Adelaide International Kite Festival

This afternoon I took a little sojourn to the beachside village of Semaphore to look at the Adelaide International Kite Festival. Adelaide seems to pride itself on being a “festival city,” there seems to be a least one every time I’m here. That said, I’ve never seen beachside kite flying carnival, so I packed my camera and went off.

The highlight was some large, no, make that huge kites. They were an impressive sight against the dramatic clouds rolling in from the sea.

The biggest kites, which really were more like air-born decorations, were suspended from trailers and four wheel drive trucks on the beach. They didn’t really fly around, they just hung there, drifting slowly in the wind.

While this is an usual spectacle, I had hoped to see something more dramatic, like the kites we see in Asia and, maybe a little duelling and battle as well.

The newspapers had predicted big crowds, but the turnout was modest, perhaps because the weather today was relatively cool (low 20s) with intermittent light rain.

Still, it was delightful to see how mixed and ethnically diverse the people were. Even as a resident of a melting pot city like Singapore, I was struck by how wonderfully multicultural and cross-generational the crowds were.

The festival is on again tomorrow and if the sun is out I might go down again to create a few more images.