Day 13 Oudtshoorn by Matt

It was a late start today, though a bright and crisp day as we emerged for breakfast. We sat down in the restaurant, with still no other guests, but they'd put us on a different table to mix things up a little. All the other takes were still made up, making us feel very special. The lovely staff plied us with tea, coffee and food and Matilda even gave Arushi a feather fringe to sew on a dress, apparently inspired by her friends purchases from Harrods!

Matilda made an ambitious itinerary for us, with many things to cover over the day, helpfully marking our destinations on a map and cheerily waved us off.

Our first stop was the Cango caves, discovered by a local farmer in 1780 and formed 20 million years ago when the sea levels retreated. Water dripping through the ancient limestone creates the otherworldly stalactites (from the top) and stalagmites (from the bottom), and cracks in the rock cause flow formations, the oldest of which was 1.5 million years old.

With 2 trip options, 'heritage' or 'adventure', a cardboard cutout with 3 holes, of decreasing size, allows you to test out the widths of the crawl throughs for the latter, the smallest of which Simi and I could barely squeeze! The cheery info lady convinced us we'd be fine on the 'adventure' despite my reservations and visions of claustrophobic long dark tunnels.

We entered the first and biggest chamber with our guide and fellow cavers. Until 1994 they held orchestra concerts on a platform built inside though sadly had to stop due to vandalism. We tested out the acoustics and admired the ethereal formations spot lit to dramatic effect, though the lights encourage growth of algae so are kept to a minimum.

We moved along the bricked path through another couple of chambers until we reached the end of the heritage trail, and adventure begins! From here it is allowed to touch the formations, as it's impossible to scramble through without doing so, and the path, handholds and footholds were smooth with use.

The first challenge was called lumbago walk, the longest tunnel about 10m, and although not a squeeze was still a tricky scramble and the increasing humidity made the smooth surfaces slick with moisture. The temperature in the caves also increased as we went deeper, which seemed contradictory. I made it through rather clumsily in a part crouch part crawl, relieved to pass into the next open chamber.

The next section began with a ladder climb then through an increasingly narrow section called the 'tunnel of love'. It was only after we all squeezed through that our guide told us that a few years ago a lady got stuck here and trapped herself and 30 others for 11 hours!! This did not help my confidence.

Then we came to Eashan's favourite bit, and my least favourite, the 'devils chimney'. With our guide patiently helping us through, Simi ahead of me and offering loads of encouragement, it was a vertical wriggle in which you had to contort yourself into the one position that worked, like one of those annoying puzzles in a Christmas cracker, or so it seemed to me. The kids, however, followed straight behind and seemed to pop up like champagne corks!

The last technical section, called 'the letterbox', required dragging yourself beneath the low ceiling and ended in a smooth slide down into a pile into front of everyone as gracefully as you could, in my case not very.

It was a long but easier walk back into open air, everyone, especially me, was very pleased with their achievements. Looking back it wasn't nearly as hard as I'd feared but they'd all been very supportive, especially Simi's encouraging words and Arushi's distracting chatter!

The next stop was the Ostrich Safari farm, which began on a tractor trailer. There are 3 types of ostrich, Zimbabwean, Kenyan and South African, in order of size. We first went through the Zimbabwean ostrich enclosure and were immediately surrounded by their long necks, intimidating beaks and huge eyes searching for the tubs of food we'd all purchased for the trip.

Our guide calmly explained their reproduction cycle, once a year up to 12 eggs delivered 1 every 2 days then incubated by both female and male for up to 45 days, whilst they poked their heads into the trailer causing shrieks of both fear and laughter! We then walked between enclosures of the SA ostrich, the only type they actually breed here and have about 2500. The others, including emus, are there for comparison.

After filming some very entertaining scenes of ostrichs reaching over our heads into the food tubs, we learnt about the history of farming them. My favourite fact was that they actually walk on their toes, of which they have 2 and can strike you dead with, and what looks like their knees are actually ankles, so they have very long feet. When they sit down they put their feet on the floor.

We drove back into Oudtshoorn and it reminded Simi and me very much of Alice Springs, with its wilderness location, red sands and tourist thoroughfare. We headed to the ostrich emporium, bought a few souvenirs, including ostrich chews for Luna, and settled into the ostrich leather sofas for a cup of tea and cake.

The last stop of the day was dinner at Buffelsdrift game lodge. Situated just outside the town, it's a conservation park with a small number of rehabilitated elephants, lions, cheetah and, my personal favourite, meerkats. It has a few lodges and a lovely restaurant overlooking a waterhole, in which we spotted 3 hippos. It was good food, well priced and best of all had other people eating there! To top it off we discovered they ran early morning meerkat safaris and had space the following day!!Read more