Instead I yank myself up into an open safari vehicle for the short ride to the Pilanesberg National Park. Sadly I am not climbing into any of them. Parked outside The Palace are a white Rolls Royce, a black Porsche and a yellow Lamborghini which sums up the over-the -top indulgence of this place in a nutshell. 'Top this' it seems to say - and few can. This is the buffet to out 'buff' all others. In the centre fof the room four near-life-size bronze elephants hold up a fountain. Liveried staff bring tea and pour litres of juice from animal-handled glass jugs. Exotic Fruit is piled Carmen Miranda high, there are mountains of muffins, acres of cereal, cheeses beyond number and meats of all varieties. Watched by leopard gargoyles I walk along turreted walkways, past two zebra-striped gold thrones and down a sweeping staircase to a buffet fit for the most wasteful African despot. Reeling from an overdose of gold leaf and animal print so early in the morning I make my way down to breakfast. Built originally as a gambling Mecca, Sun City is now an entertainment extravaganza with hotels, pools, casinos, theatres, ballrooms, and a zany Valley of the Waves with death-defying jungle water slides and an artificial wave beach. All that lushness and green, those two championship golf courses, that forest, are the result of expensive irrigation - more evidence of mad magnificence. The realm of the sun is in the middle of nowhere. Paying homage to legends of lost African empires made wealthy by the trade in ivory and gold, the palace reigns supreme over the vast Sun City hotel complex which lies in the isolated near -desert region of Pilanesberg. It would roar off the screen right at you.īoutique hotels - who needs 'em? Give me grandiose. If The Palace of the Lost City were a movie it would be an epic, brought to you in glorious, radiant technicolour, with surround-sound and 3D thrown in. I seem to have misplaced my Indiana whip or at this point I'd crack it. But now I've been bowled over by it - by the mad, magnificent opulence of it all. I admit I was prepared to hate it after all subtle is not a word in that appears in the Sun City repertoire. The Palace of the Lost City at Sun City is the most extravagant, over-the-top, glorious folly on the whole of the African continent.
Shades of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom come to mind, except that this is a temple of indulgence. A silhouetted flock of birds swoops across the pink dawn sky and monkeys swing from the ornate towers and turrets of what looks like some magnificent ancient palace. Outside my window a blood-red sun is coming up over a curling jungle which seems to go on forever. Seen in the lobby: Tourists who come just to stare, those who actually check-in
0 kommentar(er)
