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.

Yellow eyed penguins and steam punk

We've slowed down the last couple of days. I think it was because the weather turned for the worse. On Monday we had such a beautiful day with warm dry winds blowing in from the north. Yesterday the weather changed to blustery, cold and wet weather coming in from the south. Which is strange to me, like many other things. The days are getting longer, the sun tracks in the northern part of the sky from right to left, cold weather comes from the south, and I'm driving on the left. All opposite from what to expect in Canada.

Oamaru has an impressive Main Street with large imposing white limestone buildings on a broad avenue. Some of the buildings are very beautiful with Corinthian columns and ornate facades, all built in the late 1800's when this place was booming with profits from a gold rush and other businesses. Now the town is much smaller, and I found it strange to find so few people on the street, which was built at a time when the future seemed brighter. I am told that while other towns were pulling down some of these old but impressive buildings in the 60's and 70's, Oamaru was so bankrupt that they didn't have the money to do so. Good thing, because now days the buildings have great heritage value. Also, the 60's and 70's were not a great time for architecture, in my view, with its minimalist rectangle shaped buildings in vogue.

The town of Oamaru is now one sleepy place. We learned this soon enough after trying unsuccessfully to find a café that was open after 4:00 p.m. Just about every attraction runs between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. I suppose we have only ourselves to blame for only seeing one attraction per day, since we're getting up so late.

Yesterday we visited a Steam Punk museum in Oamaru, which was a blast. I didn't know anything about this science fiction sub-genre until I saw it. It's supposed to combine steam powered machines, sometimes from the Victorian era, in a fantasy alternate future. We saw imaginations gone wild with locomotives turned into flying machines, a crazy oversized chopper motorcycle made out of farm machines and other parts, and other bizarre machines made from mixing parts. My favourite exhibit was a glass room where the hanging lights turned different colours as the music played, transporting us to another dimension. Every direction we looked was saw copies of ourselves out to infinity. Very freaky.

Today was John's 13th birthday so he decided what to do. We ended up at a park next to the shore where a white sandstone sculpture competition was going on. The kids enjoyed the play structures next to the sculptures, especially the zip-line and a large wooden hamster wheelchair which we could get spinning very fast when we walked and then ran in it. The trick was trying to stop it. Usually one of us would fall first and slide along while the others kept running. It was a hoot!

Later we had lunch in a café with nice views of the shore. It reminded me of Nova Scotia on this cool, cloudy day with a view of the sandy and rocky shore, with a variety of fishing boats moored in the harbour. Later in the afternoon we went to see the movie Everest in 3D. True to the Kiwi theme of this leg of our trip, some of the characters in the movie were from New Zealand. The movie was pretty good by the way.

In the evening we went for sushi at a local Japanese restaurant and then later went to see some yellow-eyed penguins waddle on shore at dusk looking to find their nests for the night. They are a bit shy so we were lucky to see them. I understand they are endangered so hopefully they are not disturbed and allowed to flourish.

Here's John about to blow out the candles.