Category Archives: Travel

After a very quick dawn shoot we assembled for the long drive from El Chalten to Torres del Paine in Chile. This involves driving about 100 miles East, the a couple of hundred South, past El Calafate where we started, then West over the border and into the Torres del Paine National Park.

What you rapidly realise is that vast swathes of Patagonia are very empty, very flat and, let’s be frankm very boring near desert, with the odd fox or guanaco, maybe occasionally a few cattle. Our drive from El Chalten rapidly left behind the drama of the Mt. Fitzroy massif and turned into a steady plod. The first available stop was after 1.5 hours, the next more than a further 2. That’s not a choice – you can often see 5 or 10 miles in each direction and the only evidence of mankind is the road itself.

I’d be asleep at the wheel in minutes, hats off to our excellent driver Gustavo who seems to be happy doing this hour after hour.

About 4pm, after 7 hours on the (good) road we turned onto a gravel track towards the border, with the Torres del Paine just appearing in the distance. Rattling along at 20mph seemed at odds with the "main road" marking on my map, but I suppose it’s no different to southern Namibia.

We’ve been terrorised with stories of the border crossing taking multiple hours, but it wasn’t too bad – processed both sides, a coffee purchased and on our way in not much more than an hour. The main challenge is that after standing in various queues Chilean customs insist on scanning every item of luggage. It’s just sobering to remember that it used to be that way going from France to Belgium.

The road is nicely surfaced from the exact border point to a few miles from the Chilean customs, when we diverted onto a ghastly washboard which runs for a vast distance alongside what is obviously going to be a very nice new road when completed. Occasionally we were teased by crossing the new carriageway, then we were back on the washboard.

The roads in the Park are much the same, and it took almost two hours to get to the hotel. Richard had been actively managing down expectations, and it is true that the Osteria Pahoe has seen better days. There is one compensation. The view.

Apparently tomorrow most of our shooting will be within walking distance. This could work…

The day started with another visit to the canyon viewpoint, to see if we could get better light than on Wednesday. At first it looked like the Eastern sky was overcast and we wouldn’t get much, but suddenly about 1/2 before dawn it brightened up and gave us another show, but with a bit more cloud than yesterday.

It’s very interesting how photographs reflect a photographer’s outlook, and how different photographers seek different key characteristics for that purpose. I loved the cloudless sky yesterday morning and the strong geographic shapes in red and orange or blue which resulted from it. My companion for the same shoot didn’t and was much more enthusiastic about the small clouds on the mountains, which I regarded as “messing up” the underlying shapes. Chacun à son goût.

After breakfast we got on the bus and drove for well over an hour through the park to the Cascada Cañadon de los Toros, a small but dramatic cascade near the end of the navigable road. This was ideal for my style of shooting, lots of different views from tricky positions well-suited to hand-holding. However I discovered that I had to do slightly more hand-holding than recommended – the best lens for the job was my new 9mm f/1.7, but it takes 55mm filters and I only have a 58mm neutral density filter (to slow down the shutter speed and hence the water’s movement). The best shots therefore were taken at around 1/10s with my right hand holding the camera, and my left holding the ND filter. Thank the forces of light, or whoever’s responsible, for dual image stabilisation!

It was another long drive back, so we headed off for “lunch” at about 3pm. It amuses me that while we have a well-established term for late breakfast / early lunch, we have no equivalent term for “we missed lunch so let’s eat enough now to cover it and tea/dinner”. My vote is for “Tunch”. We had a very nice tunch of steak and beer.

At the end of the day we had a short hike up to the Mirador los Condores. The light wasn’t great, but we did get some nice views of the town, and one very dramatic lenticular cloud above one of the peaks.

Tomorrow, we move on to Chile.

Richard’s plan for this morning was a hike of 1.5-2 hours in each direction, with a significant vertical element. With my hip and knees complaining a bit I took the better part of valour and with Nigel opted for the alternative, shooting from an overlook encompassing both the mountains and town. Before dawn we were rewarded with the mountains glowing pink balanced by the lights of El Chaltén.

As the sun rose the scene changed with bright reds and oranges creeping down each peak until the whole range was bathed in fiery colours.

After breakfast 1 of 2 we took the bus up to the trail head to meet the rest of the group on their return. It became apparent that the walk had been longer and harder than expected, with several who yesterday were bouncing around now moving as stiffly as myself, so I definitely made the right call. While I was waiting I stalked a rabbit through the grass. The latest “animal aware” adjustments to Panasonic auto-focus really are very good:

Breakfast 2 of 2 was at the Wafelria, which is exactly what it sounds like. Apparently it’s now a tradition for after the hike. At least some of the group had already worked off the calories…

Argentinian finances continue to be a mystery to me. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if they continue to be a mystery to the Argentinian Finance Ministry! There are two exchange rates, the official one, and the "other official one", for tourists.

If you exchange cash, US$ say, you can easily get almost twice as many Pesos as at the airport change desks. Any tourist-facing business can do this, so you can pay for a meal with a $20 bill and get almost as many Pesos in change as if you had changed it at an official bureau. So far not so unusual, especially if you are old enough to have travelled to Eastern Europe before the fall of communism.

But in these days of electronic money it gets weirder. Pay a hotel or restaurant bill with a card and it initially goes through at the primary rate, which feels somewhere between "about right" and "a bit expensive" by UK standards.

Then a few days later a second transaction turns up on your card account, a rebate of nearly 50% to correct it to the tourist rate, and suddenly things feel very cheap. I assume this is an attempt to prevent the Peso just being replaced by a hard currency such as the dollar, but I’m not sure I see it ending well. At least I can stop worrying about my purchases here.

Photographic trips are hard. I spent the afternoon at “Pangea”, drinking beer and writing my blog, then stopped so I could go and get an early dinner at La Cervezeria, which as the name implies also involved drinking beer. I had to stop before I needed stabilisation, let alone my images!

The sunset shoot started off looking very unpromising, but suddenly just at the right time there were some odd breaks in the cloud and we got a handful of great shots. It really is worth sticking with it until the light is completely gone in such a location.

We started the day about an hour before sunrise back at the overlook of Mt Fitzroy and the Las Vueltas river. On the positive side, yesterday’s wind didn’t re-materialise. On a more negative one, neither did much of the warm light on the mountains we’d been promised. We got some pre-dawn glow, but then around sunrise the mountain was covered by cloud, even though when we looked in other directions several were getting a great sunrise. That’s the way the cookie crumbles… At least it’s not a difficult location to revisit if time allows before we move on.

After breakfast we explored further into the park, around the side of Mt Fitzroy. At two separate locations we were able to experiment with both direct shots and reflections in water, however the reflections were disrupted a bit by the gentle breeze, and protective of her modesty the top of Mt Fitzroy remained cloaked in a tiny band of cloud.

We had a great lunch – Argentinian steaks really are enormous – and a quiet afternoon including a critique session. I offered up a few of my shots and happily accepted the feedback. I also included the one taken above the glacier by the Argentinian lady, just to see how long it would be before the suggestion “crop off that ugly bit at the right-hand side”. About 10s…

We had two evening locations, first a waterfall for which the main challenge was getting a reasonable composition without appearing in everyone else’s and then a shot up the river towards the mountains from a raised outlook.

We spent the morning of the second full day driving from El Calafate to El Chalten, which will be our base for four days. The road was remarkably flat, mainly straight and moderately boring for much of the time, but as we closed on El Chalten some very high mountains, particularly 3405m Mt Fitzroy, started to loom large over us. If Richard can deliver on his form from previous trips here these should be the focal points of some very dramatic images.

El Chalten is one of those tourist bases which is expanding almost as you watch it, and very busy. Richard and Alejandro, the local guide, had plans for lunch at a venue they usually use, but Plan A failed because there was no space. Plans B to about E also failed in rapid sequence. We did eventually get a nice lunch, but perched on very precarious bar stools and at about 3pm.

After lunch we went to case the joint for tomorrow’s dawn shoot, as it’s a somewhat precarious and very, very windy location overlooking the river as well as Mt Fitzroy. I’m a big bloke but I was struggling to stay upright. How we’ll get on in dawn light if the wind is as bad, or worse, tomorrow morning, remains to be seen. We are already down one hat as a group.

We had a short break for tea. I decided to “just get a sandwich” and ended up with a toastie about the size of my head with about 400g of meat in it. I managed half, with another bite after sunset.

As Richard promised, the sunset shoot was at a quieter location, but the primary subject, long exposures of reflections on water, really didn’t appeal. However turning around I was treated to some great patterns of light as the sun set on the mountains.

First dawn start tomorrow. Wish us luck!

The first day of the tour proper was spent on a trip to the Perito Moreno Glacier, a 250km² ice formation, one of 48 glaciers fed by the Southern Patagonian Ice Field between Argentina and Chile. It is one of the most readily accessible for tourism, and as such is a major draw. Aside from the natural wonder, it has an unusual human history, as the area became one of the first national parks globally following their invention in the USA and Canada.

The hill opposite the front of the glacier is threaded through with a series of metal walkways and platforms so you can observe the glacier from multiple angles. All the steps weren’t ideal for my knees, but I got some great views, both panoramas of the whole glacier and details of the ice.

I have discovered that this tour is not running on “Rangers Rules” (Leave No Man Behind). I had gone slightly further down the trail to get a shot, and ended up back at the agreed meeting point shortly before the agreed time, with no sign of anyone else. After 15 minutes I discovered that they were all already in the cafe without me. From here on it’s every man for himself!

The glacier is very dynamic, advancing around 2.5m per day. This means that there’s a fairly continuous calving process, and during our visit several large lumps of ice fell off into the water, usually with no warning. This adds to the photographic challenge – can you have your camera in hand with appropriate settings to capture the event. Today I was lucky – a small piece fell off and alerted me, and I realised that a much larger slab was likely to follow. I didn’t have my camera out, and it was a race to get it ready. In the end I just made it, but without being zoomed in or in high speed mode, I just had to prod away at the shutter release while the collapse happened, but I’m really pleased with a couple of the frames.

When I’m at a tourist location I’m always happy to do a swap and take a photo of someone on their camera, in return for the equivalent to record myself at the scene. While this has never resulted in anything really bad happening, the results on my side seem to vary between the odd and the hilarious. Today was no exception: I took a straightforward picture of a couple of South American ladies, and handed one of them my camera. Unsatisfied with a straight equivalent she started off up the steps to “get it all in”. I call the result “Where’s Wally?”

Back at base we split into a couple of groups with different designs on dinner style and timing. With the four Germans and Glenn I headed to La Fabbrica, a “Cervezaria” or as we call them in Britain, a pub. We had a highly entertaining evening with a young waitress who was determined to teach us a least a little Spanish. The food was good, the beer better and the company excellent.

The Festival of the Lake continues. I really liked the headline act of the night, essentially a “folk rock” group, but I would have preferred if they finished slightly earlier than about half past midnight when I was trying to get to sleep. Oh well…

On the first night in El Calafate we had an excellent but very large steak dinner, and once my digestive system had settled down I got a reasonable night’s sleep (cheat!)

At breakfast it transpired we’d been joined by the German contingent, all four of them, who’d taken a very early flight from Buenos Aires. As they were now in the position of being sleep deprived with nowhere to go and lie down, naturally we all decamped down to the lake to look at the flamingos. As we got within 20m of the water the temperature dropped, the wind whipped up, and I rapidly and publicly recanted all my rude comments about the clothing recommendations, and wished myself speedily back at the hotel to get a more substantial hat.

The flamingos were not terribly cooperative posing for us. We wondered if the issue might be they were all feeding, but on closer inspection it became apparent that they all had their heads tucked under their wings to get out of the cold blast. Completely understandable.

Hotel revisited and hats exchanged, I set out for the El Calafate natural history museum, the Centro de Interpretación Histórica. Although relatively small, only really three large rooms, they have an excellent display of South American dinosaur skeletons, and a fun reconstruction of a giganotosaurus’ head. There’s an obvious selfie, although you have the challenge of getting the camera far enough away, and dealing with the low light in the room. Fortunately I had in my pocket the estimable Sony RX100 mk7, the only camera I still own with both on-camera flash and self timer, and it worked beautifully!

When I came out of the museum, about 1km from our hotel and El Calafate’s central park, they were warming up for “The Festival of the Lakes”, an annual music festival. I could hear everything clearly, which didn’t bode well for an early night at our hotel, over the road from the venue.

Back on the main street I bumped by accident into the Germans, who had by this stage been joined by the Texan contingent, and we had an excellent lunch of pizza and beer. A man’s gotta chew what a man’s gotta chew.

By 6pm the entire party had assembled and we had an excellent meal together. Back to the hotel and the Americans sat down to watch the Superbowl, complete with detailed Spanish narration. Meanwhile behind the festival was getting going at an even higher level of volume. The only solution, and one which worked, was lots of red wine!

I’ve made a start on one of my occasional tests of the human body’s ability to endure in situations of extreme sleep deprivation, or, as I usually call them, photo trips. This time it’s Patagonia.

Those who know me better will be aware that this has been a long time coming. I originally booked a trip to Patagonia back in 2014, inspired by two BBC documentaries, one of which was made by the BBC wildlife unit, and the other, infamously, by the Top Gear team. The original booking got cancelled and became, after a couple of further cancellations, my Bhutan trip. Other things happened for a couple of years, but in 2019 I managed to make another booking for a Patagonia trip. I was literally ready to go in the third week of March 2020 and “shit happened”. The trip could have been a complete write-off, but fortunately the organisers managed to roll the various bookings forward, twice, and here we are.

I was going to write that I have been almost paranoid about any possible barrier to the trip happening this time but that would be incorrect. I have been absolutely, completely paranoid, even to the extent of limiting the weights I lifted in my last training session in case I strained something. Mad, perhaps, but I write this from El Calafate, so fingers crossed it’s worked.

True to form the trip started as it is likely to continue, if experience is any guide, with various causes of sleep deprivation. It’s a very long overnight flight from London to Buenos Aires, which started at almost 10pm. I was ready for a sleep then, and actually dozed as we were taking off, but BA had other plans. By the time they had finished with pre-dinner drinks, dinner, coffee and clearing up it was well after midnight and Hypnos had given up and gone off to more productive pastures. Despite a comfy seat and almost magical noise-cancelling headphones he didn’t re-appear and I dozed fitfully.

I arrived at the hotel fit to be tied, but as it was only 10am in Argentina the room wasn’t ready, so I spent the morning getting to know some Argentinian pastry delicacies. Finally the room was mine and I disrobed, closed the curtains, switched off the lights, climbed into bed, and that’s when the banging started. Either next door’s headboard needed maintenance, or it was involved in some repetitive physical activity… Fortunately (for me at least) it didn’t last long and I got off to sleep for about an hour, when the banging started again, in a different room.

Late afternoon I got up for a wander. The Hilton is located in a docklands regeneration area, with a waterway and various bridges for interest. Dinner at the hotel was prohibitively expensive, so I ended up in at a floating bar, on a pontoon in the middle of the dock, with tasty burgers and a very impressive, German-inspired beer list. My initial interaction was with a nice blonde waitress who spoke good English. However communication broke down when I tried to ask one of the other waiters for the bill, and he brought another beer! Oh well.

It may be a bit early to judge, but I am wondering if I’ve packed correctly. The suitcase includes fleece-lined over-trousers and a down parka. In Buenos Aires it was 33C. Hopefully that won’t be the case up on the glaciers, but I’m beginning to wonder.

The flight down to El Calafate was uneventful, but towards the end some interesting looking lakes and mountains started to appear. El Calafate itself is a typical wilderness tourist centre, putting me in mind of Banff in Canada, or Moab in Utah, but in Spanish. Exploring it will be tomorrow’s job.