New Zealand, Wanaka: A Puzzling Pit Stop

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After checking out of the Top 10 Queenstown Holiday Park, we left the quaint town of Queenstown heading for Wanaka, a small town situated on a large lake with a unique attraction for kids of all ages - Puzzling World. The puzzling complex harboured a large, three-dimensional "Great Maze", where we had to navigate a mile of passages to the towers at each corner, and then back to the exit. It was more difficult than we thought it would have been, that's for sure!

Leaving Queenstown, we continued to have clear blue skies and we were very happy with the weather, since it meant our road trip continued past amazing New Zealand countryside in the best light possible. Wanaka was situated on the southern end of the enormous Lake Wanaka and the town was also the gateway to Mount Aspiring National Park, which was home to over 100 glaciers and sheer mountains, wide valleys, secluded flats and covered a large portion of New Zealand's South Island.

Wanaka was only around 60 miles from Queenstown, but we opted to take a road through the mountains, to save a few miles and gain beautiful views of the landscape as we made our way there. During our drive, we saw a couple from Dallas, whom we had met and talked with a week earlier, while we rode the TranzAlpine train across the South Island from the east coast to the west coast. The couple had brought bicycles with them and were cycling up a mountain that we were descending, as they made their way south on the island; we were making our way back up north towards Fox Glacier.

The first thing we needed to do at Puzzling World was to relieve ourselves after driving for an hour and a half. Kyle went first and saw an unusual sight between the men's and women's toilets, but didn't tell Dan about it, so he would be able to experience it firsthand. When Dan finally decided he had to use the loo, too, he saw what Kyle had thought was really strange, yet cool. A large mural of a Roman toilet scene was painted on the wall and there was a diorama of wooden Roman style-toilets extending out from the mural, creating an illusory effect that was pulled off quite well. You should be able to see what we mean when you look at the photos for this journal entry.

When we bought our tickets for the Great Maze, we were told that it would take at least 45 minutes to complete the maze, which is why we wanted to go ahead and use the toilet before getting lost in the large wooden-walled puzzle. Our tickets for the maze also included the Hall of Illusions, which we visited after completing the maze. In there, we saw many illusory treats that kept us amused and engrossed for half an hour, including a series of holographic photographs, the unsettling Hall of Following Faces and a balance-testing tilted room.

Each of the four towers in the Great Maze was marked with a colour: yellow, green, red and blue. For the true maze enthusiasts, the challenge was to find each of the four corner towers, but in a particular order, starting with yellow first. We had every intention of attempting the complex challenge, but when our first tower ended up being green instead of yellow, we gave up on the harder option and just followed the maze, searching for the other three towers, in any order. About half an hour later, we had found the last of the four towers and were making our way back to the beginning of the maze, which was also, irritatingly, the exit of the maze. Retracing all of our steps at that point was a little dull, but what else could we do?

To answer the query at the end of the last paragraph, there was something else we could do, which was to utilise the emergency exits all throughout the maze. We had seen enough of the maze to feel that we had gotten our money's worth, and we had also made it to the end - in our minds, at least - by tackling the fourth corner tower, so we chose the first emergency exit we saw after walking halfway back through the maze to the entrance/exit. From there, we walked back into the main Puzzling World building and entered the Hall of Illusions.

In the first room, we passed many different holographic laser images. Some were lame, but many were really good. The Hall of Following Faces was definitely something worth seeing; we enjoyed walking around the room and seeing all of the faces follow us as we moved side to side, forwards and backwards. It was fun walking into a second room where one person, at one end of the room, appeared very short and the other person, at the other end of the room, looked like a giant; it was like something from "Alice in Wonderland". The last thing we did in the Hall of Illusions was visit the tilted room, which was a small house with a few rooms in which everything was slanted at many different angles.

There was a pool table where the balls rolled uphill, a set of steps that we stood on and defied gravity ourselves, by not falling forwards, and a chair lift that took its passengers uphill, even though they felt like they were sliding down. It was all very fun and we felt happy to release the inner child inside each of us that afternoon. To continue the fun, we spent some time working some puzzles that were spread out on tables in the main foyer of the building. There were many different puzzles to choose from; most that we tried were easy to complete, but we did get stuck for half an hour or so on a sheep puzzle that was impossible for us to solve without a few helpful hints from the solution.

We spent at least a couple of hours at Puzzling World and were happy to have stopped there during our drive from Queenstown to Fox Glacier, which was to be our next stop. With the weather as good as it was, we practiced our photography skills and snapped some funny photos in front of Puzzling World before we left the complex. We made a few stops along the highway to Fox Glacier, including Lake Hawea (you must check out the incredible lake in our photo album), Thunder Creek Falls and an overlook on the west coast. Since we drove through a large section of Mount Aspiring National Park, you can imagine how beautiful the scenery that we passed was... can't you?