New Zealand and Back Again-A Badger's Tale: Wanaka oh Wanaka

...Oh have you have you seen Wanaka? Wanaka the beauty's astounding! (Now go back and sing that to the tune of lydia the tattooed lady) So the next part of my trip after Franz Josef was my stop in Wanaka, and probably my favorite part.
I didn't really want to spend my entire trip coasting through hostels, because of the expenses, and you don't really make many friends in hostel on your own. My solution to this was that I joined this site called couchsurfing which hooks travelers up with people who're willing to host you in the city you're traveling to. I tried to get a whole bunch of couchsurfing spots set up, but the only person who replied was this really cool guy named Keith in Wanaka. He said he could host me, and had another surfing that'd be staying with him at the same time so we could hang out. After I bussed into Wanaka, about 7pm, Keith picked me and the other surfer Mary Ann, up and he made us dinner. Keith was this really cool typical laid back Kiwi guy. He's really into sports and music, and actually makes his living as a snowboard/ski instructor. He spends half of his year in Japan, in the Hokkaido region (the northern most island) teaching snowboard, and train instructors there, then he spends the other half in Wanaka where there's a pretty big snow resort there in the winter. He had a whole bunch of really interesting stories, having traveled and worked around most of the world as a snowboard instructor, and even wrote the "Lonely Planet" version of places to snowboard/ski in Japan. When I had got there it was only the 2 week he'd been home from Japan, so I was really fortunate that he was able to host me! Mary Ann was really cool too. She'd just finished a linguistic degree in France (she's French, alors j'ai parle un peu avec elle), and came to do an internship here in New Zealand. She was working with college aged kids up in Auckland (that's middle school age in the States), and was doing the same thing I was: traveling for the Easter Holidays. She was really into mountaineering, but had messed up her ankle a week or so ago so she couldn't do any strenuous hikes. Since I was still nursing my gimpy knee, I didn't mind too much.

The first night we were there we mainly just sat up and talked, and Keith gave us some ideas about what we could do around Wanaka. He offered to take us up Mt Iron the next morning, so we agreed and that was that. Mt. Iron isn't really a strenuous hike; it's a kind of foothill a little ways from the lake, but the views you get from the top are spectacular! It's literally 360 degrees of mountains all around you, and lakes. It didn't hurt that fall was just starting to grab hold of the area, so all the trees were just starting to change. There were tons of beautiful yellows, oranges, and reds just bursting into color in the landscape.

In the distance, it's really hard to see, but there's a national park called Mt. Aspiring National Park. There's several good climbs and multi day treks in that area. If I had had another couple days in Wanaka I would've loved to have gotten over to that area. Alas, the only views I got of it were from across the lake. It's beautiful enough though!

As you can see, Wanaka's really not that big. It's just a small city that borders the lake, but otherwise it's just beautiful hill country all around. And mountains in the distance every direction you look!!

Anyway, so the next stop in our adventure was to go to one of the places that Wanaka is known for: Puzzle World. It is exactly what it sounds like, just a place filled with puzzles, mind bending things, and tons of optical illusions. The craziest one was probably this room where the floor was slanted, so as you walked you were titling yourself backwards just to compensate for the tilt in the floor. In this part of puzzle world there were a whole bunch of things that were counter-intuitive with the way you were standing. So in the picture on the left, (That's Mary Ann by the way) there's a billiard table. On one end there's a ball and you'd think that it would roll from right to left, but it rolls from left to right. I couldn't figure out why for the life of me, because it looks like it's rolling uphill! It was explained on one of the walls at one point, but somehow it didn't work in my brain. I guess it was working too hard to keep me upright--it was really hard to stand up straight or not to run into the walls. As far as I can remember from the explanation, it had something to do with how the angle of the floor is acting in an opposite way from what your brain thinks or something. Anyway, the little chair ride on the right the thing about how it works--because it looks like you're traveling upward, is that that's actually the top of the ride somehow! You can see from the girls leaning back, and also the girl trying really hard to pull the chair back to the beginning (it hooked in to the "bottom" there) that it was really hard to stand and walk in the room.

If that room wasn't enough, we moved on to a room of forced perspective: the same illusion they used in LOTR to make the hobbits look small. They videoed you in the room and then had it play on a 2 min delay so that you could watch it back. Essentially how it works is that at one end the ceiling is really low and the other the ceiling/door is really high. The blocks on the floor are shifted to compensated your sight and make it look like the corners are a normal distance apart, but they aren't. The room is slanted so that the far corner is not only larger, but also a little bit further back than the viewing point.

The final part of Puzzle World is definitely the most frustrating, but also the coolest. There's a whole huge maze that you can either do the "hard" version or "easy" version. The goal is to get to the four corners (each with a different color tower) in a certain order. The thing is though, that the paths are very deceiving. You inevitably have to go the long way around to get to the one you need to start at, and then the pats that look like they're a path turn out to be dead ends, or just make you go in a circle. The most frustrating thing was that the way the boards were set up that divided the paths it made it look like there might be a new path coming up, but it was really just that a board was set back a little bit. We got tangled up, and frustrated, but finally we figured out the maze and after we found our way to the first tower it was easy peasey getting to the others (of course we chose the hard path).

The rest of my time in Wanaka was really just beautiful. We wandered along a path by the lake for part of the day, met up with Keith in town for happy hour, played bananagrams for several hours, then went back and made dinner together and talked and played cards until late into the night. It was a great cultural and just human experience. The next morning Mary Ann and I continued to wander along the lake path and back until I had to catch my bus in the afternoon. There's so much more that I wanted to try and do in Wanaka that someday I'll have to find my way back! Until then I'm just going to share some photos!