The Photo, the Dog, and the Man Who Drew Lotte - Kite Buen Hombre logo.
Our logo isn't a kite, a jump, or a wave. It's a real dog, riding on a real man's shoulders, and one extremely polite favour asked of a very busy man.
Every kite school logo on earth looks the same. A rider mid-jump.
A kite arcing overhead. Possibly a wave, for drama.
Squint at ten of them and you'd struggle to tell which country you were in.
Ours has a dog sitting on a man's shoulders.
There's a reason for that, and it isn't a design decision.
It started with a dog who wouldn't stay on the beach
In our very first year bringing people out to Buen Hombre, a travelling couple from Germany came to stay — first in Cabarete, then out at the beach. One of them happened to be an excellent photographer, which is the kind of luck you can't plan for.
Among the photos he left us was one that became quietly famous around here: Miky out on the water, kite up, with Lucky riding on his shoulders like a passenger who had booked the seat in advance.
Lucky was the first of what are now five dogs. Officially he is the mascot. Unofficially he is the alpha male, the head of the pack, and the final authority on where everyone is allowed to sit — including, apparently, on Miky.
Then I asked a favour I probably shouldn't have
I've always loved animation. Estonia — where I'm from — is one of two countries in Europe genuinely known for it, alongside Denmark, with old ties and a long working friendship between the two.
My favourite animator in that world is Heiki Ernits: more than twenty award-winning films, over thirty illustrated books, and the internationally recognised Lotte series. He also draws for one of Estonia's biggest newspapers. His work is instantly recognisable and completely full of character.
He also happens to be a friend. Which is how I came to send him a photograph of a man and a dog on a beach 7,000 kilometres away, with roughly this message: could you possibly turn this into a simple cartoon drawing — pretty please?
His reply came the next day. He was extremely busy and really did not have time.
Fair enough, I thought. Slightly sad, but fair.
The day after that, a second message arrived. No explanation. Just a pencil sketch, and four words: “Something like this?”
A man, mid-ride, grinning like an idiot. A dog on his shoulders, grinning like a slightly bigger idiot. It was exactly what I'd been picturing and had completely failed to describe.
Heiki Ernits' original pencil sketch of a kitesurfer with a dog on his shoulders, the first draft of the Kite Buen Hombre logo
From pencil to Kite Buen Hombre logo
From there it went to Andres Rohtla, a long-time partner of mine from the film world who has designed more posters for me than either of us has bothered to count. He took Heiki's sketch and turned it into the finished logo — the orange and blue version you see on every t-shirt, board bag and boat we own.
Look at the two side by side and almost nothing changed. The grin is the same. The dog is in the same place. That's because there was nothing to fix — the drawing was right the first time, from a man who had just told me he was too busy to draw it.
The drawings nobody has seen
Heiki did one more thing for us, and until now it has never appeared anywhere on this website.
Buen Hombre is remote. Remote enough that of the roughly one thousand people in the village, a real share can't read or write. Sundays are beach days here — families drive in from the surrounding towns to eat fried fish and sit by the water — and for years the same stretch of sand paid for it in litter.
Which left a genuinely awkward problem: how do you ask someone not to throw rubbish on the beach when they can't read the sign asking them?
So I explained the whole situation to Heiki — the village, the Sundays, the fried fish, the literacy — and asked for something with no words in it at all.
What came back needs no translation. A man strides off down the beach, delighted with himself, one arm still raised from the throw — and behind him hangs everything he's just launched over his shoulder: a bottle, a can, a fish skeleton, a chicken bone. Behind him a woman stands with her hand over her eyes, watching it land.
No text. No language. No literacy required. Thirty years of drawing for a living, aimed at one beach.
Pencil sketch by Heiki Ernits showing a man throwing litter over his shoulder on the beach
Heiki Ernits' finished illustration for the Playa Buen Hombre clean beach campaign: a man scattering rubbish as a woman looks on in dismay
Still the same two
Lucky still runs the beach. Miky still teaches on it. Whether Lucky still rides on his shoulders is a question best put to Lucky.
And I'm still out here living what I once called a “bush life” — a long way from the media world I used to belong to. It turns out that distance is an excellent filter.
You find out very quickly who your real friends are, and which ones will send you a drawing at midnight after telling you they're too busy.
And the best part: Heiki came out to visit us. He got to see the beach his drawings ended up on.
So when you see the logo — on a t-shirt in the shop, on the boat, on the side of the school — you're looking at one real afternoon in Buen Hombre, one very patient dog, and one friendship older than the business.
Come meet the dog who started it. Plan your trip to Buen Hombre.
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