Weekend escape: Tutankhamun replicas add lustre to a getaway at a Joburg casino

Andrew Unsworth takes in the King Tut exhibition during his stay at Silverstar Casino and Hotel

The Southern Sun Silverstar Hotel and Casino is at the northern foot of the Witwatersrand on the R28, just before it climbs the ridge into Krugersdorp, close to the Cradlestone Mall.

Only an hour from my home in eastern Joburg, it's practically in suburbia but is so well placed, facing the rocky ridge, that you can hear no traffic and see no buildings, so you could be 100km away.

I went for a Saturday night and to see the Tutankhamun exhibition, and took the resident seven-year-old Dennis the Menace, on his first hotel stay. He was over the moon when we walked into our modern suite: "This is awesome! There are two TVs and a black bathroom!" I was equally impressed - for once I could watch Sky News or a movie while he watched the Disney Channel next door. He told every member of the very friendly staff this news, so they soon all knew him by name.

But first we wandered around the complex, beyond the dancing fountains in a shallow lake which the hotel overlooks. There is a long piazza with a pavement fountain that has kids running through it, fully clothed, any time of the day or night. A row of upmarket franchise restaurants offer just about anything you could want from curry to pizza and steak, all overlooked by a 62m² TV screen showing cricket. Not as bad as it sounds, the sound was off.

I decided Mai Thai would offer a light and tasty lunch, which it did, after a very long wait: the kid just wanted to swim, even though the highveld afternoon sky was darkening from the west. We were the only bathers in the small pool over a terrace overlooking the fountain lake.

Now it was my turn: the Tutankhamun exhibition. Like everyone, I was slightly sceptical about an exhibition of replicas, but I was soon bowled over. Replace the originals in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo with these and most people would not know the difference .

Just perhaps the reproductions were too perfect, but even a lost piece of lapis lazuli on the boy-king's funerary mask was accurately missing. However, the woven beard was not freshly stuck on with too much glue. (Read more about the sloppy repairs made to Tut's funeral mask.) I stared at the replica mask (below left) as I have stared at the original (below right) and tried to put my figurative finger on what made it slightly different: it was the lack of shine on the gold. Shakespeare was wrong after all: all that glisters has to be gold.

After an introduction (with audioguide) to the familiar story of archaeologist Howard Carter and his sponsor Lord Carnarvon (who owned Highclere, aka Downton Abbey), the exhibition really gets under way with reconstructions of each room in the king's small tomb, with contents as they were found, down to dismantled chariots and model boats piled up. It is a brilliant reproduction from 1922 photographs, because the tomb in the Valley of the Kings now stands empty apart from the stone sarcophagus and the mummy in its gold coffin.

The exhibition has the three huge gilded-wood shrines that went inside one another around the sarcophagus like nesting boxes, the two gilded and one solid gold coffin, the famous mask, and many of the ritual and domestic articles found in the tomb, from thrones to a chariot and cosmetic urns. All are displayed and explained in a modern exhibition way, whereas the originals in Cairo are somewhat stuck in an early-20th-century museum of cabinets.

But it's not going to keep a seven-year-old interested for two hours, so in the end I was nagged out into the daylight and the Magic Company packed with machine games for kids: money flows but it's worth every cent as a reward for his having endured King Tut and even learning to say his name.

Dinner of a cheeseburger and a sole at the Steak restaurant, with one glass of wine, saw us to bed. I have not had such an educational, abstemious or healthy evening in ages.

Silverstar (below) also offer a spa, a 10-pin bowling alley, six cinemas and a comedy/dance club, a crèche, and three gaming floors apart from the one-arm bandit halls. I'm not a casino fan and don't gamble (I'd rather give R10 to a windscreen-washer), but I enjoyed Silverstar as much as the kid did. By Sunday afternoon we were home, him moaning that it was boring now. Only one TV. Thanks, Silverstar, it's all your fault.

IF YOU GO TO SILVERSTAR CASINO...

Getting there: R28, Muldersdrift, Mogale City, South Africa.

Bonus: Free 500MB wifi per day.

Rates: Standard room R1 535, luxury suite R2 900, Presidential suite R5 500. Kids below 18 eat breakfast and stay for free.

What to do: The Tutankhamun Exhibition runs until April 12, 2015. Admission is R160.

Special offer: Pay R2 000 for two people including accommodation, tickets for the Tutankhamen Exhibition, breakfast and dinner. See silverstarcasino.co.za or phone 011-662-7300.

Unsworth was a guest of Southern Sun Silverstar