Saturday, March 12, 2016 we headed to Western Springs Park for Pasifika.  It is a wildlife sanctuary surrounding a natural spring-fed lake, one of Auckland's early water supplies..  This was a much bigger and nicer area than where they held it last year.  Pasifika is where people from all the islands come and perform and sell their crafts.  It is a very big attraction here in New Zealand and happens every year at this time.

Map of the Western Springs Park.  All the places in red were where different countries were set up with their performing area, craft booths and food booths.

 

It was a beautiful setting with open fields, bridges, lakes and forestry areas.

There are so many really great trees here in New Zealand.  You can see some of the booths.  We arrived about 9:15 a.m. and some countries were not all set up yet.  We began in Tahiti.

Next stop was Tonga.  They had a couple of different bands from different churches.  This group was Methodist and the preacher opened with prayer, gave a talk (all in Tongan), shared some scriptures and then they sang some songs as the band played.

This tent, in the Tonga village, had someone of royalty in it.  Tonga has a Royal Family.  They sat separate and guarded from the regular group of people.

The lake here is right in the middle and had different villages set around it.

This was the Cook Island village.  They had some very nice and expensive pearls.

In the Samoa village there was a man and a woman getting a tattoo right there n front of everyone.  Did not seem very sanitary to us.  Reed had an interesting burger here and I had some pineapple bread (kind of like a round ball that was donut like)  They were both very good.

A different view of the lake.  They have very large, beautiful black swans here. 

This was the Niue village.  Nada is holding a picture of a woman making tapa clothe from the Tongan village that Reed wanted.












Tokelau Village, below, was the last one we visited.  They had a lot of different performing groups but not very many craft booths.  We had a great day and the weather was perfect.  So glad we went.

 

We left Pasifika around 12:30 p.m. and headed to the Kumeu Show.  It was basically a country fair.  It was about 20 minutes away from where Pasifika was being held.

First stop some food for lunch.  The food here was much more our style, junk food.  We had a potato, cut into very thin spiral slices, deep fried and salted on a stick.  YUM!

Looked just alike a county fair to us with rides, booths, food and animals.

The main reason we wanted to go to The Show was to watch the sheep shearers.  We probably watched them for two hours.  This is one of the veterans, close to 70 years old.  He was shearing his sheep in less than a minute and they had to do five in the finals.

As the contestants sheered, the girls picked up the wool and put it in these hug sacks.  One of the girls said they send it to be washed and they separate the lanolin from the wool.  Then the clean wool they ship someplace to be carded but I can't remember where she said.   The coarser wool gets shipped to China to be made into rugs and the finer lambs wool goes to Italy and France.

These were the younger professional shearers about age 25 to 55.  They sheared 20 sheep in the finals in 16 minutes.  They said they can shear 500 plus a day.  That is a lot of sheep.  It was fun to listen to the MC calling it just a like a race.  A new experience for us.

At 4:00 p.m. all the sheering was done and the fair closed at 5:00 so we walked over to the buildings with some of the animals.  Most of them were gone for the day.  These were some  beautiful Alpacas.

Nada and Elder and Sister Wilkins heading to the car.  What a full, fun day we were able to enjoy and we had beautiful weather all day.  Not too hot, but sunny and warm.
We headed home and got a few things done so we could have a calm Sabbath.

We have been so blessed to see so many different and exciting things here in New Zealand.  It seems like there is always something going on.

We work hard but we use our time off to play hard as well.  We hope you enjoyed our Island adventure and our Kumeu Show (fair) adventure with us today.

We know the Gospel is true and are so grateful to be able to serve here in the Pacific  We love you all.  Until next time, love Elder and Sister Spencer (Aka, Reed and Nada)