Tourist Attraction: Puzzling World Lake Wanaka

Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World near Lake Wanaka, New Zealand is a unique tourist attraction. At the beginning, it is only built as a maze in 1973. After a couple years later, the place has been expanded into a puzzle café built with many puzzles things inside the area to accommodate tourists who seek for entertainment. Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World actually is an illusion complex and puzzling world themed around an illusionary sculpture garden. Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World is located at the breathtaking Southern Lakes region of the South Island of New Zealand just two kilometers from Lake Wanaka near the town. It is attracting over 160000 visitors each year. Puzzling World is possibly the most photographed place in New Zealand.

Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World is the world's first "modern-styled" puzzle building. Attractions on Puzzling World are including The Great Maze (Labyrinth), Hologram Hall, Hall of the following faces, Ames Room, Sculptillussion Gallery and tilted house. Besides a place to play for any puzzle things, it also has four different illusion rooms, a puzzle centre/café and a Gift Shop with eccentric architecture. When we enter the Puzzling World, the first building object we will see is the “leaning tower of Wanaka” that could stand tilted 53 degrees above the ground and looks like against gravity as you can see on the picture below. Puzzling World is set in an area around 7 acres and has trees and gardens at the entrance of Puzzle World.

The Great Maze is the world's first modern-style mazes. It was built as a labyrinth where it has a complicated path or interconnecting passages and it is difficult to find one's way. The paths are actually making people confuse to find the way out after walking through the confusing paths because of its arrangement. The length of the path on the puzzling world is approximately 1.5km. If there is any person who enters the paths and difficult to find a way out and give up, there are emergency doors they can use as the easy way out.

When entering the Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World you will find the hologram hall where it's designed to fascinate and make you dazzled. The hologram hall is designed by known Wanaka architect Sarah Scott and Nelson sculptor, also Derek Ball is the man who made faces for the hologram hall. At the hologram hall, you will find many collections of fascinating and amazing 3-D holograms. You will find the hologram hall when you entering the Illusion Rooms of Stuart Landsborough's Puzzling World.

Then, you can move into the Hall of following faces where you will find 168 famous faces in the form of 3D sculpture. This 168 famous faces will follow you around as long as they still can see you. This 168 famous faces can follow human movements from left to right, up and down. Try to feel the thrill as if you are followed by many faces that always stalking you even though you stand in every corner. Well, if something can move, it means they look alive and perhaps, it created a sensation that a bit scary.

Then, continue your trip to the Ames Forced Perspective Room. At the Ames Forced Perspective Room, you will definitely stun with the illusion techniques that used in this room where your body can shrink and expand when you entering this room. It would be better if you enter this room with your friend so that you can see the result where your friend can shrink and grow when moving around this room. The illusion technique that is used in the Ames room is the technique where it's also used in the Lord of the Rings trilogy where they can create tall people and little people.

The SculptIllusion Gallery is a project that was built at a cost of approximately $2.5 million. The gallery has illusion sculptures, moving and living walls, floating objects and 3D illusions. The SculptIllusion gallery stretched at 530 square meters. The SculptIllusion Gallery is the largest illusion room on Lake Wanaka Puzzling World. The attractions on this gallery are included a bench seat that looks impossible to occupy because it looks has no leg braces. There is a vase illusion where we actually can see two shapes of faces in every side of the vase, a cube illusion where we can see a cube inside a cube or vice versa and much more. There is also a house (called tilted house) that has a tilted angle 15 degrees which we will think that it seemed impossible to get through it so you have to keep going straight.