I have a soft spot for kites. In fact, it’s somewhat of a family thing. They’re pretty and fun and watching them is a great way to while away an hour or two. So, I was pleased to discover there would be a kite festival happening in Busan this month. I was even more pleased when I discovered that they’d moved the dates so that it no longer clashed with my trip to Seoul.

I got moving a little later than expected but decided to go anyway, figuring that getting out of town and seeing a new part of Busan would be fun either way. The KTX from Daegu to Busan takes just over an hour and winds through beautiful rivers, hills and farmlands. A cursory search of the internet had suggested that there were two ways to get to Dadaepo Beach for the festival – bus or subway and bus. I chose the latter because I was a little worried about time. I was struck again by the contrast between the Daegu subway, new and shiny and modern, and Busan’s more down-to-earth, slightly run-down version. I bought a day-pass (3500 won) and went down the stairs to the dimly lit and 70s-looking platform. The station was the last on the line (Sinpyeong). The carriage slowly emptied stop by stop until it was just me and a mother and son. I felt the familiar tingle of nervousness at being in a completely unfamiliar place as the train emerged from the subway and we disembarked.

I was still not at my destination but 20 minutes on bus number 2 got me to the Dadaepo Beach stop. I stood on the pavement at an unfamiliar bus stop in an unfamiliar city with no beach and no kites in sight. Nine months in a foreign country is a great way to learn not to panic. The trick, I have discovered, is to pick a direction and start walking. Along the road and around the corner, I spotted a brightly coloured kite fluttering in the distance. I crossed a road and found a policeman directing people and traffic, which seemed a lot of security for a kite festival but what do I know? It made more sense when I noticed a temporary stage set up on a paved square with a sound-check going on. Beyond that, down a hill and along a slightly muddy road, I found the beach.

The number of kites flying above the beach wasn’t huge. This may have been because I arrived rather late – there wasn’t all that much activity around the tents on the beach, either. There were some huge octopus-like kites soaring in the breeze, however. They were beautiful. Blue and pink and multi-coloured giants fluttering above us. In between, smaller kites bobbed in the breeze. Some were birds, some just shapes. My favourite was a full, rigged, pirate-type ship. Some were anchored in the sand, like the big kites. Others were flown by adults or children. I loved looked at them and seeing all the colours and shapes. As I was walking along the beach, looked at them all, someone started flying a 2-stringed, 3-story triangle-shaped kite with two long, long tails. I couldn’t see who was flying it through the scattered people but he or she was good at it. The kite twisted and circled and danced in the sky.

There didn’t seem to be a lot of this type of competitive stunt-flying going on, but there were groups of men standing around who I gathered from the whistles and the tension were involved in competition. It took me ages to figure out what they were doing. The kites they were flying were fairly ordinary looking pale squares, each no bigger than about 50cm square and with a round hole in the centre. It wasn’t until I saw one of these kites flutter down without its string that I realised they were kite-fighting. Anyone who has read The Kite Runner will have some idea of what I’m talking about. The two kite-flyers battle it out as each tries to cut the other person’s string with his line, without getting trapped and his own string cut. It was fascinating (for a while at least) to watch the desperate silent battle high in the air.

On the other side of me, a far younger and more modern crowd were harnessing the wind in a very different way. In the shallow sea-water where the river meets the sea were the kite-surfers. I haven’t seen anyone kite-surfing in ages. There is something about the power of the wind and someone flying across the water under that power that is particularly beautiful. Behind a dark grey layer of cloud the sun was tilting towards the horizon and the light shining on the water silhouetted the surfers and their kites against a silver sea.

I walked along the beach towards the rocky hill at the other end, enjoying the light and the water and the ordinary, precious moments: the man standing on the sea-shore with his little daughter, a Saturday afternoon beach-soccer game, a couple walking along the sand. Against the rocky hill at the end of the beach there is a wooden boardwalk. I climbed the stairs and walked along the boardwalk, enjoying the views. The beach is in a little bay, so there are no real expanses of the open water, but the views are still beautiful.

As 5pm approached, people were starting to pack up and leave, although the kite-fighting matches were still going on. As I walked back towards the road, there was increased activity in the direction of the stage. In the open area down the hill from the stage, I noticed that the single police bus that I’d seen on my way down had been joined by three others. Food stalls had been set up and a crowd was starting to gather. In the open square area, where the stage and chairs were set up, I sat down to change my camera batteries. Once I was sitting down, I saw that there were many more people in the square. To the side, I saw an ambulance parked. People were milling around in front of the stage and being moved back by volunteers in orange vests. I saw men in suits and women in high heels and people wearing blue sashes over their shoulders. There was something about the energy that was so familiar – I could almost feel the adrenaline of eventing coming back to me.

And then I saw a photographer. In Korea, people wandering around with large, expensive-looking cameras are a dime a dozen. Everywhere I go, there seem to be people taking pictures of each other, sometimes in groups and sometimes in amateur photo shoots. This wasn’t one of those. Over one shoulder, he carried a fancy tripod, over the other a particularly large and impressive looking camera. Instead of taking pictures of pretty Korean girls or family snaps of the groups of people, he was walking the area, trying to see the stage from different angles. He obviously knew what he was doing. After looking at every possible angle, he wandered off to the side and had a cigarette. Thinking about it now, I do hope he didn’t notice me watching him but his presence and the way he was acting were a clear sign to me that something important was going on. I decided to stick around and see what happened.

I didn’t try and get a chair, most of which were already full of Korean families, with children running around and mothers pushing prams and grandparents getting settled. I sat off to the side and just watched. A group of people in sleeping bags arrived and walked the open area in front of the stage. Ok, not actual sleeping bags but the kind of puffy long winter coats that make the person look like he or she is wearing a sleeping bag.

Before long, the sound of drums and gongs started in the distance. A group – I assume the same people who had been wearing the sleeping bags – were marching onto the square in a procession, all in traditional outfits. The front person carried a flag and all the others had drums or gongs or cymbals. They wore white with black waistcoats and yellow and blue and red sashes and the strangest white hats that looked as if they were wearing bundles of candy floss on their heads. They processed past the chairs and into the open area in front of the stage and dancing and playing their instruments. In all my time in Korea, one of the things I haven’t managed to see is traditional music and dancing. It was great to find it by accident today. The music was so different. It is strange to think that traditional music using the same instrument (drums) that I’ve known for so long, can be so different to what I’ve known. The dancing was different, too. I’m so glad I saw it.

After the dancing, a swing band played lovely music. Just as they started, the sound system distorted badly and two people, obviously the ones running the show, tore across the square to fix it. I had a moment of nostalgia for my days of running events. I listened to the band for a while but the evening was getting colder and I had a long trip home and increasing activity of the police and volunteers and people in suits suggested that the evening may shift quite rapidly to speeches and other things in Korean, so I headed back to the bus stop. The bus took ages to get back to the station, but I had a lovely time looked at all the things in the city. I may not have been paying that much attention because I definitely thought I saw a chicken shop called ‘Syndrome’, a bakery named ‘Alientots’ and a bus stop for the ‘Korea Cast-Iron Pig Refinery’. Also a sign for one of the suburbs (Gu) of Busan which has taken the tradition of each place acquiring a trite and often inappropriate adjective (‘Dynamic Busan’, ‘Colourful Daegu’) to another level, calling itself ‘Nice Jung-gu’.

A trip back on a particularly smart-looking KTX and I reached Daegu feeling tired and hungry after the sea air but still managed to stop and pick up a lemon meringue cupcake before taking the bus home. Kites, beach, silver-sea and traditional dancers – a good afternoon. Oh, and the cupcake was delicious.