End of an exercise

The Southern Katipo Defence Force exercise that has been running for the past 3 weeks ended yesterday, so today they decided to hold an open day for the community to come and look at all the machinery, and talk to the personnel.  

We were on our way to Nelson, when we decided to turn around and go and have a look at this big helicopter.  At a cost of $80 million, it's a very impressive flying machine.  The Defence force have 10 of these in service, and 8 of the smaller helicopters (one of which you can see in the background of my photo.)  

After we had a look and talk, we headed off again to Nelson for the day.