December 1st, 2019
Leaving Queenstown, I drove about halfway to Wanaka, another
popular ski and summer resort town but maybe not quite as crazy busy as Queenstown. I’d heard about it from paragliding pilots
back in Canada so I hoped to fly there as well.
I stayed at a basic campsite called Bendigo by Lake Dunstan, a long
finger like lake created by a hydro dam on a river. It was a bit windy and dusty, but it did the
trick for the night.
Pulling into Wanaka the next morning it was overcast and a
bit windy and paragliding definitely wasn’t in the cards, so I decided to check
out the local disc golf course. Just as
I pulled up to the park the rain started to come down, heavy enough that it
wasn’t an attractive proposition. I wasn’t
too disappointed as the couple of holes that I could see from my van were in
pretty wide open areas and looked quite long, my least favourite type of course.
Checking the good ol’ CamperMate app I saw a place that was
right up my alley: Puzzling World. Sounds like a perfect rainy day kinda thing
to do. This quirky museum/exhibit has
been around since 1973 and has expanded over the years. Walking through the doors there was the
ticket booth, the gift shop and a café with almost everyone who was sitting at
a table working away on little wooden and/or metal puzzle. You know the type that you have to get the ring
off of a seemingly impossible metal shaped object by moving this or that. I figured I’d finish off with these puzzles,
so I paid my $25 combo admission which was allowed me to enter the exhibits as
well as get lost in the maze outside.
With that "Leaning tower of Pisa", you can take a great pic of you holding it up...if you have someone to take the picture of you, and it's not pouring down rain.
Stepping through the automatic gate after scanning the stamp
on the back of my wrist, the first exhibit was a dark hallway with a variety of
holographic pictures. Oh c’mon, these
are cool but I remember seeing these in a National Geographic magazine in the 1980s…it
better get better than this.
Okay, the vulture is pretty good.
In the next room the floor was slanted at about 22 degrees
or so and man did it play with your mind.
There were 3 planks of wood like steps with water flowing from one to
the next and it sure looked like the water was flowing uphill. You could lean so far forward without falling
over yet your brain told you that something was wrong as the visual cues around
you told you that you weren’t upright…okay, this place is getting better.
Next
was the Hall of Following Faces. It was
an octagonal shaped room with each wall occupied by a matrix of faces of a
famous person from Albert Einstein to Mother Theresa, Abraham Lincoln to
Winston Churchill. The instructions by
the entrance to the room said to cover one eye and walk about 3 meters away
from the wall. As you moved around the
faces followed you. The ones on the top
of the wall appeared to be looking down at you and conversely the ones below
looked up, but all of them followed you.
Pretty cool. The neat thing is
that if you looked with both eyes you could see that all of the faces were
exactly the same (per wall). They were
three dimensional and concave with some back lighting…so simple yet effective
The next section had a variety of optical illusion type
displays, some good, some mediocre. Then
probably one of the fan favourites of the place was this weirdly shaped room with
two doorways, a small one and a large one at the other end. The room had a checkered carpet but everything
was askew and you almost hit your head at one side of the room and could barely
touch the ceiling at the other. After
being in the room, a few minutes later you appeared on a TV screen outside in
the hallway and everything looked normal, all corners 90 degrees to each other
and straight lines on the carpet but as you walked from one doorway to the
other, you went from being a midget to a giant.
Pretty cool effect.
A strange bench:
A trippy Persian carpet:
KNIT=MC2
Look closely:
After the exhibits, even though it was still raining outside
I decided to get lost in the maze. As a kid
I fondly remember going to an outdoor maze at Longleat in England made up from
16,000 yew trees…incredible. Now this
one was only made from wooden posts and panelling, but I have to say it wasn’t
bad. Just like Longleat, you couldn’t
see over the sides so you didn’t know where you were going. There were four towers in each corner and a number
of bridges. The idea was to make it to
each tower and then find your way back out again. It probably took me the better part of 30
minutes to meander around and finally make my way out, with it raining pretty
steadily throughout (glad I grabbed my umbrella).
I finished off back in the café and tried a few different
puzzles. It turned out to be a great way
to spend a few hours of a rain soaked day.
I decided to splurge that evening and spend a night at a campsite
that was part of a hotel and hostel on Lake Hawea. It was only $15 for a night and this included
a well needed hot shower, plus there was a pub where campers received discounted
beer and food. To top it off there was
wi-fi and there happened to be a hockey game between the Canucks and the Oilers…perfect! Additionally the views of the mountains
across the lake around sunset were superb.
Wow!
And the Canucks won!
Yes they did!
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