Oaxaca is a relatively easy run, 4 1/2 hour direct flight to Mexico City. a rather longer than desirable layover of 5 hours and a 50 minute flight to Oaxaca. First impressions didn't suggest any wholesale changes to the city and we slid easily back into remembered locations.

Our B&B, Casa Los Bugambillias is a charming, small house only a couple of blocks from the Zocalo, with three rooms only. Since it was after 8pm when we settled into our hotel we set out to find a spot for dinner and stumbled into a a very attractive restaurant...

Arrived home on Good Friday from my Scottish photo shoot in time get some laundry done and then re-packed for a 10 day trip to Oaxaca in central Mexico.

I'm still moving very slowly; we hiked up hill and down dale for most of the Scottish location days carrying a tripod and 7 or 8 kilos of equipment as well as a large Pentax medium format camera and at 71 I'm not as spry as I'd like to be. We have lots of time in Oaxaca and are staying at one hotel for the whole time so hope to slow things down a little and move to a more relaxed and unstructured daily itinerary.

We visited Oaxaca on our first trip to Mexico about 15 years ago. A significant percentage of my impressions of Mexico were formed from having read "Under the Volcano" by Malcolm Lowery and while the book was not set in Oaxaca it, like Quauhnahuac  the setting of the book, was an old colonial town in the central mountains and which shared much of the cultural context of the book....

Rest of the week quickly fell into a rhythm of early morning shoots, late breakfasts, boxed lunches on the road, afternoon and sunset shoots, dinner and bed; repeat. The routine was only varied by the weather which in a matter of hours could, and did, ring all the changes on cold, windy, cloudy, sunny, rainy, snowy and back again.

If this description sounds as if it was not interesting or enjoyable, let me set correct that impression; it was very good fun and very hard work in equal parts and there was terrific sense of accomplishment in completing some of the more challenging shooting assignments....

Turns out we will have a local photographer, Peter Cairns of NorthShots as our location guide so after loading our two vans with equipment and photogs we headed out for the 4 hour drive along the side of Loch Ness to the Sligachan Hotel on Skye.

Old hotel, built in the 1830's with a long history as the jumping-off point for climbers of the surrounding Cuillin mountains. It's a wonderful, isolated spot at the side of Loch Sligachan with the Black Cuillin towering at its back. We will be spending 3 nights here with each day beginning with a sunrise shoot somewhere in the surrounding country, necessitating a 6:30 departure. Back to the hotel for breakfast at 9 and then out again at 2 for late afternoon and sunset shots returning to the hotel at 7:30/8 for drinks and dinner....

It's been a long time without posting an update. My New Year's resolution was to keep the blog updated and add three new posts a week; given that it is now March 1 and this is my first post, you can imagine the state of the rest of this year's resolutions.

My most recent posts (last August) were about our Arctic trip which was very special, one of the better trips we have taken and one that I think will be used as a yardstick against which we will measure future trips. I hope to complete the unfinished posts and images for the rest of that trip when I can make some time and get them up on the site. I've had a number of emails enquiring if the ship sank with the loss of all hands since the posts stopped abruptly off the coast of Greenland; I simply got overwhelmed with activities and finding the time to keep the diary going was difficult. The intention was always there however.

On our return fall was very busy, starting with the Cabbagetown Arts Festival where I was displaying some new works...

Overnight and this morning the ship sailed further down the east coast of Greenland and entered Scoresby Sund, the largest fjord system in the world covering about 38,000 sq kilometers and whose arms at times extend about 350 kilometres inland from the coast.

We will be visiting the Innuit village of Ittoqqortoormitt a hunting community perched at the edge of the fjord and numbering about 450 people. They town's dock is not large enough to accommodate our ship so we will have a wet landing on zodiacs to the shoreline in front of the town....

Arrived this morning in Kejser Franz-Josepph Fjord, East Greenland  and we have sailed from 80 degrees North at the top of Spitsbergen to 73 degrees North at our present location. Because we are 7 degrees farther south we are once again seeing sunsets at about 11:30 pm and sunrise at about 3:30 am.

The intercom went off at about 6:30 this morning, a call from the captain to tell us that a school of humpback whales were swimming and feeding around the ship and so we tumbled into our clothes and up to the 6'th level deck where there is an Observation lounge area surrounded on three sides by floor to ceiling windows and access to the open deck. Wind was chill and the temperature about 3 or 4C, frigid. Whales would spout and rise to the surface, breathe and sink back into the water, 1 or 2 at a time and about 200 or 300 metres off the side of the ship....