Bahrni's Website

Martinborough Fair
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and... Dragons?
Saturday 5th March 2005

Despite having lived in New Zealand for nearly five months, almost half my working-holiday visa, until this weekend I hadn't actually managed to leave Wellington or its suburbs. This was primarily due to a lack of transport, which has now been resolved with the arrival of a 1981 Honda Civic. It might not look like much, but... that's because it isn't. But I've never been one of those guys that must have a 4-litre V12 shiny TadgerMobile. My first car was a Citroen Dyane and despite having the handling and power of a clockwork pram, it did everything I needed it to. It had wheels, a stereo, four seats and four doors. It was fun to drive and cheap and easy to maintain. Well, except for the stub pins. Those blasted stub pins! Every year they'd have to be replaced. A friend of the family who worked on Citroens for a living would be out there for hours with a blow torch, chisel and mallet trying to hammer the rotten things out of their housing and replace them. An awful, awful design. I'm assuming most people reading this will have no idea what the hell stub pins even are, and you may consider yourselves extremely fortunate.

Anyway, the point was that I've never had high-expectations from any automobile I've had, mostly due to their advanced age, dubious condition and extreme cheapness. This Honda Civic though is certainly the oldest and very nearly the cheapest vehicle I've yet owned. I'm cynically waiting for the engine to explode or the wheels to fall off, but so far (touches whole forests-full of wood), she's behaving herself perfectly.

This is fortunate, as the route out to Martinborough is not the easiest I've seen. I mean, it's not Arctic Tundra/Sahara Desert difficult, but with climbing and then descending the Rimutaka Range into the Wairarapa region, it's steep, vertiginous and full of blind hairpin bends. The sort that seem to suddenly expel oncoming lorries occupying three-quarters of the road when you attempt them. Which, given one side of the road is a sheer rockface and the other is a terrifying plunge into a tree-speckled abyss, is always a fun way to keep the heart-rate up, the speed down and the attention focused.

The views from the top of the Rimutaka are spectacular though, sadly not done justice by the photo at the top left of this page. I'm come to realise that such views never are. With great height and distance, only being there in person generates the necessary sense of perspective. Photos, no matter how detailed, always seem rather flat and unimpressive compared to the reality. However, in this case, a photo is the best you're going to get.

Eventually though, and with the help of my trusty GPS and it's fantastically detailed New Zealand maps, we arrived in Martinborough. Actually we arrived on the road leading to Martinborough and with nearly two kilometres to our destination, both sides of the road were already lined solidly with cars. That's what we get for turning up mid-morning I guess instead of early. The walk was pleasant enough, though I was less enthralled hours later as we trudged wearily back again, in my case carrying a heavy lump of concrete. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Martinborough is a fairly smallish town, practically a village, but it was hard to get much impression of what the place is like throughout the rest of the year as today it was crammed like Princes Street at Hogmanay. I expected some stalls and a bunch of people milling about, but I hadn't quite bargained on the sheer masses of humanity that apparently arts and crafts can attract in New Zealand. Everyone from the well-to-do down to the Kiwi equivalent of neds were in evidence, with stalls crowding the central square, it's park and most of the immediately surrounding streets. The stalls were an eclectic mix of the practical, the pretty and the bizarre, with thankfully none of the tables of nasty plastic crap that seem to constitute a sizable chunk of "markets" can in Scotland. No cheap plastic guns, dodgy CDs and knock-off designer goods were in evidence that I could discern, and I'm fairly sure that I saw every stall there was in the couple of hours we spent there. One chap was selling outdoor furniture made of gigantic slabs of wood which was expensive but an absolute work of art (sadly I didn't get a picture), whilst a nearby stall was selling pink floral wellington boots, presumably for the fashion-concious lady gardener or gay man with a sense of the theatrical.

At the other end of the spectrum a friendly stall holder with a table loaded with the clean and elegantly poised skeletal remains of dozens of creatures was more than happy to discuss his charges to any interested party. I was quite taken with the skeleton of a New Zealand Black-Backed Gull for my brother, but quickly realised it would be almost impossible to get it back to the UK for him, so I settled for a photo (you can see it on the left of this page). On the fringes of the park a stall was showing what the expansively minded individual could do with the humble carrot, given enough time and, presumably, carrots. Carrot sauce, carrot preserves, carrot chutney... the list (and jars) went on and on in a manner that beggared belief. I actually intended to get some purely just for a talking point, but in the end I was distracted by a stall of pottery dragons that housed hidden incense burners. Made of clay, their bodies leading up through to their nostrils were hollow, allowing a nicely realistic (if a dragon can be classed as realistic) trail of smoke to issue forth. They were sculpted with such an amiable expression that I decided I had to have one. Whilst rather heavy, they still weren't as heavy as my other purchase, the aforementioned large lump of concrete.

It's actually a... well, a torch I suppose I'd have to class it. A semi-spherical foot-wide lump of white concrete with a hollow in the middle to hold a tin of gel-like fuel, it sits on the ground and flames lick from the centre in a pleasing and warming display. Reasoning that it was both practical, providing both light and warmth on a chilly evening in the garden as well as being rather nifty-looking, I eventually talked myself into buying it for what I shall laughingly refer to as our back garden. There is greenery in it, after all, even if it is only moss and weeds.

Before hefting the lump'o'concrete as Jo has now come to call it the two kilometres back to the car, we watched a demonstration of the "Jaws of Life" by the local fire brigade. They're something I've heard of, but had never actually seen up close. Having now done some "Jaws of Life" is a slightly grandiose term for what should be called "World's Largest and Scariest Pair of Tin Snips". Watching them effortlessly snip the roof off a car was impressive, although the main thought revolving through my head during the display was "Don't get your fingers caught in that thing!"

After the fair we decided to head to The Pinnacles, the spectacular rock gullies that became the Paths of the Dead in Return of the King. Sadly, it wasn't to be and instead we got lost somewhere in the south-eastern Wairarapa. We did find the Hau Nui Wind Farm, which was quite cool, but wasn't quite the same. Perhaps next time...