Wanaka Puzzle World
Trip Start
Mar 10, 2007
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120
188
Trip End
Jan 08, 2008
Wanaka,
New Zealand
Thursday, October 4, 2007
The weather however, was not better in Wanaka, in fact it was raining just as much there as it had been en route. We were determined to make something of the day though so we still decided to go to Puzzling World (PW) and play in the maze - in spite of the fact that we would get wet. We were to have an hour at PW, in which time we would have to get lost in, and then find our way out of, the large maze, before navigating the illusion rooms and playing with some of the puzzles in the cafe.
The maze at Wanaka is a world first, incorporating bridges and 3D sections as well as the traditional passageways. It was also difficult to navigate, as the bridges had a quality of not bringing you to the section of the maze to which you thought that they led. Apparently, most people walk between three and five kilometres when trying to navigate the maze, and it was easy to belive as I went around in circles in the rain, getting frustrated at the fact that I could not seem to find more than two corners. It was a shame that it was raining so much because if it had not been, I would have attemted the difficult version after the standard one, but I was wet through completing one circuit, let alone two. (The standard puzzle is to reach all four corner towers in the maze before leaving by the courtyard, the difficult puzzle requires you to find the coloured towers in a certain order - yellow, blue green and red.) After wandering in circles unsuccessfully for a while, an still not finding my way to the remaining two corners I got tactical. I used the height of the bridge sections to assess petential routes and work out logically which way I had to go in order to reach the corners. This made my navigation go a lot smoother once I was back in the passageways, and by the time I was wet through I had found all four corners and made my way, with surprising ease (after the circles I had been wandering in) to the courtyard exit, and back inside the main building.
Next I visited the illusion rooms, which include a hologram room and a Hall of Following Faces, where over 100 heads of people such as Einstein and Mother Theresa follow you as you move around the octagonal room. It was wierdly creepy.
These however are not the best rooms, those two were saved for last, the Ames room and the Anti-gravity room. The Ames room palys with perspective in order to make people grow to the size of giants or become midgets depending on where they stand in a specially designed room, that looks of normal proportions on the outside but which is actually diagonally sloped and graded with cut floor tiles. It is the same trickery that was used in LOTR in order to make the hobbits hobbit-sized, and watching people change from giants to midgets was both disconcerting and fun, especially when it was our turn to go into the room and shrink and grow rapidly. It was one of those experiencces that just makes you smile.
The final room was a dizzying one, and it totally altered your perceptions of how things worked, containing as it did a pool table with balls that appeared to roll uphill, a water-rise (going up not falling) and a block on which you could mainatin a 'falling' posture indefinately. This was all done by constructing the room on a diagonal slant which altered your perception of what horizontal was; the gradient of the room was such that an apparantly horizonal object was actually tilted down, creating the uphill and water rise trick, and allowing you to roll 'uphill' on a chair without any effort. No one walked out of the room without feeling dizzy. The last ten minutes of the visit were spent in the cafe palying with various puzzles, I did the Nile Pyramid, which was an interesting puzzle and mentally spent a fortune on the various puzzles in the shop, though there was no way that I could have transported them all back to the UK had I bought them. Then it was back on the bus and off to Queenstown, with a brief visit to the Kawaru bridge which is the world's first permanent bungy site. I did not jump though - I spent that money on my skydive video, and I have heard too many stories of detached retinas to want to make the leap.
Very soon I was settled in at my hostel, which had views of the mountains and lake, or would once the rain stopped! I have decided to spend a few days in Queenstown, as I am tired of the bus, and the good weather is supposed to arrive at the weekend, so that is when I want to do my activities.
