Wanaka
Trip Start
Jun 13, 2006
1
153
177
Trip End
Jun 12, 2007
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Wanaka,
New Zealand
Thursday, April 12, 2007
On the road again we carried on to Wanaka, a pretty town on Wanaka lake with gorgeous mountains all around. Our first day there was activity day. We started out at Puzzling World, whose main attractions are the Great Maze and the illusion rooms. We managed to find our way to all four corners of the maze and out again in under half an hour so we were quite chuffed with ourselves (the average is 30mins - 1 hour) and headed to the illusion rooms. These were great fun, the first room is covered floor to ceiling on every walls with famous concave heads, which look convex and follow you around the room - creepy. The second room demonstrates one of the tricks used in Lord of the Rings to make hobbits look hobbit sized, two people stand in opposite corners of a sloping room and are filmed, which is fairly unexciting but when you leave the room you get to watch the footage the person in the tallest section of the room really does look diddy while the person in the opposite corner looks huge - very funny and all a clever optical illusion. The final room is also sloped with various effects like steps that make you look as if you are stood at an angle, pool balls rolling and water flowing uphill - again all illusions and all good fun. The cafe outside is no less fun, but perhaps more frustrating, all the tables are covered with little wooden puzzles to keep your mind busy while you drink you tea! After that we headed up the road to "Have a Shot" and had a bash at the driving range (we were better than we thought - I even managed to hit one of the TVs they had kindly left as targets) and then tried our hand at archery (it is safe to say Dean is better than me at this!) I would say it is good stress relief but I don't think we have much stress left after 10 months on the road, it was good fun nonetheless!
The following day we went for a tramp along the Diamond Lake - Rocky Mountain track. It was a beautiful hot sunny day and we got fantastic views from the top over Lake Wanaka and Mount Aspiring National Park. The steep bits got to me a bit more than they should have though - obviously having the car isn't the best thing for my fitness level (or the fish and chips, meat pies and cadbury's cream eggs for that matter). Off to Te Anau to see Milford Sound tomorrow with a short stop in Queenstown on the way.
