A journey through the Cango Caves, South Africa's first tourist attraction, is filled with breathtaking formations and historical significance dating back 80,000 years.

It's time for a day trip to South Africa's first tourist attraction, the Cango Caves.

The mysterious limestone chambers full of glistening stalactites and stalagmites and strange formations proved irresistible to people in the early 1800s, even though the entry fee was five rixdollars (the equivalent of R2,300 today).

Tourists came from all over the world and despite the massive entry fee - or maybe because of it - they were a destructive lot.

So many hacked off stalactites and dripstone formations as souvenirs and carved their names on walls and limestone pillars, that in 1820 Lord Charles Somerset passed the country's first environmental laws to protect the delicate cave ecology.

The Cango Caves also boasted South Africa's first tour guide - Johnnie van Wassenaar - who helped open many side-chambers between 1891 and 1934.

Popular legend has it that a man called Jacobus van Zyl "discovered" the caves in 1780 after being alerted to them by a herder, Klaas Windvogel, who stumbled across a great hole while looking for lost livestock. Lowered down by rawhide thongs, Van Zyl was the first in unknown centuries to see the initial chamber, the size of a rugby field, now named for...