Central Park scavenger hunt review: New York smartphone tour

The Central Park scavenger hunt by Urban Adventure Quest makes travellers look at New York City’s most famous park differently.

This review of the Urban Adventure Quest Central Park scavenger hunt is part of a special New York City collection created to celebrate the new direct flights from Sydney to New York. To find many more great things to do in New York City, head this way.

Central Park scavenger hunt

At the time of writing, the Urban Adventure Quest Central Park scavenger hunt costs from $20.52. To skip the review and just book your Central Park scavenger hunt, book here.

Review of the Urban Adventure Quest Central Park scavenger hunt

Ordinarily, I’d probably not give the Maine Monument a second glance. It’s a shiny, gold, pompous thing on the entrance to New York’s Central Park. But now I have to read the inscriptions on it to find my next destination. In doing so, I have my first encounter with the story of the battleship Maine. This ship sank in Havana harbour, taking 260 American sailors with it.

Tackling Central Park as a treasure hunt forces you to look at it differently. You find yourself honing in on details that you might otherwise miss in order to move on to the next task and get the highest score possible. The game is a wheeze dreamed up by Urban Adventure Quest. The company sells similar mobile phone-based treasure hunts in cities across the US.

Which New York City experiences to book

There are hundreds of great experiences in New York City. But we’d strongly advise against bus tours (unless you like sitting in traffic for hours). Try these instead.

Boat tours: Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island | Sunset and city lights cruise | Complete round-Manhattan island cruise.
Get up high: Top of the Rock | Edge Observation Deck | Summit One Vanderbilt | Manhattan helicopter tour | One World Observatory | Empire State Building.
Museum entry tickets: 9/11 Memorial Museum | The Guggenheim | Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum | American Museum of Natural History.
Food tours: Chelsea Market and High Line | Lower East Side | Chinatown and Little Italy.
Central Park: Central Park carriage ride | Pedicab tour | Central Park Zoo.
Multiple attraction savings: New York CityPass.

How the Central Park scavenger hunt works

It puts the clues and puzzles together using information that’s already in the park. This can be as simple as counting the number of baseball diamonds at the Heckscher Ballfields. Or as tricksy as using Scrabble scores of particular words on plaques or finding exactly what angle a photograph was taken from.

It’s fun – especially for competitive types who hate losing five points when they mess up using a cipher to decode the name of a location. But it also shows off just how much has gone into making Central Park what it is.

When was Central Park founded?

Central Park was founded in 1857. The park was meticulously sculpted and deliberately designed almost to the level of each blade of grass by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux.

Every nook and cranny has a purpose. And over the years gaps have been filled by memorials, monuments, activity hubs and other quirky oddities. Most of them have a story behind them.

Central Park carousel

The carousel, where I need to identify the four types of horses identified in a poem on a stone post next to it, is gloriously old-fashioned.

But the kids gleefully riding on it have a more enjoyable time than the blind mule and horse on a treadmill that used to power it from an underground pit.

Similarly, the statue of a dog that children seem to love climbing on turns out to be Balto. He was the lead dog of a sled team that travelled six hundred miles through Arctic blizzards and over rough ice to deliver medicine to a stranded Alaskan settlement struck down by a diptheria epidemic.

My eyes are opened to yet another previously unknown story while I’m trying to solve a word search using the four letter words on Balto’s memorial plaque.

The statue of Balto the dog in Central Park, New York City. Photo by David Whitley/ Australia Travel Questions.

Underrated Central Park attractions

The game successfully manages to change the mindset. Soon enough, I’m looking at smaller details even if they’re not required to solve a clue.

I’m looking up at the gorgeous glazed tiles of the Bethesda Terrace Arcade, stumbling across a statue of Hans Christian Andersen while taking a wrong turn and scrambling up rocky outcrops. It’s not exactly a walk in the park – it’s far more fun than that.

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