Wanaka's The Puzzling World

It's certainly puzzling ...

After a few days at Queenstown, we headed for Wanaka which is only a short hop from Queenstown. As would be expected, the sights are similar and the lake large and beautiful as the photo of part of Wanaka from the town lookout suggests.

Here, we attended a social get-together for timeshare guests where we had sausages in bread and coffee etc for lunch and chatted with our fellow travellers, most of whom were New Zealanders from the north visiting the south island. The barbecue setting is underneath a glorious old tree in an idyllic setting as shown in another photo I just had to take that also shows a water wheel in the foreground.

NZ has plenty of opportunities to get outdoors, despite the cold, and walk, so we have done a fair bit of that walking around the edge of the lake and within the nearby national park area. We also had a 45 minute game of tennis which got the pulse moving, which was part of our plan, to get some exercise while on holidays.

Most interesting was Wanaka's The Puzzling World which is designed to challenge your spatial, abstract and conceptual skills through working a variety of puzzles and entering rooms that are built at an angle sufficient to challenge your balance and perception. Very interesting indeed. I fiddled with a wooden, four piece puzzle for maybe 20 minutes managing to form two of the four shapes possible and then lost interest. It's demeaning to be beaten by a few pieces of wood!

Christina and I entered the reality-changing building which initially was like walking up a ramp while fighting against our old friend and foe, gravity. In this building, water appears to run uphill, a chair ride takes one uphill on its own accord when you press the release button, and various things you see aren't really what you see. As one of the great philosophers suggested, "we should be more interested in not what we see, but why we see it."

A couple of additional photos from the Puzzling House show part of the experience. The first is Robin with his arms through two nuts that look flat until photographed. The second is the water running uphill. 

Enjoy.

Robin