Garden Route Kite Festival time once again!

It's time for the Garden  Route Kite Festival to fly high once again on Sunday 8 Oct 2023 at Karatara. Now, in partnership with WESGROW - Cape Town and Western Cape Tourism, Trade and Investment Company it is set, to be the great fun outdoors event for the whole family, drawing professional and amateur kite flyers to this crowd-pleasing event.

Sedgefield Striders will be offering an earlier start with a fun run/walk of 2.7 kilometers. With food and drink available at the festival, it promises to be a fabulous outdoor function for the whole family to shed their winter woolies and welcome in the summer.

For more information contact,
 Sarie Exton 081 895 5285

Kite flying festivals are great fun for the whole family, providing challenging competitions tailored for all ages and having great spectator appeal with many kinds of imaginative kites on display, some just for show as they are tied to the ground via a long cord and fly themselves, and others for their flying capabilities.

With music in the background and the regular dose of great food stalls to keep the hungry crowds satisfied, there are also craft stalls and even the family pets can partake in the festival and enjoy an always enthusiastic participatory dog walk and then later, the dog and owner obstacle course which is equally absorbing and amusing to watch.

There are a couple of other happenings like the slow-biking competition - more daunting than one would think, some fun Boere sports and a wind power contest.

Kite flying offers great photographic opportunities so no surprises that there is a competition with categories for adults and juniors.

The adult winner in 2017 was Cathy Birkitt and the junior winner was Marissa du Plessis. 

The Garden Route Kite Festival has all the fundamental elements to become another popular annual event on our Slow Town calendar, drawing people from far and wide as has already proven to be the case.

Along with kite-flyers along the length of the Garden Route a number of international kite flyers from the UK, Poland and the Netherlands attended the 2017 festival. 

A great many kite festivals are held around the world. In different places and for different reasons they are nonetheless all popular and well attended events.

In places like Bali in Indonesia they are an integral part of the culture. In Sumpango, Guatemala, they express strong political statements on behalf of native people.

In Shirone, Japan they are exceptionally beautiful works of art and the small town has a kite museum worth visiting.

Large kites come into their own flown in strong challenging winds at Wildwoods, New Jersy, USA.

The Festival of Winds at Bondi Beach, Sydney is Australia’s largest kite festival.

And, at the highly acclaimed Dieppe Festival in France, international kite flyers are showcased and it is considered a world class event for kite lovers in every respect. 

I mention only a very few of a great number of well known kite festivals.

Purpose of the Garden Route Kite Festival

Masithandane initiated the Garden Route Kite Festival as a fund-raising event. This NPO has far reaching programs to assist all levels of need in our local community and beyond, into rural areas surrounding Sedgefield.

In this instance the aim is to provide transport bursaries and school related items to enable Grade 8 children and above to attend secondary schools in Knysna and George because Sedgefield doesn’t have a high school.

Many children drop out of school because their families cannot afford the transport costs since the provincial school buses between the towns, stopped running in 2013.

In 2017, over 3000 people attended the day and as an outdoor pastime in a spectacularly beautiful environment, the Garden Route Kite Festival will surely only gain in size and popularity in years to come.

Hopefully it will secure its place as a desired annual event and continue to be attended by international kite flyers. This fun occasion will have the knock-on effect of bringing much needed funds into the coffers of Masithandane for a very good cause.

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