Saturday, 26 March 2011

Puzzling World, Wanaka

Friday we took our rental car for a spin and went to one of the nearby towns, Wanaka, about 100k away.
Wanaka is also situated beautifully on a lake, and we had some yummy lunch down the seafront.



Nearly every time you order coffee in this country, it comes with a silver fern. Or, it's an "All Blacks coffee" as Lucas say!


In the afternoon we attacked Puzzling World. Quite a cool place, with illusions already before we entered; 'The Leaning Tower of Wanaka', leaning at 53 degrees!






We then spent a while in the lobby, trying our best to solve some of the many puzzling challenges there.






I really liked the 'Illusion Rooms'. They had a great display of 3D holograms, and other different optical illusions.









A strange wall, from afar it all looked wonky...



... but when you came up close, the lines were all straight!



The 'Hall of Following Faces'. Very effective. When you closed one eye and walked around, all the faces kept looking at you. And even though they were concave, they appeared convex once you closed one eye - spooky!



And here, another room that created an amazing illusion, apparently used a lot in 'Lord of the Rings'. The 'Ames Forced Perspective Room', when empty:



With a giant Linnea:



And with a tiny Linnea, and a giant Lucas and Daddy:



Then we arrived in the 'tilted room', where everything was behaving very strangely..! Here Linnea is on a sliding ride going upwards!



The ball too was rolling upwards:



And Nathan and Lucas did also stand up straight, although it doesn't look that way:



At Puzzling World they also have one of the biggest mazes in the world. A two-storey maze, covering about 1,5k (although most people apparently walk between 3-5k to find their right way around!).
The objective was to find all four corners/towers of the maze. Not as easy as one might think...










Yay, we found the green tower!





And the blue tower!





Finally the yellow one - the kids actually got to is one all by themselves, without any help from us! Quite impressive!



Well, we found all of them, and kind of the way out too (Lucas had had enough by then, so he took the easy way out - an emergency exit..!).



Yay for us!
Even the "toilets" in this place had optical illusions, very cool.



After mission complete in the maze we all thought we deserved some ice cream and a little break in the sunshine. Another fantastic day in fabulous weather, we are so lucky!




1 comment:

Pink Diary said...

been here too on a christmast holliday, i lost my patience in the great maze, and im roasted as well in the hot sunny summer, exit using the emergency exit.