On a sunny Saturday morning, out for a drive in the countryside, we drove into a little town called Cowaramup, hoping to find a quite cafe with a sleepy view of the main street and a yummy breakfast menu.
The town’s name originates from Cowara, the Australian Indigenous word for a bird, the Purple-crowned Lorikeet. The town was originally created around timber milling, but now it is best known for it’s wines, beef and DAIRY products (mainly cheeses and chocolates). A perfect combination if you ask me!
But of course, the amazing coincidence is that… the town’s name has the word “cow” in it, and it is in the middle of the diary industry.
So its nickname is COW TOWN.
As I said, we were looking for a small cafe with a relaxed vibe. But when we pulled up in the main street, we found something very odd instead.
The whole town was decorated with cow spots. There were life-sized statues of cows all over the streets, sidewalks and gardens. There were cow balloons, cow streamers, cow posters and cow banners everywhere!
There were PEOPLE dressed up as cows! They were everywhere! Hundreds of them.
Adults and their children were in cow onesies!? All walking along… acting like nothing was unusual at all.
My children were dumbfounded into silence. Their eyes twitched and the cogs in their brains slowly told them that something veeeeery strange was going on.
One of my sons said “Mum, this is like a weird movie, right?”
It turned out that we had arrived on the day of the town’s annual country fair, named “Deja Moo – an Udderly Legend-Dairy Cowntry Fair”. It was so cute and fun! There were food stalls, arts and crafts, bouncy castles, “moovellous milking demonstrations”, “cowabunga boot throwing contests”, “cow pat lotto”… and more cow puns I’ve ever seen in one place.
But why was everyone dressed up as cows?
We quickly found out from a cafe owner (who was serving me while wearing a cow suit) that only minutes before, the town smashed the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people dressed as cows, with a total 1,352 people in cow suits! Apparently the record was previously held by the town of Fairfax in Virginia, USA, where 470 people dressed as cows. They went to the trouble of having a unique number for each and every cow suit! This is pretty good going for a town with an official population of less that 1000 people. I guess they got help from the neighbours.
How cool! I love seeing small communities come alive and get involved in a project that brings everyone together! There was such a wonderful sense of celebration and happiness in the air! I was very moo-ved.
(Sorry, I couldn’t help it)
