“It’s the alternator.”
These are not the words you want to hear in the middle of the night on a remote stretch of a highway near Middle of Nowhere, Gujarat.
“Please sir, help – push the bus off the road, ok?”
Who wouldn’t want to ruffle Christopher’s bronze beard?
So we did – it wasn’t even our bus, as Manoj would never let such a thing happen to him – and Christopher surely managed to take an epic selfie while pushing the beast with all his might.
Smile, it’s a festival!
But it’s not just a festival, one of the kite festivals – it’s the International Kite Festival Gujarat, one of the largest and arguably the most important kite festivals in the world, a world championships of sorts, and a … bonfire of oddities.
IKF Gujarat means spending a sizeable chunk of January somewhere warm, it means meeting friends and family (yes, family!), spending countless hours on the kite field praying for wind, driving for countless hours across Gujarat, encountering fantastic adventures and incomprehensible quirks every step of the way.
Chews you up and spits you out.
No trivial stuff in Gujarat!
Two years ago we experienced fantastic travels all around Gujarat in our little crazy red bus, driven by Manoj the Magnificent, the real Gujarati Snake Plissken.
This year we had a little blue bus at our disposal, and the driver was no one but Manoj – and from the very beginning the bus was oddly familiar. It was the same model as the red one, the seats were adorned by the same pattern, the windows on the left were stuck, the USB chargers didn’t work, even the Pour Elise that sounded when Manoj put the bus into reverse had the same off note. Apart from the colour, it was practically the same bus!
“So, Manoj, tell us- is this the same bus as the one two years ago?”
“હું ન તો પુષ્ટિ કરી શકું છું કે ન તો નકારી શકું.”
“Oh Manoj, come on …”
We had to ask Bakul to get the info out of Manoj, and Bakul came back with an tall story about Manoj being the craziest driver in Gujarat (true) and therefore the red bus a big blip on a police radar (very probably true), and to avoid problems and add a layer of mimicry he simply painted his red bus blue (hmmmm…).
It didn’t work so well though, as the windshield has a hole which Bakul insisted is a bullet hole. But nothing can stop Manoj, right?
“Manoj, did you really paint the red bus blue?”
“હાહાહા – કદાચ!”
It was our crazy little red bus, just blue! Step on it, Manoj – adventures, ahoy!
There is no wind, again, so we stand by our stall on the field conversing with a nice lady, when Trevor comes by.
“Trevor, come here, you should meet someone!”
“Ok …”
“Trevor, please meet Mateja!”
“Hello Mateja, I am Trevor from Ireland … do you fly kites too?”
“Occasionally … I am the Ambassador of Slovenia to India.”
“I see … wait, what?”
Mateja Vodeb Ghosh, the Ambassador of Republic of Slovenia to Republic of India, is a honorary member of our kite club and comes to the festival every year – to endure the loooooong inaugural ceremony, the speeches (“… we built miles of roads, we opened a new railway station, we constructed irrigation channels, we …”), the dances and the music (she even took the time to take a picture of us marching), but mainly to mingle with the kiters and fly kites – if there is wind (it’s Ahmedabad, so there wasn’t any).
And she got a cowboy hat for some reason, which she promptly donated to Gregor. Ambassadors have standards.
Incidentally, would anyone guess what tune we march to every year?
Yeah. Totally appropriate. So the newbies know what to expect …
We mess up the daisy chain of lines of our Manta ray kite and we start swearing because it would take at least half an hour to untangle the giant googlie-mooglie under the hot sun of Rann of Kutch salt desert.
Luckily, the friendly locals came to help – and we were done in two hours and a half flat!
The funny thing was that our fight with the lines became more and more the focus of the audience … the tension rose, the expectations were high … and when everything was in order and the giant manta flew into the blue sky above the white salt desert, it was a magnificent moment:
“OOoooooooOOOOOoooooHHhhhhh!”
Star of the festival!
The beast is huge and it pulls like hell, so we had to find a suitable anchor, sturdy and strong. Luckily we brought one with us …
Speaking of stars: one of the greats of IKF Gujarat 2025 wasn’t even there, but luckily his kite was. Janez Vizjak, the best kite maker in Slovenia, CEO and chief designer of Dr.Agon kites.
The red, black and white fled kite with a long red tail and an intricately made pattern caught the eye of none other than a director shooting a movie for Gujarat Tourism.
They took the kite, selected the most beautiful girl and the most handsome guy (Christopher, who else), and shot scenes on the kite field for hours.
Lights!
Camera!
Action!
It took a lot of takes before the director and the scriptwriter were satisfied … Yunus, Saša and Ivor were pulling the kite in low wind, trying to incarnate the director’s vision … “Make it stay in the air! Now move it towards other kites! Land it directly in front of the camera! …”
Now we wait for the movie premiere …
The mad kite crew of Odisha – best guys ever, party animals, great friends, poets, kite wreckers, smart and completely insane – took a huge kite train of almost 300 individual kites into the sky.
It wasn’t enough (it never is for them), so they made the train pull the IKF Gujarat banner.
It still wasn’t enough for the Odishans, but the line had enough and snapped. The kite train flew gracefully across the Sabarmati river and wrapped itself over a crane on the other side.
“Yes! Our plan worked!”
“What? What plan, you just lost the train.”
“Oh, sure – we did this on purpose!”
Whatever it takes to save face on the hot kite field of IKF Gujarat …
The ride back from the white desert to Ahmedabad ride takes 12 hours with all the planned breaks. We started at 4 PM, so we knew we’d be ‘home’ at 4 AM. We had our tea, the night fell abruptly as it does in the tropics, and the mood on the bus was festive.
In Gujarat everyone and everything has a licence that allows them to force us into an adventure any time they please. So at 9:40 PM the alternator in the other bus decided it was his turn to start one and promptly died.
Now what.
Every minute spent at the edge of a highway somewhere in the middle of nowhere was eating up valuable sleep time. Replacing the alternator quickly was out of the question, and a new bus from Ahmedabad would take at least 5 hours to arrive, so we had to think fast.
“Bakul, what if we …”
Two options: wait here for a new bus or a new alternator, or stuff everything and everyone in our crazy little blue bus – and let Manoj do his magic.
Bakul put both options to a democratic vote, and winked us to sway it towards the second option, cram everyone and everything into the small bus – so Ivor was shouting “Option two! Option two!” even before Bakul finished his blood, tears and sweat speech.
It worked, the vote was unanimous, and kiters, kites, luggage, everyone and everything, 40 of us in all, crammed into the crazy little blue bus with 28 seats and no room for bags, kites or suitcases. Was it uncomfortable? Of course. Dangerous? Maybe – a couple of people were left standing, and the precariously stacked kites were just waiting for Manoj to do one of his snakeplisskenesque maneuvers.
How did we get through this? Well … like kite flyers!:
Then Bakul showed his organisational prowess and arranged a couple of subtle and smart things that clawed back most if not all of the time we lost. He called for a replacement bus from Ahmedabad and had Manoj drive us all to a highway rest stop for dinner. While we feasted, Bakul booked another bus from a local company so we again had two at our disposal, uncramped us, and then our convoy raced towards the incoming Ahmedabad bus.
We met it at a toll booth two hours out of Ahmedabad. It was a gamble, but it worked. The man in the Moschino jacket saved our sleep!
Chapeau, dear friend.
IKF Gujarat is a bonfire of oddities, but is also a feast of profound beauty. Made by Gujarat itself, the nature, the history, the people – and made by us, kite flyers.
Just look, flying fishes:
There was so much beauty in the Gujarati sky … Scott’s masterpieces, Colombian giants, Argentinian aerial sculptures, flying wonders from Malta, Netherlands, Brazil, Mauritius, Slovakia, Bhutan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Germany, Greece, South Africa … the world above the world.
And Julian, of course 🙂
And us.
Incredible, as always. It’s IKF Gujarat!
International kite festival in Gujarat is always hardcore, but this year it was even hardcorer.
Distilled.
A month of experiences crammed into four days.
We boarded the plane in Ljubljana at 2 PM on Wednesday, spent hours at the airports in Dubai and Mumbai (NB: the smoking area has been moved to P6 West!) and checked into a hotel in Ahmedabad at 8 PM local time on Thursday. The very next morning was the inauguration ceremony, so we got up at 6 AM (copious consumption of illegal contraband till 2 AM did us not do good, but we met so many friends we just couldn’t help it). Then it was flying till dark, the next day we flew kites till 4 PM and boarded a bus to the White desert, we docked in Bhuj at 2 AM, we woke up at 6, drove to Dhordo, flew kites in the salt desert till 4 PM, boarded a bus back to Ahmedabad, got there at 4 AM, woke up at 9, went to the field, then it was time for the rooftops, celebrating Uttarayan.
Oh, the rooftops of Ahmedabad …
And the festival was over. Blink and you’d miss it.
As Gregor said: we slept for 15 hours. All three of us. Cumulatively.
But our brains, our memory caches, our experience-retaining synapses are full. To the brim.
Is it worth it, ask the hoi polloi – of course it is! It is magical, it is bizarre, it is beautiful, hard, warm, frustrating, incredible, unforgettable.
It’s all about the people. But that is for the next story – coming soon!
Post Scriptum
Of course you are all wondering about the epic selfie Christopher took while pushing the bus.
It turns out he was making a video (!) – so please enjoy this epic snapshot:
Amazing stories. I always wait for the next stories. Thank you for sharing it with us. Terima kasih. Matur nuwun. 🙏🙏🙏🤙🤙🤙👍👍👍
Thank you, Anang! 🙂
Anything is possible in Gujarat and there is also a solution to it
Absolutely 🙂
Thanks guys, for a few minutes I returned to this other, amazing planet and I realized how much I miss it…
Thank you, Barbara! We all miss it ..
G R E A T S T O R Y ! ! !
Nothing more to say 👍
Ulli – thank you so much! 🙂