Spent the first couple of days wandering the city, and discovering new interesting spots and re-discovering old haunts. Restaurants continue to feature largely for us and we easily slid into a more local routine of lunch at 2:00 and dinner at 8:30. Only one dreadful meal to date, a dinner at supposedly hot restaurant, Zandunga which I would not recommend.

My spanish is very creaky but workable for the simpler moments in life and normally utilitarian enough for restaurant use. Unfortunately...

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....