Published August 31, 2022
10 min read
When the winds begin to pick up over the Indonesian island of Bali in late May, the skies are streaked with fluttering colors—the reds, yellows, and blacks that announce the arrival of kite season.
It’s a summer pastime that evokes joyful memories of childhood for Balinese photographer Putu Sayoga. As a young boy, he’d watch older kids pull kites through rice fields near his village of Tunjuk after harvest season. Sometimes they’d let Sayoga tie the string onto the kite, and he’d look on with envy as it danced through the sky. He tried to make his own kite, but struggled to shape bamboo sticks to hold the colorful paper. An older boy who learned kite making from his father and uncle helped Sayoga and his friends, crafting them a fish-shaped bebean kite, considered the easiest to fly.
When the wind didn’t come—and it rarely blew through the fields as powerfully as it did on the beaches—the boys would whistle loudly, acting out stories of Rare Angon, the Hindu god revered by kite flyers. According to lore, his magical flute beckoned the wind. Kites that dance on those gusts are said to help farmers keep pests away from their harvests.
There wasn’t much else to do in the long summer afternoons when he was a child in the early 1990s. “There were no mobile phones at that time,” he says, laughing.
In the 1970s, foreign visitors began coming in droves to Bali’s white sand beaches and in 1978 the island launched an annual kite festival on the popular beaches of Padang Galak and Mertasari that quickly grew into a large competition. Dozens of teams from nearby villages, along with visitors who lea