Have I Offended El Gauchito Gil?

Today was slightly harder work. We had tricky start to the day. At the sunrise location the sunrise largely failed to materialise, but we did get light just on the peaks for a few minutes, and I got some good close-ups.

We had then been promised a location where a female puma and her cubs were working their way through a recent kill within easy sight of the road. The score: dead guanacos 1, pumas nil!

The post-breakfast shoot was productive, walking up past a dramatic waterfall to a large space filled with trees which died in the major forest fire of 2011. These make great compositional elements, either as frames for the mountains, or as primary subjects in their own right, with mountains behind.

Another lazy afternoon allowed me to catch up with my images and blog, although posting the latter was a painful process. The internet connection in Torres del Paine is not only slow, but also drops out every few minutes, causing anything which was part-way through to have to restart. When I’m back I’ll have to review my blog posting software and see if I can make it more resilient, although how I’ll test this I’m not quite sure.

I must have accidentally offended El Gauchito Gil (the Argentinian "Robin Hood" and protector of travellers), but I’m not quite sure how. However first my sandwich for lunch took almost an hour to arrive, then when we went for dinner I was served last, at which point the restaurant realised they’d got the order wrong and prepared one too many vegetarian risottos, one too few salmons. Fortunately it didn’t take them long to fix it, but I was then a bit peeved when despite their many "mea culpa"s, they insisted I break an additional large note when my available cash came up about 50p short. Not impressed.

The plan was to get back to the hotel, then go to the other side of the island to shoot sunset. However as it was by then cloudy and blowing at about 50mph I took an executive decision and decamped to the bar. Much better!