I had a day off work today, and needed distraction. I decided to drive to Mystery Creek, a few hours south of home, to attend the first day of the annual show which is held there.

The show itself did not interest me, apart from being a good excuse to spend a day driving around the countryside. Naturally, driving for several hours and then turning around and driving home again would be pointless and weird, whereas doing the same thing with the excuse of visiting a show in between is not.

Mystery Creek is the largest agricultural exhibition in the Southern Hemisphere and is literally a temporary town in the middle of nowhere -- it covers more area than most actual rural towns do. Most of the towns I passed through on the way to it, in fact, could have been dropped into one corner. The show runs for four days and consists of about a squillion tents and stands, selling and promoting everything which has anything at all to do with farming, and many things which don't. There are also various exhibitions, performances, and competitions. Like I said, I wasn't expected it to be interesting in itself. Surprisingly enough, it was. I spent about four hours there, walking around and looking at stuff, and occasionally eating deep-fried things on sticks as per international showground regulations.

I watched one competition, chainsaw sculpture. That's using a chainsaw to make a sculpture out of a log, not making sculptures out of chainsaws. The competitor I watched was making a life-sized statue of a man with a bowler hat, a suit, and holding something unidentifiable and lumpy in one hand.

There was also an area where you could see the entries for the Inventors' Competition, and talk to the inventors. All of these were commercially viable ideas and many of them were pretty amazing. The one I liked best was a wind strength and direction measuring device which could be dropped anywhere and then contacted from anywhere else to get the readout. It was made from the inside of a cheap cellphone and various bits of homemade stuff. It may not be obvious why this is such a great idea, until you consider that many New Zealand farms are extremely large and extremely remote -- in the South Island, often a day's drive or more from one boundary to the other -- and a lot of light plane and helicopter work is involved. So, if you want to do some spraying up at one end of the farm, you might get there (at the cost of an hour's fuel and/or plane hire) only to find the wind in that area is unsuitable. Hence the invention. I thought it ruled.

I then spent what felt like a year nodding and agreeing politely with the inventor of a new kind of dog harness, who was at least nine-tenths insane by anybody's standards and had many strongly held views on a wide variety of topics, none of which I particularly cared to hear about. When he started telling me about his plan to extract useable fibres from human excrement (I think), I gave up being polite and fled the scene.

Then I watched a bullwhip maker demonstrate slashing things in bits and flicking things into the air and similar tasks unrelated to everyday farm use.

I also watched two bald guys spraypainted orange from head to toe and wearing orange overalls, who were the mascots of a chainsaw company, playing spraypainted orange guitars and singing "That's Amore" in extremely good two-part harmony. This was one of the ten weirdest things I have ever seen in my life.

Then I went for a five-minute helicopter ride to see the area and the river from above, which rocked as much as all things to do with helicopters rock. Which is A LOT.

I also got a couple of touristy stops in on the way to and from the show. Going there, I decided to FINALLY stop at a Historical Place roadside marker which I have driven past approximately ten billion times in my life. A short walk from the roadside, I found out that it was a field containing grassed-over trenches, redoubts and other fortifications from the Battle of Rangiriri Pa in 1863. Which tribes fought this battle and who won is still a mystery to me, but the trenches were interesting.

On the way back, I went via the town of Te Aroha, because there were some thermal springs there which I hadn't been to before. They turned out to be very different from what I expected, and far more interesting. Instead of the standard modern hot-pools complex, it was a beautifully restored Edwardian spa town. Each mineral spring had its own adorable little building, spread out over a large park area; there was a large bathhouse, a large public hot swimming pool, a set of private spa rooms, little drinking fountains in their own gazebos and so forth. I tried the natural soda-water drinking fountain. It was very weird to be drinking fizzy, salty, soda water and knowing it was coming out of the ground instead of being made in a factory somewhere. It tasted odd but not unpleasant. Then I paid $8 to rent a private soda-water spa pool for half an hour. It was hot enough that half an hour was sufficient, but it was very relaxing. The water felt tingly and quite different to normal water. After that, I walked up one of the bush tracks to see the hot soda water geyser, which was supposed to erupt to a height of 200 feet every 30 minutes; later, the woman at the information centre told me it wasn't erupting because it periodically gets blocked up by its own soda crystals and they need to go stick a plunger down the hole or something. This is a job I would not personally want.

And then I drove home.

Brunnen-"almost falling asleep many times along the way"G