Hedge your bets on one of these five amazing mazes this weekend

Kids love them because they can run around like crazed terriers and adults do too, for the lovely gardens, the mental challenge…and the fact the kids are usually completely worn out. There’s plenty to choose from and here are five of our absolute favourites.

A trip down to the Mornington Peninsula is always a nice drive and if you take in the Enchanted Adventure Garden it’ll keep the kids occupied for hours. There are three bordered hedge mazes including one especially designed to challenge and entertain the really little ones. Better than that, there’s a plethora of tube slides and for extra cost there are tree-surfing and flying zip-line courses for old and young alike.

Adults will be happy enough to try a tasting at Bago Vineyards’ cellar door on this impressive spread inland from Port Macquarie. It might be worth going easy on the vino until after you’ve tackled the Bago Maze, NSW’s biggest maze (it covers 10,000 square metres) and accepted the challenge of finding a list of objects including musical instruments within. Devilishly tricky and formed from gorgeously maintained 2.3 metre-high lilly-pilly hedges, Bago Maze is a great excuse to get lost.

There’s so much to do on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast that the ten minute drive inland from Mooloolaba to Bellingham Maze is almost a holiday in itself. Star attraction is the star-shaped living hedge maze that covers 6400 square metres and is a real brain-bender. Then there are rope mazes, a tyre maze and all sorts of other giant sized puzzles. If that’s not enough, have a hit of mini-golf or collapse in the cafe for a cuppa.

To get an idea of how quirky this maze is, let’s try its full name. Tasmazia and the Village of Lower Crackpot is in Promised Land near the mural town of Sheffield. The Great Maze is massive and its hedges frustratingly dense, being planted back in 1987. But then there’s the Hampton Court and Hexagonal mazes, plus the aptly named Confusion Maze. Lower Crackpot is a model village one-fifth normal scale that adds further to the sense of unreality.

There are plenty of reasons to visit WA’s Margaret River region and if you still have a sense of child-like adventure, the Yallingup Maze is definitely one of them. Okay, it’s not huge at 1600 square metres, but because it’s been nailed together out of planks there’s been scope for diabolical dead-ends, bridges and towers, and you can’t ever see your way out. If nothing else, it’s a welcome break from all that wine-tasting, surfing and truffle-munching.

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