In Cholila, we left the horses resting in Peppe’s farm to go on a different adventure.
Not only do I have to ride and care for my horses out here on the road, I must also play journalist everyday. I shoot everything for Outwildtv, write blogs and write monthly articles for the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest daily newspaper. It’s not easy juggling this cowboy lifestyle with my profession, but I love sharing this experience with my followers!
Because the memory cards I use for the camera are 8 GB each, it is impossible to transfer the footage to the united states through an internet connection. So once a month, when the cards fill up, I send them to Nashville and once the footage is safely copied to the production company’s hard-drive, they send the cards back to me. In order to prevent footage from being lost, I shoot everything with two cards. Once I know the cards have arrived safely and that the footage has been copied, I can shoot on the B cards.
On my first journey from Canada to Brazil, things couldn’t have gone better. We never lost cards. Fedex packages always arrived in the countries I was crossing. It was great!
Well this time around, things couldn’t have gone worse. In the state of Parana, Brazil, I ran out of cards and was forced to start shooting with the B cards. When I sent the package to Nashville, it was opened by customs in the US and never closed properly. By the time it arrived, four cards were missing. That’s 80 minutes of footage gone. I wanted to cry. My hard work, getting off the horse, setting up the tripod, riding by the camera only to have to step off the saddle again to pack up the camera. Shooting interviews with people after long days in the saddle where all I want to do is rest and sleep. Waking up earlier to catch those epic sunrises…. Gone… Almost a year after this episode, I still lose sleep over those lost cards.
But this was not the only problem we had on this journey. Argentina is a country plagued with bureaucracy and the further south I rode, the harder it became to get cards into the country. Three different times, the government did not allow the package to enter. Leaving me without cards and shooting as little as possible. A really awful situation!
After all of the failed attempts to get the cards into the country, I managed to buy some in Bariloche and the production company sent a new package with a fellow journalist to Santiago, Chile. She then shipped the package in country to Osorno, Chile, a 6 hour drive from Cholila where we were resting.
It sucked! We lost an entire week, had to deal with the insane border officials in Chile and then Argentina when we reentered the country, and drove 12 hours in our support van that’s falling apart. But the good news is… I finally had cards to shoot once again.
