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KNYSNA NEWS - There is a little shop in Green Street, Knysna that will sell you something quite extraordinary. A thing prone to make you giggle and stare up at the clouds for hours on end. Something bound to make you lose track of time, get you high, fly with it in an ecstatic stupor…
The two men responsible for what might become your next addiction are the world-renowned kiting pair Greg Mountjoy and Keith Mould, who own Kites by Design – the one-stop shop for kiting fanatics in the Garden Route – and they are in the spotlight this week because, yes you guessed it, it's Eden Kite Festival time again.
This coming weekend will see kite enthusiasts from all walks of life converge, first in George on Saturday 20 October, then in Sedgefield on Sunday 21 October, for the Eden Kite Festival and both men are part of the organising committee of the event.
'A kite is like a cat'
The 58-year-old Mountjoy was born in a place formerly, rather awkwardly, called Wankie (now Hwange) in the old Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He talks about kites like they have feelings – he anthropomorphises them and explains that each kite has its own personality – "Much like a cat," he chuckles. Mountjoy traces his kiting addiction back to the age of five, becoming somewhat "cured" of it as he got older, and then, he admits, relapsing terribly later in life, to the point of distraction.
After school, Mountjoy "bummed" around Durban for a few years making leather bags, living on society's fringe. "I didn't really fit the briefcase-and-tie-thing very well," he explains – very much in contrast with his partner Mould who from an early age entered the corporate world.
Not one for specific dates – possibly an effect of his years as a musician some years later in Cape Town – Mountjoy was in Durban for about two years before being called up to ''go drive tanks in Angola".
From gigs to kites
"But I didn't really want to and ended up in the airforce base in Ysterplaat, Cape Town for four years as an electronics technician," he relates. Forever a non-stickler for the rules, he recalls living illegally off-base with a "hippie chick". It was also during this time that he started honing the musical skills that would later support him as a professional session musician.
From the mid-1980s to early '90s the tattooed, iconoclastic, kite-man toiled away in a Cape Town recording studio. "I basically made a life out of gigging (performing),'' he says before explaining how it was also during this time that the kiting bug got hold of him again. He bought three stunt kites from a friend, which together with a CNA kite manual would cause a snowball effect leading up to the point where he is today – a widely revered kite maker, according to Mould.
"The book kicked my passion for kiting up to a new level. Later I would even meet the author," Mountjoy says.
'Nothing else makes sense'
In 2012 he moved to Knysna, and together with Mould, opened Kites by Design. "Now I design kites because I can't do anything else," he says laughingly. "Nothing else makes sense. When you see someone flying their first kite it stirs something in you."
In all his years of kiting, his involvement in making the biggest kite in the world stands out. New Zealand kite maker Peter Lynn roped Mountjoy in to assist with the 44x36m monster.
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Born in Lusaka, in the former Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1964, Mould remembers how, also at the age of five, his father forged him a kite from newspaper and bamboo, "and since then I never really stopped." Possessed of a memory clearly more reliable than Mountjoy's, Mould lucidly recalls moving to Zimbabwe from Lusaka in 1970, then to SA in 1982, dropping out of UCT, his first kite fest in 1999, involvement in organising the 24th Cape Town International Kite Festival in 2000, and the year he came to Knysna – 2012.
'They represent freedom'
"From an early age kites were already a representation of freedom for me,'' he says in a manner thoroughly in contrast to his corporate reality. ''Looking up, focusing completely on your kite, it becomes like a form of meditation. You zone out completely." He enjoys paragliding and sailing as well. ''Wind and air,'' he explains, ''have always been a driving force for me.''
Even though he dropped out of university, Mould would eventually complete his B Comm honours in his 30s. "But kites were always in the background. While living in Cape Town my passion for making them was reignited and I bought myself a sewing machine," he tells. His degree has allowed him to enter the respectable world of consulting businesses on efficiency, restructuring and leadership coaching. Kiting was and is a way for Mould to escape the corporate grind but, he explains, "I still enjoy my day job." For him, kite making rather constitutes a way to satisfy his creative urges. "It's the best thing about kites – creating something that flies! Greg and I made a 45m-long kite and to see it fly for the first time was amazing."
Mould owns no less than 300 kites (of which 160 of them form a singular 80m-long unit).
Kiting celebrities
Although both Mountjoy and Mould are too humble to admit it themselves, they are clearly celebrities in the kiting world. The two are regularly invited to international kiting events and their love of kites has seen them travel to France, the UK, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, China and South Korea, with some places taking kiting rather seriously, they say.
Both chuckle at the memory of a festival in India where they flew kites in front of 250 000 people and being subjected to "kite paparazzi", having to hold babies aloft like heads of state while being blinded by countless cameras flashing away.
"We even had to be escorted to the stage by security that day," Mould recalls. ''We were treated like rock stars," Mountjoy adds. "They even wear their Sunday best."
Perhaps the coming weekend will bring local non-kiting mortals closer to this level of appreciation for the art of kiting.
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