The Kook Diaries

The beach was just outside of Tarifa, but I could see these colourful kites flying around. I was sure it was the kite surfers I’d been told about back in Marbella.
It was too far away to walk to, so I figured the only way to get to the beach was to sign up to lessons. I was put onto the ‘fast track’ course which meant that instead of spending seven sessions on the beach, I’d be in the water the same day. It turned out I had signed up to the 160 euro crash course on how to kite surf (it turns out there were far cheaper options).
We pulled up to Playa Los Lances Norte where it was a levanter (eastern) wind which made the walk up the beach that much harder. I had been walking for a while up-wind to find the best spot to set off from. Blowing the thing up took whatever was left in the reserve tank completely out of me.
I looked up to a plethora of colour, all around me from every possible direction this side of the coast line. The kites were splashed with reds, yellows, oranges, greens, blues, slashes and circles, squares and splashes of golden sand with aqua blue. It was as if God himself had discovered Microsoft Paint and gone ape-shit on the clouds. Either that or I’d found myself in the middle of Sony’s next TV advertisement. I could see the slogan “Colour Like No Other” appear above, followed by “The new Sony Bravia.”
They swirled around my head, then suddenly they’d dash and jolt towards me before slowly rising again. The outline of Morocco across the sea was almost like the perfect backdrop to a theatre show. The kites danced over the sea. At this point I looked down to see the kite surfers catching serious air. These kites were travelling at such speed, and the surfers were going one-handed, facing backwards, forwards, sideways and upside down. They were pirouetting across the shore and drifting along ripples. I watched in awe.
I lasted no more than five seconds above water, and once I was down, I couldn’t get the kite back up so that was that – I was a floating buoy. I decided to allow the wind to take me down the coastline so I could at least watch the kites above. It was an expensive way to view some kites but my curiosity had been fed and I could hesitantly tick kite-surfing off the list.
It was a somewhat surreal experience, being on one continent and seeing another so visibly, but the view made the long walk back to the car that much easier and expanded my travel aspirations to another shore.