An earthquake an hour

My memories of Sun City were of the inescapable sound of clinking money, and of the way it was always meant to be night even during the day. On your way to the breakfast patio, through dark rooms lit by flashing red neons, you’d pass women cleaning the carpets, wearing shimmering disco outfits.

The resort’s casino hotel has long been eclipsed by the glitzier Palace of the Lost City, which is indeed something to behold.

A two and a half hour drive from Johannesburg brings South Africans and loads of foreign tourists to the Sun City resort. Sun City also serves as a convenient gateway to the Pilanesberg game reserve that is situated within a real 1 200 million year old volcanic crater. However, the resort’s original reason for being was as a gambling Vegas-themed mecca. Today the resort’s description says it is rather focused on what they term the African Experience. The Palace of the Lost City has, as its own theme, the fantasy of a rediscovery of some ancient but idyllic African civilization.

Near the entrance gate to Pilanesberg we had our first glimpse of the spires of The Palace of the Lost City suffused in Disney-gold morning light.

As I got out of the car I looked up and really thought I saw a giant kudu leaping out of a lotus flower on the corner of a tall tower. I held onto my briefcase more tightly. It felt solid and reassuring. Our car was whisked away over a little lake and we followed our bags being trundled around a mighty fountain gushing, rather surprisingly, out of super-ginormous black sable antelope horns. There were maybe fifty people of many nationalities who probably noticed anything remarkable about water gushing from ends of animal horns, no more perhaps than the way it comes out of demons’ mouths in the rest of the world. They were taking still and moving pictures of their partners and friends and the extraordinary fountain was a mere backdrop.

There was more clicking and whirring in the grand loggia where Reception seemed dwarfed by domed and painted ceilings, zebra-striped lofty window frames and the grandest arrangement of St Joseph lilies in creation. There were vast tapestries featuring animals from Africa and even Madagascar, I noticed, for there was its famed indri lemur keeping woolly company with some local springbok and hippos. On the marble floor lay a small Japanese boy. He wailed.

“Have you noticed that on every piece of anything, something is killing something else?” said Philip, the photographer as he and I explored the interior. No expense or hunger for blood has been spared on the wallpapers, the tapestries, the drapes, the carpets, the mosaics or even the lampstands and shades. Recognizable or fantasy animals, big and small, are hunting or being hunted wherever your glance falls.

Outside are the fake ruins of old temples, supposedly ancient carvings, illusive grottos. Waters spew forth all over the place. Beyond the so-called Palace hotel is its ‘Grand Pool’ with more gushing water and jungly gardens and a place named The Valley of the Waves.

As though guarding the Palace is an immense bridge, lined with numerous stony, towering elephants, leading eventually to The Entertainment Centre. It is labeled The Bridge of Time. Every hour there’s a powerful booming and much billowing of smoke from the elephants’ direction. The bridge then rumbles and shakes to simulate the feeling of an earthquake. You hear that booming bridge wherever you are in the resort grounds.

It competes for noise level with The Roaring Lagoon. The Roaring Lagoon is part of The Valley of the Waves, which has what looks very like a natural beach and water that comes up to about an adult’s waist. After a mighty echoing roar, 1,8 meter waves appear every 90 seconds for 30 minutes. Otherwise the water is on “bob cycle”, as one of the lifesavers informed me.

We watched. The water was packed with bodies. More lazed over the surrounding grassy slopes. There was a pre-teen sunning herself in her cute bikini, peak cap and earrings, smoking a cigarette. There was an earthquake. She didn’t stir. I checked my watch. Eleven. Alongside was a valley full of people bobbing, facing The Roaring Lagoon to see when it would release their next series of waves.

Next day we took the Palace of the Lost City lift nine floors up and a further few flights of stairs, to The Kings Tower. There one can’t help but be impressed by the size and thematic assiduousness of the surroundings. It was there, too, that I was able to confirm my bizarre giant kudu sighting. Directly below me, on each corner of the tower were four mighty African kudus, all in mid-escape from four giant Indian lotus flowers.

Next to me was a group of visitors up from the Western Cape, I guessed by their voices. Their little boy was naturally impatient to be able to see what they were looking out at, so he was lifted onto the parapet.

“Lion King”, he asserted as gazed out.

“Lion King is not here,” sighed his mother. I glanced at her. Only the adults round the place seemed to be confused about what The African Experience was about. All the kids seemed to get it immediately.