Sanur village festival is an annual event which runs for four days, this year (2014) the dates were from 20th to 24th August, there is a slight variation on the dates from year to year. The festival offers a range of cultural activities such as water sports which includes the racing of traditional Indonesian Jukung boats fully equipped with sails!

Surf competitions, dance performances, music and food festival along with the highly popular Indonesian tradition of kite flying is to name but a few of the activities on the Sanur Village Festival program.

Here I will be concentrating on the final day and the Kite (Layang in bahasa Indonesia) competition.

The kite competition sees hundreds of people from all over south Bali pooled together in groups from their respective area to fly some of the biggest and most interestingkites you are likely to see in Indonesia. Each flying challenge lasts around 20 minutes and the category of kites ranges from small to big to enormous.

Even the small kites which normally the youngsters tend to fly need a number of people to carry out a succesful flight but the biggest kites can have a team of around twenty people and rope is used to fly these monsters as standard kite string would not stand a chance in high winds at the height these things fly!

A whinch is used to safely release rope and allows some sort of control over the biggest kites when taking to the skies and for reeling it in it is also an essential part of the overall equipment.

The event attracts a huge crowd similar to that of the Sanur Annual Kite Festival which also showcases during the summer months.

The actual Venue of the competition is at Mertasari Beach (Pantai) in Sanur. The turquoise waters of the sea are directly behind the main flying area. A big sandyexpanse ofwasteland usually reserved for such events which can clearly be seen on Google maps as a landmark.

A lot of the kites tend to have pieces of bowed bamboo which make up the framework and create a humming sound as they hover in the air due to the vibration of the kite string which actually bow's the bamboo as can be seen in the image above.