MADisON_veloCITY: The Day My Garmin Failed In Puzzling World

After spending another night at Fox Glacier, we had enough of other guests cooking antics in our lodge. Basically it was a cheap place to stay. But the way they prepared their dinner does not reflect a budget type of lifestyle. Imagine that someone can have the luxury of heating their plate in the oven before putting their “main course” on it. The next day, we started our journey down south to Queenstown. From Fox Glacier to our destination, we waded our way through mountaineous terrain once again.. With sharp bend and curvy road like Megan Fox, I felt like the main character in Initial D.

Han Ching’s sister recommended us to visit the Puzzling World at Wanaka. Thanks to discount voucher we had in our magazine we got a 20% discount for our entrance ticket. Just by the name of the place itself, it gives you an idea of what to be expected at this place. Well, it started out as just a maze back in 70s, but over the years it expanded to accommodate a "puzzling café" where guests could try out several puzzles, rooms with optical illusions, the Leaning Tower of Wanaka (which has a backwards clock) and other things. The Leaning Tower of Wanaka is, as the name implies, a tower that is seemingly impossibly balanced on one corner, making the whole structure lean at an angle of 53 degrees to the ground.

The operators of Puzzling World have for many years offered a monetary prize for anybody who can prove themselves to have psychic powers; all a potential winner needs to do is use their powers to locate a specific item located somewhere in Puzzling World's environs. To date the prize goes unclaimed, although there are many people have attempted the challenge. But what is that challenge?

The biggest challenge: A huge maze called Labyrinth in which the traveller must reach four towers while navigating the maze. And today Han Ching and I gonna claimed our fair share of the prize money. But first, since there is no toilet inside the maze, it is advisable to answer the nature call first at their ancient Rome toilet. Sorry girl’s toilet is separated however.

Basically, there are two challenges for this maze. The standard challenge is to find the four corner towers. Red, blue, yellow and green in any order then find your way back to the start again. The difficult challenge is you have to follow the pre-determined color sequence. We came all the way from Malaysia just to try out this maze. We are not going for an easy way out.

“Standard challenge is for kid. We are going for the difficult one of course”, I dared Han Ching.

But once we kick-started our challenge, the first tower we reached after 10 minutes was green which is not the first color of the pre determined sequence.

“You know what, judging from the fact that we need to drive down to Queenstown before 5PM, I think we give this maze a chance. We better change our mission”, I defended our stance to which Han Ching nodded steadfastly.

Because of that we reached our second tower, yellow tower easily. Normal maze is already confusing but with the inclusion of pedestrian bridge connecting each section to the other makes it further mind-boggling. By the time we reached our third tower which is the red tower, we were already into our 30 minutes of time and we were already half-dead. In 30 minutes I guessed we must had walked more than 4 round of stadium.

Ok. Just one more tower to go. We were already half way in duration taken of what other average person achieved. Inside the maze we made a lot of friends. After meeting them in another section, we got to see them within minutes at another section. All of us were chuckling, knowing each other was striving hard to complete the mission. I saw a couple in jovial mood at the beginning and then getting livid towards the end. I’m sure if we didn’t find the last tower, we might just be the next Angry Bird. At last, after working hard for another 15 minutes we reached our last tower after some good memorizing and much trying.

See, we were just on our 45 minutes and we found all the towers. But wait. Finding the four towers is one thing. Never crossed our mind that getting out from the maze to our starting point was the most time consuming and toughest yet. It is not as straightforward as if you back-tracked the path you took initially. Since we moved around so much, the trail in our mind has gone haywire.

We were embroiled over bad decision-making.

Frustration was clearly showing on our face.

Fatigue overcame our conscience.

Foul play began to override fair play.

Ahem, those last two pictures do not depict our real situation. We are people with high integrity and honesty who stick to our principles. Anyway, we’ve seen people raised the white flag and opt for emergency aka chicken exit along our way. It was quite tempting at first place.

I had to burst that bubble of thought. So, we got up to the tower. Look at the path leading to the exit. We divided the task of remembering the route and after much pondering, we plotted our way to the exit. Finally, we reached our entrance which is also the exit point for this crazy maze. Gee, never had I thought finding the exit could caused us the most time. 45 minutes from the last tower. Should there been a fire drill, this structure sure will fail the fire department test.