Unfinished Business - a return to Chile
Way back in 2017, we headed off to Chile on a recce with one mission: to photograph Pumas in the Torres del Paine. Unfortunately for many reasons, based on that recce, we couldn’t take it forward to offer it as an expedition. This is something that happens from time-to-time, we will test out a destination and a logistics team to see if it is something that we can offer in the future. But we have high standards, it has to work as a photographic safari destination, and we have to be fairly confident that we will be able to host a trip with decent opportunities available. And based on our experiences in 2017, we couldn’t take it any further. Every now and again people would ask us about Chile and Pumas, and the Torres del Paine, and our response would always be the same - we have unfinished business there…
When we were in Chile in 2017 we managed to spend a couple of days with a female puma called Sarmiento. She was pregnant at the time with cubs and therefore very uninclined to move - which for us was very lucky!
Even though we had managed to get a few portraits of the female known as Sarmiento, we felt that we had been very lucky and were unwilling to take that same chance with clients… Chile and the pumas were put on ice…
Fast forward a couple of years and we find ourselves with our good friend Guiliano running one of our Pantanal Photo Safaris, and the subject of Pumas and Chile came up - we recounted our tale and our unfinished business. Well it turns out that Guiliano knew of a different and very successful Puma Photography company - we were interested! After much intelligence gathering it seemed like this was an operation that we could trust. And in a twist of fate, it turned out that a very trusted friend of ours was booked with this very same company to go and try the pumas, and after a very successful trip for him, we were convinced. Maybe we would be able to complete our business out there after all!
So with the final seal of approval we launched our Puma Photographic tour. We took with us 6 intrepid travellers packed with all the thermals, fleece layers and heavy down coats we could carry and started the massive 14 hour flight to Chile, landing in Santiago and enjoying some spectacular mountains on the way. We deliberately timed our trip for the Chilean winter, hoping to get Pumas in snow, but it meant that conditions may well be challenging and the snowy mountains that we saw along the way certainly made for a fantastic introduction.
Going out for Ramen in Santiago!
After a night in Santiago we boarded a domestic flight for the short flight south. I say short, but even though we never left Chile it was still a three hour flight - the scale of this country is something that is hard to fully understand. This brought us to our next destination the coastal town of Punta Arenas, once we arrived we had one goal, to find somewhere to watch the World Cup football - a necessary bonding trip for the group you see!
After a successful win for England and a welcome team meal afterwards we were due for an early night ready to meet Team Puma and head off to the Torres del Paine in the morning. We piled all our bags and ourselves into the team vehicles and headed north to Patagonia. We travelled through some fantastic scenery, with some excellent coffee stops, and a lunch stop along the way, before reaching the team hotel on the outskirts of the Torres del Paine.
A coffee stop during the journey and a chance to meet some of the locals!
The Chilean scenery that we saw on our drive to our hotel was incredible!
All in all the journey north was about 5 hours including the breaks that we took along the way, but still our team hotel was a welcome sight for us. After a thorough briefing by our team on what to expect and how to behave as well as a good dinner we all got an early night ready for Day 1 of our photographic safari…. but would we get lucky…
