There are a few things that captivate and mesmerise people. An open flame. The clouds drifting across the sky. A stream, swirling and winding across the stones.
And kites in the air.
Kite flying is really zen. It’s simply the wind, the line singing, the kite dancing… you sit down, hold the line in one hand (and possibly a beer in the other), and stare into the sky for hours… all kiters have aching necks, right?
Kiting is oftentimes compared to fishing – a line in one hand, a beer in the other, hours of staring – the only difference being where your eyes end up traveling along the line: the ocean or the sky.
So an inflatable fish is a very appropriate kite to fly – and a shoal of them is even better, cementing the metaphor.
Showkites are great thing at catching the looks and making necks sore. Doesn’t really matter what one flies – a cheap chinese rainbow delta or an intricate edo with a stunning appliqué that took hundreds of hours to make – kiters are soul fishers, kites are lures.
So people who drove across Ljubljana Marshes that day didn’t only found Nemo, but three of them. They were dancing in the sun above the trees and the marshy meadows, as if they wanted to swim away from the Terrible Trilobite, despite a time chasm of hundreds of millions of years.
A lot of showkites are modelled after aquatic creatures; octopuses, mantas, whales, jellyfish … They swim as smoothly and gracefully in the wind as their living siblings do in the water.
Another aerial adventurer flew over and observed our kites enjoying the wind, so he approached for a closer look. A thread stretching thousands of years connects kites, the first flying things created by humans, to planes. It was as if a grand-grand-grandkid had returned to see its grandparents, still going strong, still enjoying the breeze, still able to do what we can’t: fly.
We wondered how our kites look from up there, so we took a couple fo kite aerial photos of them. The sun went behind the clouds, so the light wasn’t perfect – but it didn’t matter, a KAP session is a KAP session.
And we paid tribute to those kites that often get overlooked by the flashy aerial sculptures: the pilot kites.
Those workhorses of the sky do their job far above the crowds, holding their beautiful but aerially challenged colleagues up to be admired and praised, but themselves seldom get the recognition they deserve.
It was a beautiful day. The turbines were swirling, the fish were swimming …
… and our necks were sore.
Even Žogica Nogica – the main character of a fairytale by Jan Malik and its puppet play adaptation everyone in Slovenia know about – enjoyed the flight (though it seems annoyed and scared, it isn’t).
It was a perfect, very zen, kite flying day.
Kite aerial photos shot with Nikon P330 on The New Original Blue rokkaku by Dr.Agon kites.
