Mountain vistas and Queenstown fun

On Thursday we drove southeast from Oamaru to Wanaka and then on to Arrowtown near Queensland. Taking our time, we enjoyed the scenery along the way, as we drove past aqua and blue coloured lakes with impressive hydroelectric dams, meandering around foothills and over mountain passes. The towns were few and far between, and there were little sign of civilisation among the hills and mountains. As we weaved our way around the surrounding hills, we marvelled that the hills were mostly covered in the same tan coloured bushes. It created an unusual but pleasing colour scheme. The mountains were always in the distance - with their snow caps, they were a beautiful sight.

In Wanaka we visited Puzzling World, showcasing optical illusions and technological trickery that had us scratching our heads. The room of holograms had a number of high quality holograms. In the room of faces, all four walls were covered in famous people's faces that moved to follow us as we circled around the room. I particularly liked the room where one person had to crouch in one corner and looked like a giant while someone else stood in the other corner and looked like they had shrunk down to Alice in Wonderland size. My favourite exhibit was a sloped room you could walk through discombobulated, and play with exhibits like a pool table and ball that made it appear that objects were rolling and flowing uphill. Afterward we tried our luck in an outdoor maze, with bridges over parts of the maze where we had to get to each of the four corner towers to complete the challenge. I think Catheleen and I tried for almost an hour before giving up. The kids did the best and managed to find three of the four towers. We all had a great time at this place.

We next drove on, stopping at a few viewpoints along the way, and eventually descended from the top of a mountain pass to the valley below and our next stop, Arrowtown. It's a small town of 2,000 residents that was once a larger boom town in the late 1800's during a short lived gold rush. The town hit a low point in the 1960's with only 200 residents before bouncing back, mainly due to tourism. The town's Main Street contained many original wooden buildings from the gold rush days, and new development is in tune with this theme. It's a nice picturesque town surrounded by wooded hills and rocky mountains. Tomorrow we might try our hand at panning for gold in the stream.

On Friday we went to nearby Queenstown, home to an impressive number of high excitement adventure sports like bungee jumping, paragliding, and riverboat rides. We started out with a visit to the Fear Factory, which was really fun and well done. The kids wisely decided to sit this one out while Catheleen and I tested our nerve against the haunted house. The attendant highlighted how many people chickened out part way through. The 20 minutes through the maze was in total darkness, and the monsters throughout would constantly startle us when they appeared in front of our faces, screaming or howling for brief seconds with perhaps flashlights to light up their faces. They would often brush up against us in the dark, or run their hand on the back of our neck or pant legs. Catheleen, being shorter, had to go in front and my hands had to be on her shoulders as we crept along. So Catheleen got it from the front and I got from the back. Was a crazy haunted house. My adrenalin was up by the time we finished and popped out of the exit. The kids said they got a kick at hearing us scream. Definitely the best haunted house I've gone through.

Later we did a family activity called the Odyssey Sensory Maze. John had a lot of questions at first for the attendant to ensure there were no 'jump scares', as he calls it. After the attendant said that a two year old had gone through the maze that morning, John felt compelled to concede that it couldn't be scary. We had the whole place to ourselves, which was great, so we really goofed around in each of the sensory rooms. There was a room piled high with exercise balls where we could either bury ourselves in, or else try to sit at the top of the pile. There was a balloon room which was great for balloon fights, and a bridge over a glass room which looked like there were stars to infinity in all directions. The bungee cord room was like something out of the Mission Impossible movie, where we tried to get through the maze of multi-coloured bungee cords stretched out in a three dimensional barrier like laser beams. The most fun room for me was the mirror maze, where we tried to work our way through the dead ends to find the exit. It was fun just wandering around and getting fooled when we thought we were meeting each other only to discover we were looking in a mirror instead.

Here's Elizabeth at a mountain pass.