Wanaka & Queenstown

Wednesday June 14th – We got an early start today as we needed to get to Queenstown which would be about a 4 hour drive. As we headed out of Haast we pretty quickly began driving through snow and ice. It’s weird to think that in less than a week we will be in Cairns where we hope to be wearing shorts and our bathing suits!
I was a bit nervous driving on the icy, winding, two lane road, but everything went well. We stopped to take a few photos in the snow but for the most part just drove straight on until we got to a town called Wanaka. There we visited “The Puzzling World of Stuart Landsborough”. “Puzzling World” is full of eccentric shaped buildings and puzzling rooms. Some are world unique and the others could be world best (according to their website).
The moment you drive up you know you are approaching something really different. You cannot fail to notice the eccentric buildings. “The Leaning Tower of Wanaka” really catches your eye. In Italy they have a famous tower that leans a mere six degrees. This incredible leaning tower leans a remarkable fifty-three degrees and balances on one corner! Continuing the theme of eccentricity, the large clock on the tower actually runs backwards. It was started on the stroke of the millennium and is ticking backwards into the 20th century!
Once inside you can visit a variety of puzzling rooms. The “Ames Forced Perspective Room" uses the technique of illusion was used in “The Lord of the Rings” film to create tall people and little people. The shape of this room is totally distorted although when viewed from outside through a window, the room looks normal yet the people inside look either very tall or very short!
The “Hall of Following Faces” illusion room is where 168 giant models of famous faces seem to turn to follow you around the room, creepy. The “Illusion Tilted House” is a room tilted at an angle of fifteen degrees. All the displays inside are normal yet when you enter the room the illusion is so strong that your brain is convinced the room cannot be sloping. The brain straightens up the room at the expense of the displays that seem to hang at impossible angles. This one made me a little motion sick.
Sue and I had the best time at the diorama of the Roman baths, seen here.

After our stop we continued on to Queenstown, ate lunch and located a place to stay. We were delighted to find our hostel has wireless internet! What a luxury. We headed over to the airport to drop off our rental cars. As we are staying in Queenstown for two days and taking a bus trip tomorrow, we won’t need the cars anymore. We dropped the cars and took a bus back into town. Once we hopped off the bus I realized that I still had the rental car key in my hand! Scarier still, Sue took one look at me, reached into her pocket and pulled out her key! We called the office and they kindly agreed to pick up the keys at our hostel. Next we strolled around town and did some shopping. Queenstown is a cute, resort town with lots of shops and activities. In the winter skiing is the rage and in simmer boating on Lake Wakatipu is the thing to do. We had a leisurely afternoon then dinner at a local pizza joint. We arranged for our tour to Milford sound tomorrow, and spent part of the evening blogging and sharing all our photos.