While I was researching our trip to Plettenberg Bay I came across Plett Puzzle Park. So off we went, hoping to re-create the awesome day we had with our friends in Ottawa.
We fell a bit short in our re-creation, as we dearly missed the companionship of our friends, but the park was a really unique and enjoyable adventure.
There are 2 primary attractions to Plett Puzzle Park. The first is a 3D maze. At each corner is a different coloured tower (blue, green, yellow and red). You start at the centre of the maze and are given a blue triangular prism and told to find the blue tower and insert the prism into the puzzle box. The blue box kicks out a green prism of a different shape, then you need to do the same at the green and yellow towers. At the red tower you are presented with a round disc containing all 4 colours to prove that you completed the maze. The maze consists of dead ends and 3 double sided bridges to go up and down Here's what it looked like. You can just see the peak of the blue tower over the top of the bridge.
Here's DD and DH getting the yellow cylinder from the green box.
Larger groups are divided into teams and you are meant to race against each other. It was DS #1 and #2 and I (well really I was taking more pictures than helping) and DD and her daddy on the other team. DS #1 is dyslexic. His brain works differently than most of the population. It doesn't do sequences, as in turn right here turn left there, or these letters go together, in this order, to make a word. His brain sort of sees the big picture in 3 dimensions. So while reading and writing in a sequential linear fashion are a huge challenge for him, this 3D maze was easy peasy. He dragged DS #2 around showing him where to go. He didn't have to look down from the bridge like I did to try and figure it out in sequence. I can't really describe it, he just knew which way to go to get to places and he didn't put too many paces wrong. It was pretty awesome. He was totally in his element and he was done in about 20 min. The average, we were told is 45min. to an hour. Adding my help, DH, DD and I finished in about 40 min. Thankfully there was a kids area in sight of the bridge that DS #1 and #2 could play at while we plodded along.
The second big attraction was the forest maze. This was a set of 9 rather ingenious puzzle boxes interspersed along a 1km trail through indigenous forest. Each puzzle box was different. The puzzles were hidden on the underside of a board that became the top of a box. When you flipped the board up, a timer started a 5 min. count down and the pieces required to solve the puzzle became accessible. There was a hint, but if you lifted it up you forfeited the token you could receive for solving it in 5 min. Once you got the puzzle right the timer stopped and a token dropped out of the side of the puzzle box. Get 7 out of 9 tokens and they gave you one free drink. One of the puzzles was a map of South Africa. One was a sudoku type puzzle. One was true or false questions and one was a move the matchsticks type puzzle. We solved 7 of 9 by ourselves and because we were the only visitors that morning one of the staff joined us and helped on the other two. So we had all 9 tokens to turn in.
The last section of the park is a kids area with a smaller maze and a survivor type rope course.
All in all a terrific morning. After a brief stop for lunch at the restaurant next to the Mohair Mill Shop the kids were sufficiently tired and blissfully quiet on the 2 hour ride home.
Next Post - South African Vernacular
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