Our New Zealand Adventure: Day 31 - The road to Wanaka and a mazing afternoon.

Tue 30 Jan
As we packed up it started to rain. This is great we thought, we're booked in to do canyoning tomorrow in Wanaka, and you need water in the rivers for that.

Plus rainbows!
I kicked off the driving, and off we went. we'd found another cheap card only filling station, but it wasn't quite on our route and we were still pretty full from filling up at Gore.
We drove for an hour through rolling farm land to Athol, where we had a quick loo loo break and cleaned the windscreen before hitting the road again with Karen at the wheel.
After Athol the view started getting more interesting as we started round lake Wakatipu (where the TSS_Earnslaw, built in Omaru, lives).

link to panorama

We bypassed Queenstown and started climbing towards the Crown Range. The roads were getting gnarly and Karen had been driving for over an hour so at the road works we took the opportunity of a red light to change drivers.
As we climbed up the views were spectacular. So it wasn't long before we stopped to take photos.

And again a bit higher still.

Eventually around lunchtime we arrived in Wanaka. The beach looked like a paradise, and the perfect place for lunch.

Unfortunately it was experiencing a howling gale. Blowing hard enough to slam shut open car doors. So we headed off to Puzzling World, made lunch in their carpark (still windy, Karen ended up wearing most of a plum). And then went indoors to see the Holograms followed by the Hall of Illusions.

These faces follow you. They look as if they are faces sticking into the room when they are actually hollows.

pool anyone

The chair slides upward without any help, but has to be pushed back down.

Once through this we stopped off in the cafe for a coffee and an ice cream. I got very frustrated trying to do two puzzles, before Karen found one I could do. You could spend all day here just playing with puzzles.
Then off to the 3D maze! We chose to do it the hard way too finding each corner tower in a particular colour order. Because its a 3D maze you can't just put your hand out and just follow it. We recommend visiting here, it's a lot of fun and surprisingly difficult considering you'd think you could see quite a lot of the maze from the high points.