After breakfast we drove into downtown Wanaka to visit the Op Shop (Salvation Army) to see if we could find a replacement rain jacket for Nate. His old one disintegrated while we were at Milford Sound. The Op Shop was right in the middle of town so prices were a bit more expensive than where we were last time. Still, $15 for a lightweight jacket is OK, and it’s all to a good cause.
The rest of the morning we spent at Puzzling World, which the kids thought was just fantastic. Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World started out as just a single level maze in 1973, but over the years expanded to add overbridges to the maze design (thus creating the world's first 3D maze), a large "puzzling café" where guests can try out puzzles, five large rooms of optical illusions, the Leaning Tower of Wanaka (which has a backwards clock that was started on the eve of the new millennium) and other attractions such as the Roman Bathrooms that ascribe to their theme of "puzzling eccentricity". The optical illusion rooms include a set of rooms built at a 15 degree angle, containing illusions such as water apparently flowing uphill, the octagonal "Hall of Following Faces" with spot-lit hollow mask illusions on the walls, and a perspectively confusing room with a delayed video feed where visitors can see themselves afterwards with seemingly different heights depending on where they were positioned in the room.
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| Puzzling World |
When we finally got on the road, just before 12, it was for a day of driving. Through Albert Town and then along the shore of Lake Hawea on our left, before crossing a saddle and then Lake Wanaka on our right. This is another huge inland lake, considering we had already been on its shores at Wanaka.
We stopped for the 30 minute walk to Blue Pools and then had lunch at the Cameron Creek Camp Area.
It was then through Haast Pass and along the Haast River to Haast Village where we stopped for a coffee to keep us going. We had contemplated stopping at Monroe Beach, where there are sometimes Crested Penguins, but we had read that they are not usually around at this time of year and it has just begun raining again. At one stage we had a great view of snow-capped mountains and what we think was Mount Cook –our only glimpse for the trip.
The rain continued on and off all the way to Fox Village where we booked into the camping area at Fox Glacier Lodge. We had decided that if it was going to be wet and cold, then we might appreciate the heater. As it turned out it was quite mild, although the rain kept drizzling - even when we went for a walk down the road after our pasta tea to see the glow worms. They were quite a treat - just everywhere along the Minnehaha Walk.
It's hard to believe that at Fox Village we are less than 30 kilometres from where we camped at Mount Cook last week.
