A-Mazing Wanaka & Heavenly Hawea

Monday 10 November

Waking in one of our favourite places to the sound of birdsong, we made plans for a wet morning and a sunny afternoon.

It turned out not to be as rainy as forecast, but we headed into town for coffee & a treat at Pembroke Patisserie (I did not succumb, though my enthusiasm for the keto diet is waning as the weight refuses to drop significantly).

Then, despite not finding a BookMe deal, we visited Puzzling World for a morning of illusions and tricks and getting lost in the maze! After blending into the fluorescent passageways of the Glow Safari in our fabulous Cyberdog outfits, I got very thrown by the Tilted Room where everything is at a 15* angle, but with no external horizon to gauge this by, it totally throws you off kilter as water appears to flow uphill, you can ride a chair "up" a track by gravity alone, and your ankles get tired holding you upright! There were other illusions like the room of Following Faces where the giant portraits of the likes of Einstein, Mandela & Mozart appear to watch you as you move around the room - at first glance they appear to be sculpted out into the room, but they are in fact concave and all angled so that they look down, up and straight ahead at you - spooky!

There are also a bunch of optical illusions and the Sculptillusion Gallery, the Ames room which is tiled to make you look enormous in one corner and tiny in the other - Alice in Wonderland style.

Once we had exhausted all the indoor fun we set out to conquer the Great Maze which had a tower in each corner that you were challenged to reach. By now the unexpected sun was beating down on us in amongst these narrow fenced passageways and I began to lose the will to live after the second corner... but we persevered then took the cheat's exit once we had reached each coloured corner tower!

Driving down the west side of Lake Hāwea the day before, we had wondered if you could explore the east side too so we set off to find out… answer, yes, at least part of the way! We drove to John Creek at the south eastern end of the lake and then a little way up the gravel road before turning back - happy with our discovery. There are a few walks up here so I can see us visiting again in future.

Lunch in Banjo then a wee siesta, before meeting two fabulous dogs and going on a cycle ride to John’s Creek where we had driven through earlier. Gertie was living in the caravan next to us - she was a Briard or Berger de Brie (which sounds delicious), a French sheepdog with the most amazing long coat. Two doors down from us in the opposite direction was Mable, the Red Setter/Goldie cross who I was very tempted to kidnap, she was sooo gorgeous!

It was a lovely cycle track round the South end of the lake and to my great excitement there were lupins at John’s Creek - yay! The bees seemed to be loving them as much as I was!

We raced an approaching rain storm home, watching it march down the Lake towards us as we cycled… and just beat the downpour! A wet evening followed - so dinner in Banjo and more episodes of the brilliant “Riot Women” before bed.