Cougar Biking: NAMPO – An agricultural show of epic proportions

It’s amazing where my job takes me. Never would I have thought of going to an agricultural show in the middle of nowhere, for even more than half a day. As part of my job of promoting the Can-Am Spyders, I support the various dealers in whichever way I can. Our dealer in Klerksdorp, Speed Bike, has a stand at NAMPO and has had for years. Once you manage an approval to have a stand there, you do everything in your power to keep it. Rules are strictly applied and the waiting list for stands is five years long. If you transgress a rule, you can be assured of losing your stand, so we were all read the riot act to make sure we toed the line.

“Piet Spoed” van Zyl, the owner of Speed Bike, doesn’t sell only two-wheeled bikes, but deals in ATVs and Spyders as well. For NAMPO, Piet gathers as many hands as he can get and I was one of the worker bees for the week. When I was told about the show and the scale of displays and the number of visitors, I wanted to know what they were smoking. And then when they told me how the farmers arrive at the show – light airplanes and helicopters – I wanted to smoke that stuff too.

I arrived at the show on Tuesday at around 10:30 – I stopped counting airplanes when I got to 20 because to carry on counting was pointless. There were eight helicopters, ranging from two-seaters to eight-seaters – I became a believer! From the minute I set foot on the stand I was busy, but at the end of the day was told that it was the quiet day – Wednesday was a bit busier. Well, THAT was an understatement! At any one time, there were 15 people at the Spyder stand, often more than that. Sitting down was not an option and I had to make do with one bottle of water the whole day. That night I fell into bed with just two Pro-Nutro breakfast bars as supper, I was just too tired to eat anything more complicated.

Of course the organisers could not have foreseen that the Wednesday was to be election day, so everybody was thoroughly unprepared for the number of visitors. By 10:00 the queue of cars was 35 km long and they had to close the gates, letting in one car only if one left. There were a total of 44 000 visitors through the gates just for the one day. I later heard that a bull at auction was sold for a record R8m. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to take a photograph of the number of airplanes and helicopters, but I was told that there were 45 and 25 respectively. The show was truly on an incomprehensible scale.

The show closed on Friday at 17:00 but I left at 14:00, stopping off for some North West biltong at a place called “Moerse Lekker Plek” which advertised “Flippen lekker biltong” – you just have to love the Afrikaans language!

NAMPO is known throughout the world, from the USA http://www.buyusa.gov/northdakota/nampo.html to Australia http://www.austrade.gov.au/EventViewBookingDetails.aspx?EventID=2756 . To read more amazing statistics about NAMPO, go to www.nampo.co.za .

Would I go again next year? You bet I will! Despite working so hard, I would not miss it for the world!

Two of the "smaller" tractors....