Montepulciano Proper and Tuscany

Today was tour day. We went to the town of Montepulciano during the day to check out old town, before we had a photography tour booked with Alfredo.

Montepulciano can be a little bit confusing because it’s the name of a medieval hilltop town in the province of Sienna in Tuscany, and it’s also the name of a wine that is not produced in Tuscany.

Come photography tour time we got into the car and it became a game of racing for light.

We started at the windows 95 wallpaper spot.

This involved pulling onto the side of a highway, scrambing going down the embankment of an overpass and wading waist deep into grass for the perfect angle.

Then we moved to the Gladiator ending scene. To get here, we wound our way up and down various semi steep roads, down the back driveway of a school before wading through more grass.

From this angle, outside of the wheel marks of mowed lawn, it would be difficult to discern what era we were in. We rested here for a good long while, crouched on the heelside, watching rippling waves of grass fields and feeling the breeze, waiting for Alfredo to take a smoke as we heard his tales as a Reportage photographer. And tales Alfredo had, from stories of how he gained the trust of DRC Congo generals to facing down guns in the inner streets of LA in his search.

The sun was starting to set, so we set out towards another set of hilltops, turning up and down more roads, questionable roads, then finally definitely not roads.

Alfredo continued to tell us tales of his time as a reportage photographer as we watched the light change and the sun set —

— before we finally raced back to catch Montepulciano at night.

Not going to Antelope Canyon

I mentioned we’d learned that the Antelope Canyon (which has an upper and lower section) isn’t publicly accessible.  It’s on Navajo land and in fact different families have rights to the different canyons.  You have to pay a permit fee, a guide fee, a licensing fee if you want to take photos and possibly sell them, and you have to sign up for a tour in order to go.

Well we didn’t know that, so Pokin spent a few hours on the phone calling up tour companies.  Most of them were already booked up, but eventually she found a tour with one spot left.  A two hour photography tour with Chief Tsosie of the hour Upper Canyon for $80 at the 10:30 time slot.   There was also a $43 regular non photography tour too.  Upper Canyon is famous for the beams of light that shine into the canyon at certain times, and as a result it’s crazy busy there.  Being crammed into small confined spaces with tonnes of other tourists seemed like the last thing my best bear bud wanted to do, so we wished Pokin good luck and headed towards lower canyon where there were rumours that you could go without a guide.

sumi bear no antelope canyon-1

Which turned out not to be true.

Well it’s true that you could go to lower canyon if you were a photographer.  With an SLR.  And a tripod.  No, your fancy Leica won’t work because they don’t accept mirrorless cameras.  So not surprisingly they didn’t accept our cell phone camera as sufficient equipment.  And unfortunately we missed the guided tour departure by about 5 minutes so seeing the Antelope Canyon just wasn’t happening.

Off to find something else to do!