Sun City, Sin City

Just as I do not enjoy betting at the horse track, I do not enjoy gambling in the casino. And although I have been to many of the world's biggest gambling playgrounds -  Monte Carlo, the Caribbean, ... Connecticut - I have never pulled a single slot handle or placed a chip on a roulette wheel board in them. I go for other reasons. For instance, even though I lived in New Jersey for all those many years, I only visited Atlantic City once. And that was to see the Monopoly Boardwalk, the Margate Elephant and the Absecon Lighthouse. Didn't ante up at the gaming tables once.

And I could have lived my entire life quite happily without ever setting foot in Las Vegas had it not been for the fact that our Colorado River white water rafting trip through the Grand Canyon began and ended with a helicopter ride from Sin City. But unless seeing Cirque du Soleil in Vegas is a sin, I am still pure as the driven snow.



Pilanesberg National Park, where we went on safari at Christmastime, borders on Sun City, South Africa's closest equivalent to Las Vegas. And since we had a couple of hours to kill before our flight took off for Port Elizabeth for the next leg of our holiday vacation, we spent those hours visiting South Africa's Sin City, ... Sun City.





But once again though we did not take in the pleasures of the dome that is the Palace of the Lost City.





 

Instead we visited Kwena Gardens with its Nile crocodiles living in their natural habitat.

Kwena Gardens is a crocodile sanctuary right on the grounds of Sun City.












 And it is also a refuge for the tiny (compared to the croc) Nile monitors.

 
They also have a meerkat colony and a bird sanctuary. It was all quite nice.

And for those of you keeping score, technically I am still a gambling virgin.