and chambers go on for over four kilometres, only about a quarter of this is open to visitors, who may proceed into the cave only in groups supervised by a guide.
The caves were discovered in 1780 by a local farmer named Jacobus Van Zyl. The chamber he first was lowered down into is as long as a football field.
The cave’s first official guide is purported to have walked 29 hours to find the end of the caves in 1898. When there, he is said to have calculated that he was 25 km from the entrance, and 275 m underground; his route apparently followed an underground river. So far, they are finding more and more caves to support this story.