Pines Resort — Attraction in Mogale City Local Municipality

A beautiful, clean, well-managed self-catering water resort with a few critical shortcomings: The management take their policy of not allowing glass bottles on the premises a touch too far. Right off the bat, at the entrance, patrons are forced to queue like children and forced to decant literally every drop of sauce, every bit of spice, salt or pepper from the original glass containers into plastic cups. Those who refuse to do so are given the option of leaving their condiments at the gate.

A "no-glass" policy makes perfect sense to me to protect patrons from broken cooler, wine or beer bottles that could potentially be tossed about by drunk, ill-mannered litterbugs. A blanket ban on literally all forms of glass, however, strikes me as needlessly extreme and also not very easy to enforce. Beer, wine and cooler bottles are typically emptied on the spot during a braai by those consuming the alcohol and then often dropped on the ground. Chutney, spice or tomato sauce bottles do not. Patrons hardly ever finish all of their salt, all of their pepper or all of their mustard and they don't typically leave these laying about when they leave. While accidents do happen, I should think in those rare cases where a butter-fingered patron did manage to drop their bottle of All Gold on the ground, this could easily be dealt with by the clean-up crew.

Ironically, despite this draconian preoccupation with patron safety, the resort fails to impress. The largest attraction on the premises was poorly designed and built, and is dangerous in places. Several members of our party were scraped, bruised and even cut on this slide, and one had to receive first aid from Management for a bleeding cut under his big toe. Some of the life guards are also in desperate need of retraining, and need to be taught that when bathers approach them for assistance, they should not respond with "What?!" The polite response in most civilized establishments is something along the lines of "How may I help you?"

Be sure to bring none of your own alcohol, but all of your own food, and plenty of sunscreen. The only shop on the premises sells beer, coolers and spirits and their take-away menu is limited to five types of toasted sandwich and instant coffee. Older patrons should bring their glasses, because the shop has only one printed and laminated A4 menu and spirits list available to...

Nice clean place. Nice picnic and braai areas. There is a little waterfall area for 2 &3 year olds to run under at picnic spots. Bring extra shading If you can because it can get quite hot as they don't have a lot of shaded area. Toilet were nice and clean up until early afternoon. By late afternoon it wasn't being maintained anymore. Because by 2pm the handwashing area was very dirty. Suppose the resort can't be blamed if some people are just plain filthy. Kids old enough to enjoy the slides will have a good time. The adult pool on the shallow side. Not deep at all. Because it's so shallow all the teenagers were playing ball in the pool and if you want just a nice swim you won't get it there as a ball would come your way every minute.The slides by the kids pool I felt was not very safe as it was much to fast. Also the pools are extremely slippery so beware as I slipped twice while getting in and out. The place is not baby friendly and definitely don't take your grandparents as the walking in is fine as it's downhill but climbing back up not for the faint of heart . Its advisable to sit close by the pool as then the climb wouldn't be so bad. Parents with teenagers will however have a good time. Maybe avoid going on month end as it was very crowded. They have a well stocked shop for your drinking needs as you not allowed to bring alcohol in. I felt R120 to much if you not using the slides etc. They should consider changing those rates for non slide users. We will not be going to this resort again unless they consider...

The resort is nice enough, I appreciated that there were 7 slides into the little kids pool, and 4 adult slides to choose from (plus the 2 short, fast ones into the main pool). Que management was good on the day we went (not more than a few lee waiting at a time, but they were told to wait a bit between each person going down to prevent crashing). There are also lots of clean toilets and change room cubicals. Disappointments - once you go in, you can't do out again. This means we had to hire a large locker to store our food, towels, keys, clothes, etc. R150 for the day (less for fewer hours), as we were only 2 adults with 4 kids. The tube slide is not a lazy river type, but super fast down drops, and I had to tuck my feet in to avoid them being bashed against the walls each drop. Most disappointing, though, was that I'd chosen Pines because there were additional options of bouncy castle and playground which my younger children could use if tired of slides or if they needed a break from the cold water (we went on April) - both were broken or out of order and unavailable/taped off. Please fix these and let people know if not in use, or remove from...