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Published: March 20th 2011
Mar. 15 Wanaka
Nelson has a competitor for my favorite NZ community. Wanaka has it all: a beautiful blue mountain lake, hiking trails, friendly community, decent shopping, restaurants, and an overall peaceful attractiveness to it.
We spent our first day here doing a lot of walking. We headed out of town about 2km where we started up to the view point on Iron Mountain. This hill is about 260 m high and took a good 40 minutes to climbed to the top. But the views made it all worth while. We had a 360 degree view of Wanaka and the surrounding areas. Lakes, mountains, rivers, and fields. We then headed down the hill on a much steeper incline that took us down the hill to a place called Puzzle World.
Now Puzzle World totally lived up to its reputation. It is a mind boggling collection of puzzles that include holograms that change as you watch them; faces that turn to watch you as you move about. It has a room on a 14 degree angle that totally throws your balance and sense of reality into a spin with its pool table with the balls role uphill, the steps that cause
you to ‘lean’ way over; a chair slide that goes up stairs. There is another room where you enter on one side looking very small and when you move to the other you grow in height. Lots of fun. And then to finish it all off, there is a maze created to amuse us adults. It took us just over half and hour (which is actually quite quick) to finish its km of paths. I am sure we covered way more that a km in there though.
It was then time to walk the 2 km back to town. By the end of the day we both had sore feet and were glad to put them up.
Next day was more walking and exploring this city. Unfortunately, what started out as a cloudless sunny day, soon became overcast and threatening rain. Looks like we are in for a week of rain, no matter where we are NZ.
Mar 17, It poured rain all night, but the sun has returned. The pictures will say it all about this place. Both or us would like to return here.
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Louis
non-member comment
great mural
wish I was still over there... all the best