A few weeks ago a group of cruisers from the river went to Sampango for the day of the dead and giant kite festivals. Sampango is past Guatemala City, so it was a full day of travel to get there. Tom and I have made the trip from Rio Dulce to Guat City a few times by bus, so going with a group in a nice van with a group of friends was much nicer. We stayed in the City overnight, got in some shopping, then early in the morning piled back in the van for the hour drive up to the festival.
The day of the dead (November 1st) is a big holiday in predominately catholic Guatemala. It's a time for families to remember and honor their ancestors, clean up gravesites, etc. For more than a hundred years, the locals up in the Guatemalan highlands have built and flown giant, colorful kites for the celebration. Anthropologists believe the practice actually goes back more than 3000 years to the Mayans. The biggest of these celebrations is in Sampango, outside of Antigua.
The kites are painted in images either representing someone who passed away the previous year, or maybe just fanciful or important symbols. While most of the kites were "only" 10-15 feet in diameter, some of these were significantly bigger. I tried to pace off the size of the biggest and I came up with between 50 and 60 feet! And all hand painted. Here are the pictures I took, but they really don't capture the true majesty!
Our first view of the staging area, most of the kites are still being put together so are not yet up:
I liked this one with the little "mini" kites around the perimeter:
One of the most elaborate ones, this was easily 50 feet tall. The detail was amazing:
This was one of the biggest, I tried to pace it off (difficult because of the crowds) and came up with over 60 feet! Several people though it was even bigger...
Here's the construction of the back. They try to make these as light as possible, but also make do with what's available.
Here's another even bigger!:
After wandering around watching them finish the construction, we decided to explore the rest of the festival. Lunch roasting:
We eventually made our way to the cemetery. There were many families having picnics, planting flowers, painting the tombs and burning incense. We felt a little awkward taking picture, but here are a few I surreptitiously shot:
Then it was time to watch the kites fly :-)
A few more kites have been erected and the crowd is pretty thick:
We paid the equivalent of about a dollar each for bleacher seats. If they even allowed something like this back in the U.S. they would require the entire staging area cleared of spectators with large barricades and security keeping the crowds well away. Here in Central America, they have a few kids run down a line telling everyone to make way, 5-6 big guys grab onto the kite line, running after the kids, the crowd scatters and hopefully the kite catches the wind before it arrows into the crowd, shear chaos. Actually some of the groups were pretty well organized and could get their kites more or less in the air, but it looked pretty dangerous to be down under where the kites were flying/crashing. Luckily as far as we could see there were no injuries.
Clear the crowds and run/pull:
It's up!
Two up at the same time:
Unfortunately there wasn't enough wind to even attempt anything larger than the "small" ones (12 foot diameter) before we had to go meet our ride back to Guatemala City. Though as we were driving away, we saw one of the 20 foot diameter ones way up in the sky.
Overall it was a very fun day made more so since the majority of the crowd looked to be local Guatemalans. The only bad thing was whenever you get that big a crowd, the pickpockets come out and one of our group got his wallet lifted. In my opinion anyone bringing a wallet with drivers license, credit cards and lots of cash to something like this is just asking for it to be taken. For me, other than enough for lunch and a few trinkets, everything was back in the hotel safe or still on the boat...
Cheers
