ECONOMYNEXT – Sri Lanka’s Colombo Kite Festival to be held from August 24 with 55 foreign kite flyers taking part from 25 countries, which add to the country’s appeal for tourism and variety, organizers said.
Sri Lanka had a longstanding tradition in kites especially among young people, but with the city life and the pace of life children were losing the skills that the earlier generation had.
“We started the Colombo kite festival in 2015 mostly with local participants,” Chief Operating Officer of Sri Lanka’s DeranaTV network, Madhawa Madawala told reporters in Colombo.
“But it has now expanded and it is now we have the it the calendar of international kite festivals. “We hope it will help boost tourism and make Colombo.”
The Derana Colombo International Festival will be held on Sunday August 24 also supported by the Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau.
The kite festival will add a colourful activity to the Colombo, Ruwan Ranasinghe, Deputy Minister of Tourism said.
“If we want to brand the city of Colombo, we need activities like this,” he said. “I hope this will also provide material for youtuber and social media activists material. It will show how interesting Colombo is.”
Among the participants is Nguyen Phu Quoc from Vietnam. Quoc is an arts graduate who is in interior design. Since he was interested in kites from childhood, he and started to design kites, adding his skills to his childhood hobby.
After he got involved in a kite festival in Da Nang in central Vietnam, he started participating in international festivals.
“I learned about the Sri Lankan festival when I came to India,” Phouc told EconomyNext. “I have designed a kite for Buddhist devotees and I will give it to the Sri Lankan team.”
He has also brought Vietnam flute kites, which is a tradition dating back a thousand years.
Another participant is Micheal Alvarez from Australia whose parent migrated from India in 1967 who make a variety of box kites, which are three dimensional. He uses kites to teach people about the unique animal life in Australia.
“I use kites to teach,” he explained. ” We have animals with pouches, which are called marsupials, and some of the marsupials like the Wombat has a pouch that faces backwards.
“And also its poo comes out like a rubik’s cube. So it is a very strange animal.”
