Fieldays

In the spirit of truly immersing myself in New Zealand culture, we visited Fieldays, which is apparently the biggest agricultural trade show in the southern hemisphere. While that sounds really dull, it was actually a pretty fun day out! As well as all the farm machinery on sale, it was a kind of microcosm of the New Zealand way of life. One of the first things we saw was the tractor pulling drag race –

The police and the fire department also got involved:

We then checked out the “Timbersports” competition. This was a time trial that consisted of four tasks – cutting through a log with a chainsaw, standing on top of a log and chopping it in half with an axe, cutting a log with a traditional bow saw and chopping a log while standing on top of it!

The next stop was the performing sheep dogs – one of them had learned how to wrap himself in a blanket. We couldn't get a good shot of that unfortunately, so here he is standing on his trainer's back.

Toward the end of the day, the British Commission provided us with much needed free cups of tea (Twining’s no less!). As most of you will know, getting anything for free warms my heart, and all I had to do to claim it was pretend to be interested in investing in Cornwall. We also got plenty of food and booze samples, and ended up coming away with some cheese, beer and tea made in New Zealand.

There was a lot of charmingly agricultural prize draws to take part in, among which was “guess how many artificial cow teats are in the jar”. This is my personal favourite though – win one tonne of Magnesium Oxide!

We rounded off the day with a trip to the petting zoo, where we met a Kunekune pig (meaning “fat and round” in the Maori language, Te Reo).