New Zealand: Otago – ‘Bradrona’

🏔️ Over the Crown Range — The High Road from Arrowtown to Wānaka, Central Otago

Leaving Arrowtown behind, we pointed the car west and south towards Wānaka, and instead of taking the sensible, flat, easy road that any reasonable person might choose, we took the Crown Range Road. This is the highest sealed road in New Zealand, which is either impressive or alarming depending on your relationship with altitude and hairpin bends. I was fine with it. Mostly.

🛣️ The Crown Range Road

The Crown Range Road — officially State Highway 89 if you want to be pedantic about it, which I generally do — climbs up into the Remarkables’ lesser-known cousins, a wide and rugged stretch of high country that sits between the Queenstown Lakes district and the Wānaka basin. The road has been in use in one form or another since the gold rush days of the 1860s, when prospectors and their horses made their way through these passes looking for fortune and finding, more often than not, very cold weather and disappointment.

The sealed version that exists today is a much more civilised affair, though it still demands a degree of respect. The road winds upward through tussock grassland and exposed schist rock, the kind of landscape that looks like it was designed by someone who wanted to make you feel very small indeed. Which, to be fair, it does rather effectively.

At various points along the way, there are viewpoints — proper pull-over-and-get-out spots — where you can stand and stare across the Wakatipu Basin and the Arrow River valley below, with mountain ranges stacking up behind each other into the distance like a series of increasingly dramatic stage sets. The views are, and I use this word carefully because I don’t want to sound like a travel brochure, enormous. The kind of enormous that makes you briefly consider taking up landscape painting before you remember that you can barely manage a shopping list, let alone a mountain range.

It was, in short, spectacular. Even by New Zealand standards, which is saying something, because New Zealand does spectacular the way other countries do mediocre.

🍺 Cardrona — A Pub at the End of the World

About halfway up the Crown Range, or possibly a bit beyond it — I was navigating by scenery rather than signposts, which is not a reliable system — the road passes through the tiny settlement of Cardrona. And I mean tiny. This is not a village that is going to trouble anyone’s top-ten list of New Zealand’s great urban centres. It sits quietly in its valley, apparently unbothered by the modern world, and its main contribution to civilisation is one of the most satisfying pubs I have ever clapped eyes on.

The Cardrona Hotel is the sort of building that makes architects and historians go slightly misty-eyed. It was built in 1863, right in the thick of the Otago gold rush, when this part of New Zealand was crawling with prospectors who had come from Australia, California, China, Ireland, and everywhere else you can think of, all hoping to strike it rich in the rivers and hillsides of Central Otago. The hotel served as a watering hole, a resting point, and presumably a place to sit down and have a quiet rethink about one’s life choices.

It is built of weathered timber and corrugated iron, with a wide veranda running along the front and a general air of having seen things. It looks, frankly, like a film set for a Western, except that it is entirely real and has been standing in that valley for over a hundred and sixty years. Men arrived here hopeful and left broke, or arrived broke and left marginally more drunk, which amounts to roughly the same thing.

The hotel had various periods of fortune and misfortune over the decades — it was closed and reopened several times during the twentieth century as Cardrona’s population fluctuated with the ups and downs of farming and tourism — but it has been restored and operates today as a proper functioning pub and hotel. The restoration work was done thoughtfully, which is not always the case with old buildings, and it manages to feel both authentic and welcoming at the same time, which is harder to achieve than it sounds.

We did not stop for a drink, which I shall probably regret for the rest of my life.

🩲 The Bra Fence — “Bradrona”

Just beyond Cardrona, and I want to be absolutely clear that nothing in my previous experience of travel had prepared me for this, there is a fence.

This is not, in itself, unusual. New Zealand has a great many fences. The country is, if anything, enthusiastic about fencing. But this particular fence, which runs alongside the road on a gentle hillside, is decorated from end to end with brassieres. Hundreds of them. Possibly thousands of them at any given time, in every colour, size, and condition imaginable.

It is called, with the kind of cheerful New Zealand pragmatism that I find rather endearing, the Bra Fence. It also goes by the nickname Bradrona, which is either brilliant or terrible and I cannot quite decide which. Possibly both simultaneously.

The story of how it started is the sort of thing that makes you reflect on the essential strangeness of human beings. In the late 1990s — the exact date is somewhat hazy, as these things tend to be, because no one knew at the time that they were witnessing the birth of a roadside institution — a small number of bras appeared on the fence. Nobody seems to know with absolute certainty who put them there first or why. These things happen. Someone does something odd, and then, because humanity is fundamentally odd, other people follow suit.

And follow suit they did. Over the weeks and months and years that followed, more bras appeared. Then many more. The fence became, somehow, a thing. People began making detours to add to it. It became a talking point, a landmark, a destination in its own right. Local authorities periodically removed the lot for hygiene reasons, and each time the bras reappeared within days, because that is apparently the kind of thing people feel strongly about.

Over time — and this is the part that redeems the whole enterprise slightly — the fence became associated with breast cancer awareness and fundraising. Various campaigns linked it to charities supporting research and patient care, and it became a place where people left bras in memory of relatives or friends, or simply as a gesture of solidarity. So what appears at first glance to be the aftermath of a very chaotic laundry day actually carries a degree of meaning and purpose that you would never guess from the road.

None of which quite prepares you for the experience of driving through empty, beautiful, genuinely majestic New Zealand countryside, with tussock grass and mountains on all sides, and then suddenly encountering a hillside that is entirely covered in undergarments. It is one of those moments where the brain takes a second or two to process what the eyes are reporting. You find yourself thinking: am I seeing what I think I’m seeing? And the answer is: yes. Yes, you are.

We pulled over. We looked. We took photographs. We got back in the car and drove on, because really there is nothing more to say or do at that point. You have seen the bra fence. The bra fence has been seen. Life continues.

💭 Reflections

The drive over the Crown Range Road turned out to be one of those journeys where the road itself is the point, not just a means of getting somewhere. The views were genuinely extraordinary, the kind you stop talking mid-sentence to look at.

Cardrona Hotel was a reminder that New Zealand has more history layered into its landscape than people sometimes give it credit for. The gold rush of the 1860s shaped this entire region — the towns, the roads, the demographics — and that old pub standing in its valley is a solid, weathered piece of evidence.

The bra fence defies easy summary. It is absurd. It is also oddly touching, once you know the context. It is very much the sort of thing that could only exist in New Zealand, where people seem comfortable letting the strange and the sincere coexist without making too much fuss about it.

We arrived in Wānaka in good time and in good spirits, which is about the best you can ask of any road trip.