Radiac's South African Adventure, Part 3

• 18th October 2004 at 23:14

African Adventure Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

Day Three - Sunday 17th October

Another ludicrously early morning. Had to wake up at 7.30 (6.30 UK time) so that I'd be ready for breakfast. Food was conventional, but the juice was most disappointing. Having checked out, we set off for Sun City, which is right next to the Pilanesburg national park, sitting in between a couple of the mountains, and so just around the corner from where we were staying.

"Oooh, I lived in Johannesburg for a couple of years! Make him take you to Sun City, it's fantastic!", said the woman at the place I bought my plane tickets.

Well, it was certainly different. We paid a small entrance fee, and, full of anticipation, parked the car and rode the Sky Train into the city.

Well, 'city' is the wrong word really. The legend goes something like thousands of years ago, a people came to Pilanesburg and created a city. Then the volcanoes trashed it, the people fled, and it was up to the Sun corporation (no, I doubt there's any relation between them and the people who wrote Java) to clear the vegetation and sort it out ready for the tourists. This legend was, in fact, invented by the Sun corporation, and it's actually just a holiday resort, built in the 1980s, along with it's 'Sky Train' and curious 80s architecture. In the 1980s, gambling was illegal in this country apart from in the homelands (areas granted sham self-rule by the government to appease the natives), and since Sun City was one of these, it was incredibly popular. I got the impression that since the legalisation of gambling, it has struggled a bit.

But having said all of that, it really is a lovely place. Beautiful surroundings, friendly people, lots to do, and the best orange juice I have ever had. But more about that later. The resort was quite spread out; there were 4 or so hotels, an 'entertainment' centre (read eating, drinking and gambling), a water park thing with slides and stuff (that we never actually found), and a large lake with various outdoors water-based activities.

When we arrived we went into the entertainment centre and did a spot of gambling. Well, we played the one-armed bandits. I started off with 40 rand on my card, almost immediately winning over 20 rand. I promptly lost it all, put in another 20 in an attempt to win my money back, and I did, with interest - at one point I was up to 70 rand! Woo! But Paul wasn't finished, so I kept playing and ended up with 40 again. At that point I decided to cash out, and I got my 40 rand back - approximately £4. Hey big spender...

Some of the gambling floor, slightly blurrier than in real life

After the gambling binge, we went for a drink, and then decided it would be a neat idea to figure out what else you could do at this place if you had forgotten your swimming stuff. We had heard that the palace gardens were pretty good, so headed off in that direction. Paul then decided that it would be the perfect opportunity to have a diabetic sugar low, so I got him high on Sprite and pizza, then sent him off to the car to shoot up with some insulin.

As an aside to those of you who remember the days of my Sprite addiction, I'm finding it extremely hard here, and have given in to the urge more than once. Everywhere you go is selling Sprite, or giving you Sprite and then asking for money and tips, or waving Sprite at you from behind the little glass doors of the millions of vending machines. I haven't quote broken the 5/day mark yet, but there's plenty of time for that.

So, once I had packed Paul off, I found that I was thirsty. It being about 11am and me having already drunk 3 Sprites, I decided to see what else there was to drink in this country, and found my new favourite shop ever. Apart from play - don't worry guys, I won't abandon you. This shop is called Juicy Lucy (told you shops in SA have great names), and it sells juice. Such very, very good juice. They have lots of different fruits, but I went straight for orange. And it was good. I had a 500ml glass of it, and I must say that I haven't ever had any juice as good before, ever. And that includes Tropicana. If anyone from Juicy Lucy is reading this and thinking of opening stores in Bath and Sevenoaks, you can't fail, just as play about their business model.

Upon Paul's return, we set off for the Sun City palace and gardens. The palace is actually a hotel, but we didn't realise this until we were there. It would have been nice to have had a map of Sun City, because then we would have understood why there are busses to take you everywhere. Or it would have been nice if they had given us a bit of paper explaining that if you want to go to the palace and gardens, you have to book a tour in the information centre before going up, otherwise the people at the door will stop you from going in and will send you straight back down again. So we didn't bother seeing the gardens.

We did, however, see Animal World, which was quite curious. Not curious that we saw it, but curious that somewhere that calls itself 'Animal World' should only be home to a couple of guinea pigs, a few goats and a large black pig. But we saw it nonetheless, and wandered around the bird aviary. After that we found ourselves by the lake and watched people paragliding, before getting on a boat and being guided around the artificial lake, with the lady pointing out various bird varieties. The South Africans appear to like their birds. The whole afternoon was quite surreal, but enjoyable nonetheless, and once it was over we headed back to the entertainment centre for some dinner. I got to choose the restaurant - Juicy Lucy. We had a sandwich, and the lady who took our order luckily misunderstood when I attempted to cancel the large orange smoothie and replace it with a large orange juice, so I ended up with both. 1.5L of orange juicy goodness. Mmm. Then we drove back to Johannesburg in the dark, but didn't get lost once.

Day Four - Monday 18th October

Finally, a lie-in! I think I have mostly caught up with my sleep now, after sleeping for about 12 hours. Paul went off to work extremely early and I just slept until I woke up at about 11. At about midday, I had a phone call from tonbschl telling me that there was an emergency with the website - turns out an event needed moving in the calendar from Saturday to Thursday, but I couldn't get on the internet to fix it, so it'll have to wait. I spent the rest of the day doing stuff on my laptop and charging batteries for my various toys before Paul returned at 4. I should point out that he had locked all of the security gates when he left in the morning, so I actually had no way of getting out of the house until he returned, short of breaking windows and angle-grinding off the bars. We then went off for a drink at the local shopping centre, and then went off to a different shopping centre for a meal with someone that he works with, which was very enjoyable. They warned us about some things we might come across in Cape Town, like how we shouldn't drive along a certain road in the dark because people will throw stones at the car, wait until we pull over to check the damage, and then come car-jack us and bury us in a ditch. At this point Paul described our journey home the night before, in the dark, and they looked shocked then laughed and said that was far more dangerous than cape town, because we went through 3 poor areas - after surviving that, we'll be fine. Joke!

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