Of Mad Max & Mega Downwinders

My three weeks in Kalpitiya are coming to an end. It was a strange time. A lot happened, but little happened. Towards the end of the season, the wind bucked more and more violently, completely overpowered to the point of sinking every second was the standard. Landing was often difficult and many kites formed intimate relationships with the trees in SriLankaKite.

On the penultimate day, we took three boats 25 kilometres out into the upper lagoon of Puttalam to Magic Island. I do the whole trip with the chiefs as a downwinder. Thanks to the narrow lagoon here, the first six kilometres are pleasantly flat water. Every now and then the kite sinks, even frontline pulling doesn’t help. There are fleas on the seaweed in the 10cm deep water, and they bite like jellyfish.

After five kilometres, the lagoon widens, deepens and the wind picks up to a good 24 knots. Until the first stop after 20 kilometres, there is now a good hour of humpback piste, 180° downwind over rough chop. My legs were already burning after just a few minutes, and even switch riding and heavy kite cranking didn’t help. The lifeboat pulls ahead of me as the last kiter for a good 1.5 kilometres, which gives me a wonderful feeling of safety on a lagoon the size of the Saarland. The other kiters rig up on a sandbank and I have to change from 13 to 9m². From here, the remaining five kilometres to Magic Island are once again comfortable flat water.

The wind on Magic Island is much more laminar compared to the Kalipitiya lagoon. To be honest, after a good three weeks here, Kalpitiya is one of my top three most bucking kite spots in the world: Essaouira, Kalpitiya, Brombachsee. In that order, getting out. In the mirror-smooth water behind the island, the chieftains are hitting one hammer after another. After 4.5 hours and at least 80 kilometres on the water, I’m simply exhausted. The heavy swell on the one-and-a-half-hour return journey by motorboat keeps me awake.

On the last day, the wind bucks again with 20 to 30 knots. In the last two hours on the glistening lagoon at sunset, a few gusts give the afterburner to heights that nobody would ever reach with technology and surface area. The wind is writing stories on the water, it is now playing with me, not me with it. New special move: Jodelair on a sandbank overflight before a vulture dive landing in the finish area.

During my two weeks in the monastery here, I lived almost monk-like. My dear Polish friend Dominik proudly reports three days in a fortnight during which he wasn’t on port side swinging his sabre towards a new morning. In Kalpitiya’s last sundowner, I confess to him much less proudly that I had only managed to do the same in three days. Nevertheless, we met more than people who don’t even know what their tattoos mean. Some you meet again somewhere in the world without agreeing on a word, where the wind blows and the sand flies. Others pass by without a trace.

At some point late at night, the same music that I have forgotten to listen to differently dies down. The nightly feeling of fear induced the day before by the consumption of “Paranormal Activity – The Marked Ones” due to the alcohol-fuelled rustling of ghosts in the dark room turns out to be a ferret in a kite bag. All is well. Time to move on.

So far I’ve seen practically nothing of Sri Lanka, except that it would probably be the perfect holiday destination for Mad Max (not you, MadMax…). That is, if he would appreciate a holiday at home. Sri Lanka, with its piles of rubbish burning everywhere and the omnipresent filth of half a century of petroleum industry, gives me much more of an end-time atmosphere than a holiday feeling. There are five plastic bags for every poop, and even the palm roofs are fastened with nylon strings. The sunset is usually wonderfully colourful with dirt.

I usually only laugh at tourists when they dishonour their dream destination with a simple “Ugh, how dirty!”. I wonder what it would be like in Germany if all the clean people had to burn their rubbish themselves because there is no rubbish collection service. Or whether the environment would mean anything to them if they didn’t know what their children were going to eat tomorrow. Or whether they would be against power lines if they were really in favour of something. On none of my previous trips have I ever had the feeling that an entire nation didn’t care about the world. Maybe that’s just the disadvantage of otherworldly religions…