Kite Flying

The sky is filled with kites.  Summer is the dry, cooler, windier season in Bali. 

Every afternoon, everywhere you go, you see kids flying kites, mostly boys.

We decided to give it a try.  Lynn bought a couple of small kites for the girls.  I went out with Charlotte in the field near our house, but had no luck getting the kite up in the air, despite Charlotte's energetic efforts.

The field is flanked by trees on all sides.  We saw kites in the sky that were being flown nearby.  Charlotte and I hopped on the motorbike and soon found an open stretch of rice fields where the wind was stronger, and a little boy in one of the fields trying to fly a kite.  We walked near him and tried to fly the kite.  Still no luck.  It had been so many years since I'd flown a kite that I had forgotten how to do it.

A few days later, on a windier day, we tried again in the field near our house, but failed again.  A couple of neighborhood boys were sitting in the nearby soccer field.  We asked them to help.  They unreeled a much longer length of string to launch the kite than we had been using and soon had the kite flying.

The boys handed the string over to us, and we happily flew the kite until the string broke and the kite sailed away.

A week or so later, Dewa's eight year-old son, Surya, who was already on holiday break, showed up with Dewa when Dewa came to drive us to Green School for the end-of-term assembly.  Surya is a passionate kite flyer with a large collection of kites.  He is constantly buying more kites (which Dewa says makes "wife very sad") and almost immediately breaking them or getting them stuck in trees. 

On the drive back home after we had picked up the girls from school, we stopped to merge into traffic right next to a kite store where Surya had bought a kite that same morning.  He had flown the kite earlier that afternoon and had promptly broken it.  We quickly stopped to pick up a replacement for our kite which had flown away and to buy some stronger string.  Naturally, Surya bought a kite too.

When we arrived home, the girls and I, and Dewa and Surya went to the nearby field to fly our kites.

With Dewa and Surya's expertise, we soon had all our kites in the air.