When I had been planning my route around the south island, I failed to notice that the line on the map between Franz Josef and Mount Cook was a footpath across the mountains, and not a road. Therefore Wanaka became our next destination.
The YHA hostel was fully booked for the first night – and so were the next three hostels I rang – so we checked into the Matterhorn South hostel and moved down the road to the YHA hostel for the second and third nights. The latter, named the Purple Cow, was much nicer as our dorm had its own kitchenette and bathroom.
On our way south, we took a small detour to visit the beautiful Lake Matheson. It took about an hour and a half to walk around it, and we took plenty of photos of the lake and its reflection of Mount Cook, New Zealand’s tallest mountain at 3,755m.
Wanaka’s selling point is its own lake, though the town is also surrounded by mountains. It was surprisingly busy for its size, and it emerged that the reason was that it was hosting an A&P (agricultural) show that weekend. It was the local equivalent of the Devon County Show.
Silvia and I walked around the town and had a drink near the lakefront before moving on to the Irish pub where we played pool, listened to the live music, ate steak and Guinness pizza and got free Guinness baseball caps. I also had a drink with Xinchen from China, who was our hostel roommate. Xinchen had come to Wanaka to sell handbags at the A&P show, and she gave me her spare exhibitor’s pass so I could get in for nothing.
The highlight of the A&P show, for me, was the Jack Russell Race, which was hilarious. I nearly missed it, so I wasn’t in a good position, but I saw around 60 dogs being lined up by their owners, ready to chase after a dead rabbit being dragged by a man on horseback. However, when the race began, although some of the dogs chased the rabbit, most of them ran all over the place in excitement. The organisers were still announcing lost and found Jack Russells over the loudspeaker half an hour later.
Wanaka is perhaps best known for its quirky attraction Puzzling World, which I had promised the STA Travel rep I would visit, although I didn’t attempt the maze. It featured a large display of 3D hologram pictures, including some amazing ones done with multiple exposures. The Hall of Following Faces freaked me out. It contained 168 faces of seven different famous people including Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill. It wasn’t just their eyes that followed you as you walked around the room – they seemed to turn their whole head in your direction. In the Ames Room, you could be a giant one moment and a dwarf the next, and then see the effect on screen afterwards. In the Tilted House, water seemed to flow uphill, and it messed with your mind. There were optical illusions all around the premises. It was a fun place.
In the hostel, I met Michaela, 28, from Germany. She knew, without me even having a shorthand pad out or asking a hundred questions, that I was a journalist. She said she could tell by my body language. This left me even more mystified than Puzzling World.