At least if the Lune Bleue carnival in Kars is anything to go by. At $60 for a standard ticket, plus the trip to Kars, the price is steep — but it's worth it for six hours of solid entertainment.
To talk about it too much would be to spoil things: part of the fun is discovering what's in the tents for yourself and catching a couple of surprises along the way. But some very, very serious effort has gone into this thing, by people who have a pretty good idea what they're doing, and if you go hoping to be delighted, I predict you will be.
Consider the Ferris wheel, a refurbished relic. It may look small, but it really moves. More than enough to make it feel like you're vaulting into the sky as you climb and to make the pit of your stomach flip as you descend. According to the woman manning a tent full of genuine artifacts from fairs and carnivals in the early 1900s (including a hilariously absurd "turtle boy" that's basically a doll encased in a large turtle shell in murky water), they had to replace all the wooden seats with metal ones for modern safety-regulation reasons, but it suffers not at all for the upgrade.
We bought dinner in the restaurant-style cook tent (pretty good if a bit pricy, and cheaper stuff's available at a more snackbar-type stand close by), and then saw the Carnival Diablo sideshow, with host Nikolai Diablo.
Diablo wanders the fairgrounds between shows, leering. The show's a mix of illusions and genuine feats of endurance, skill and pain management, and what we saw was a bit different from what the Citizen's reviewer did, so apparently they only do some of their feats in each performance.
The story Diablo tells of making a mistake in an Edmonton performance and slamming his hand down on an upturned buckknife blade is true; the Edmonton Journal reported at the time that he carried on with the show for half an hour, until it became clear he really needed to go to the hospital.
Diablo's joyful over-the-top showmanship is just about worth the price of admission by itself. I bought a poster.
There was more — the fast-moving carousel, the carny games of skill, a secret surprise or two — but I've told you enough. This is an Ottawa original and supporting Wayne van de Graaff's labour of love might be worth it on those grounds alone, but this thing doesn't need that kind of goodwill subsidy. You should go
