Maz NZ and Oz

Before leaving Fox Glacier, I had to bring Genny and Denise to Gillespie's beach to watch the sunset as I had done when I was on the West Coast with Owen and Eunice back in September. Because of being upside down, the sunset had moved further south over the summer, which only occured to me when I noticed the position of the sun in comparison to the pictures I had taken the last time I was there.The following day, we headed to Wanaka and there was plenty of spots along the way where I just had to stop the car and take pictures.Once we checked into our hostel in Wanaka, Denise and I headed for puzzling world, a tremendously fun museum of optical illusions and conundrums.There's even a fun maze there which took me ages to figure out. In this picture I'm happily smiling for the camera 'cos I've just found one of the towers... but Denise assured me that she spotted me a few times with "a big thick confused head on ya"The next day, we took part in one of the most fun activities of the holiday in Cordrona Valley, a few miles south of Wanaka. For the first time for any of us, we went horse-riding. They gave us the most docile horses, so they were suitable for complete beginners like us. My horse was called Smoke, Gen's was Frosty and Denise's was called Chocco.

Close to the horse-trekking centre, the is a fence covered in bras.... I'm not kidding. Apparently, somewhere in the North Island, there is a 'shoe fence' where passers-by feel somehow compelled to remove their footwear and attach it to a fence for some reason. Anyway, a man in Cordrona was inspired by this and decided to establish a fence where women (and sometime men, I suppose... but probably mostly women) feel compelled to remove their bras and leave them there. You might think that this was a crazy idea and that very few women (or, of course, men) would go along with this... but you'd be wrong.....

Another interesting discovery we made about Wanaka was that it is New Zealand's ice-cream capital (or at least we decided that it was). Lots and lots of yummy ice-cream flavours to choose from, so we had to give them all a go... in the interest of research, of course.