A-maze-ing Fun at Plett Puzzle Park
Visitors to Plettenberg Bay know about the Blue Flag beaches, the restaurants, and incredible adventure activities but how about a mind-bending experience in a maze and puzzle park that is the only one of its kind in the country?
With Plett summer coming up, the beautiful white sandy beaches will be the nirvana they always are, but for those overcast days, or perhaps when you are sunburnt and need a day off the beach, there is a perfect activity for the whole family – aged from one to 99.
The Plett Puzzle Park and maze is nestled in the Crags just outside Plettenberg Bay – and it should be on your to-do list when visiting Plett and the Garden Route.
My first visit was very humbling. I thought a maze and a puzzle park would be a doddle in the park (children can do it right?), but I was dead wrong.
Plett Puzzle Park offers fun and games for the whole family, but at the same time it’s not just child’s play. There are two main activities at the park which include the first life-size 3D-Maze in South Africa and the Forest Puzzle Walk appropriate for people aged one to 100 – so claims the Puzzle Park! For little children there is a mini-maze.
We did the 3D-Maze first and while it’s described as a “challenging and enjoyable life-sized puzzle,’ it turned out to be much more than that. The maze is a 40x40m (1600m2) timber-planked maze comprising ground-level passages as well as upper-level bridges which span over the passages below. It all looks tame enough, but that’s only until you are actually lost in it.
It works like this: You get given a token key for the first corner and then once you get there, you get another token to find the next corner and so it goes until you have found all four corners. Trick here is the sequence. If you happen to find the blue corner and you have the red token, it doesn’t count! And believe me it is almost impossible to retrace your steps because all the wood looks the same, all the pathways look the same. and there is no way of cheating, making it all a somewhat mind-boggling exercise!
Apparently, this maze takes about 45 minutes to complete. It took us well over an hour to emerge from the labyrinth of confusion feeling suitably humbled. Thank goodness it didn’t take us three hours which is the record time that anybody has been lost in there! What I can recommend is proper walking shoes, water and lots of patience. I had my exercise watch on, and it was only almost 10 000 steps later, many of them going up and down the steps to the bridges, that we were done, home and dry.
I can imagine people panicking especially if hungry, thirsty or in a hurry. There are emergency exits for people who lose the plot and need to be released, but we are told that children are the ones who panic, not adults. We couldn’t help noticing some graffiti carved onto the wooden planks in the maze, one saying HELP and another an expletive *&% in Afrikaans! At the exit someone has engraved the words RIP. However, be prepared for a challenge & you’ll have lots of fun.
Next, we ventured into the Forest Puzzle Walk, which is about 350m long as it meanders through natural forest and fynbos, thinking it must surely be easy because apparently kids from seven years old successfully conquer this activity. Some Grade 7 kids did it in 15 minutes, but the average time is about an hour.
Here the aim is to beat the nine boxes which have word, shape, number and general knowledge puzzles that come your way. But, the thing here is that only five minutes are allocated for each activity before the lid of the game slams down rudely when your time is up. And for each exercise you crack within the five minutes, you get given a red token reward making this all quite competitive – after all who wants to be seen returning an almost empty bucket symbolic of your mental mastery?
The purpose of these puzzles is some mental gymnastics, creative and strategic thinking, frustration, laughter and some adrenalin because you are working your brain against the clock. It’s also a test of your relationship if you do it with someone because obviously nobody tackles a puzzle the same way and it’s easy to blame each other when the heat is on.
There is a restaurant with wooden benches in a park setting. It’s a lovely peaceful place to stop between the two activities to refuel! There are also all sorts of wooden puzzles here for children to play with.
The Plett Puzzle Park is great for all ages, for special family outings, for birthdays, corporate team-building or just for an outing – and they offer discounted rates to group bookings of 10 or more people. It is situated about 10km from town on the N2 towards the Crags/Port Elizabeth, where you see the signposted entrance.It’s easy to spend half a day at the Puzzle Park, but while you are there, it’s well worth making a day of it. The South African Animal Sanctuary Alliance (SAASA) consisting of Monkeyland, Birds of Eden and the Jukani Wildlife Sanctuary are right there and you can buy all your tickets together.
