Johannesburg – Most of you go to Gold Reef City because you’ve got kids and they love the rides. Or you go there because you love the rides.
I go there for the history.
There’s a reason for that. We went on a family outing a couple of years back. I survived the Runaway Train, I managed the Anaconda (I closed my eyes for the entire 45 seconds – I counted) and I even got through some spinning thing, and then we went to the kids’ rides and I started projectile vomiting on the tea cups.
No one, quite rightly, has ever let me live it down.
So, the last time we went, the kids went off on their own and my wife and I did the far tamer history part. I’m a bit of a history fan (okay, a huge history fan) and the history at Gold Reef City is very good, from the old reconstructed houses to the original artifacts dotted all over.
The real winner, though, is the actual gold mining stuff, the winding engine room and the gold pour, where the molten gold is taken out of the kiln and then poured. Purists can argue about the process, but having worked in a smelt house I can tell you, it’s the next best thing. It smells like a gold pour. Sounds like one and feels like one.
Back to my humiliation: After throwing up as if it was an Olympic event, my wife took me past the touch farm, which almost set my stomach off again, until we reached a quiet place, a little village away from the rides, of shops and a hotel.
The thought of something like that in the middle of a theme park intrigued me. Last month, I got a chance to try it out.
The hotel spreads amoeba-like across the village. The reception is in one building, the restaurant is another bungalow that ultimately becomes an old-time pub, while the rooms themselves are situated annex-like down two roads.
It’s quaint, the balconies and broekie-lace make you feel you could be anywhere from Kimberley to the American Wild West (some aficionados would have difficulty telling them apart), but effective.
The rooms (all 75) are en suite, with DStv, flat screen TVs and obviously air conditioning.
You can eat at Barney’s or just catch a free shuttle across to the main Gold Reef City, the sprawling casino and entertainment hub of the south of Joburg.
You can eat at one of the many chain restaurants or enjoy an evening of jazz and truly fine dining at the newly refurbished Back O’ The Moon, named after the old speakeasy in Sophiatown, immortalised by Miriam Makeba.
The casino and its precincts are undergoing a major revamp under the leadership of Gold Reef’s dynamic boss Mike Page.
Tsogo Sun took over the theme park, the casino and the hotels last year from Gold Reefs.
The company, owned by the Krok Brothers, set up the casino and, in the greatest of ironies, the Apartheid Museum, off the back of the Gold Reef City theme park, which itself was created in 1987 as part of Joburg’s centenary celebrations on the actual site of the old Crown Mines 14 Shaft, which had been closed in 1977.
14 Shaft was legendary – 30 000 miners worked there in its heyday and by 1916 it was the deepest shaft in the world, producing 1.5 million tons of gold over the 90 years of its existence.
And to cap it all, 14 Shaft is a ruse. It was actually 13 Shaft but called 14 Shaft because of superstition.
Gold Reef City was a buzzword in the late 1980s and the early 1990s.
The casino took it to the next level. Page’s challenge is to get it back there despite all the other attractions that exist in Gauteng today, and then take it beyond.
The theme park remains hugely popular and the tables do a healthy turnover in the casino.
The hotel does well during the week with business conventions.
It’s the weekend, though, that’s the hidden nugget.
With competitive rates, you can book the family in on a Friday night, be the first on the rides when the park opens at 9.30am and then repair to your room for an afternoon kip, have a relaxing evening and leave on Sunday.
And, given my adrenaline averse sensitivity, it’s the evening that is the most magical, walking through the grounds of the village when everyone else has gone home and you have the entire enchanting place to yourself.
For a moment, you feel just like a Randlord.
Saturday Star