Ines Elvira Uribe, of Medellin, Colombia, not only holds an annual international kite festival in her city but attends the occasional festival elsewhere around the world. Although some countries in South America have booming kite industries (Brazil’s beaches teem with fliers), few South American kiters other than Uribe, an educator by profession, move outside their continent to demonstrate their considerable art.

The thrill of collecting results often not from the item found so much as the information contained in the item. So it is with a recently discovered article The Game of Kite Cutting from an 1880s periodical. The author, F.D. Clarke, recalls his childhood many years before in San Antonio, Texas, where kite flying meant—-kite cutting!

In his recent book The Wrong Stuff: Attempts at Flight Before (and After) the Wright Brothers, published by the Smithsonian Institution, author Phil Scott cites the Rogallo Wing as a case in point.

When our last guest workers leave for the year on their long migratory flights back to the northern hemisphere, we’re down to just the nuclear family, that is, the cats Tory and Chia, and their staff (that’s wife Elwyn and me). For our enthusiastic kitesurfing readers, there is now a newsletter from the Peter Lynn Kiteboarding Team, at the following link: www.peterlynnkiteboarding.com

To those who guessed that the new big kite is a Kuwaiti flag, you were right. I lied. Prior to the first public flights, Faris al Farsi and companion came out from summery Kuwait to wintery New Zealand for a week’s flying practice. I suspect the 50C to 0C climate was mild compared to the culture shock. We were impressed with the traditional Kuwaiti meal Faris and Kahlid cooked for us, and particularly by the real time supervisory cell phone linkage back to mum Al Farsi that enabled them to get the finer points correct.

I decided to try a dose of machinery therapy (the male version of retail therapy)—-a forklift truck. It’s not exactly a new one, but it is six years younger than I am, so it’s not so old either. Nothing to do with kites? Well, it is actually. It’s an essential part of any good kite kit, as you will see.

Eve Hanney, of Weymouth, England, is a darling of Chinese kiting, often photographed, filmed, and interviewed. “The Kiteflying Granny,” she is called. After eight trips to China, she knows her way around politically. “I’m aiming for a front row seat with the top officials at the 2008 yachting Olympics in Chingdao,” she says. “That’s my goal. I’m not looking beyond ’08, when I’ll be 74.”

Li Ruo Xin (better known by his nickname Mo Dou Li) is a Beijing kitemaker who lives closer to the Great Wall of China than to the capital. A former technician at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, he and wife are now retired and living in a new three-story house in Xiang Tang village overlooking a large public park and gorgeous, very close encircling mountains.

Have enough kite pins, patches, caps, and festival tee-shirts to last a lifetime? Well, China has other kite collectibles well worth considering. New Year’s woodblock prints with kite motif are inexpensive and often beautiful. They are a 300-year-old tradition. Kite postage stamps are another option as are low denomination coins with a kite theme. Mass-produced but quite elegant and inexpensive miniature kites are a fourth. Inexpensive and unusual are traditional paper cutouts of kites and people flying them.

Chan Fo Kwong, of Hong Kong, has organized several associations of which he is the chairman. They are devoted to chess; the lute; Bor-Yea Buddhism; antique watches and clocks; calligraphy and painting; pot plants and gardening; research on antiques; and, most charmingly, the Hong Kong International Deserving Genius Association. Not a one has a single member other than Chan. “I feel upset whenever I think about it,” he says.