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

Our Tour to Milford Sound, New Zealand

Milford Sound ... Visiting by Bus

Milford Sound isn't that far from Queenstown as the crow flies, but it's a 12 hour round trip on the tour we took, departing at a sensible 8:15 am. As fate would have it, our bus driver "Oz" (give me a break) is an Australian turned New Zealander. Apparently, if you are an Aussie, it's fairly easy to get permanent residency in NZ. For some reason, the government likes us and gives us special treatment.

Mountains en-route to Milford Sound

He didn't say why he had transplanted to NZ many years ago, but locals tell is us it's a great escape from child maintenance that may otherwise be payable by men in Australia who don't wish to pay it. I'm not of course casting aspersions at Oz ... he may simply prefer the NZ way of life instead of the Aus way of life. Each to his own, but I'm advised that escaping child maintenance is a common motivation for expat Australians.

As would be expected, the trip to Milford Sound is via mainly winding roads and as it had recently rained, there were streaks of water creating water falls in most of the hills we passed. The driver gave us an ongoing oratory about the history, character and special events etc we passed, but of course by the time we had got to Milford Sound we had forgotten most of them. Information overload, but interesting at the time.

Some of the wild life here is unique. We haven't as yet seen a genuine, non-plastic kiwi, but hope to do so before the end of our trip. We saw a statue of a Moa, a larger, more imposing version of the emu at Queenstown.

According to one information board I read, the flightless birds of NZ were once capable of flight, but because there are very few ground level predators, they lost the faculty of flight because it was no longer needed. Now, I'm no evolutionary biologist, but that sounds like a lot of codswallop to me.

Evolutionary biology is full of examples of products that didn't quite work out. It seems more likely to me that the creatures grew wings that didn't work. Why would you give up the ability to do something very effective and functional? Everyone who's read Dawkins' books knows that reptiles grew wings to be able to traverse territory better and to do things like move from tree to tree. Present day lizards with large skin folds between their front and rear legs that glide are testimony to a work in progress; long after we have moved on, they will likely have wings.

The most favoured bird here is the Kea, a type of parrot which is large and apparently very friendly and playful (lovingly referred to as clown birds). We saw a couple on the ground while waiting to enter a tunnel on our return to Queenstown from Milford Sound, but unfortunately never got up close and personal to them.

Milford Sound is probably just a little more spectacular than the whole area here. The hills are a bit taller, the lake just as nice, and of course there is a fleet of tourist vessels waiting to take the thousands of tourists, like us, for a two hour cruise up the sound, which is really a fjord.

The slow, two hour trip up and back along the fjord as far as the Tasman Sea is pleasant with plenty of photographic opportunities. A handful of furry seals was lolling about on a rock providing a different sort of photographic opportunity from the rock walls of the escarpment and the dozens of waterfalls. Apparently the first few metres of the lake is fresh water with an underlying salt water base. Makes sense to me.

Having done the 12 hour trip, I don't think I'd bother to do it all again, but now I can say in true New Zealand speak, "bin thire, done thet."

Robin