GRINGO INVASION part two...valpariso



Brian will not let me use this because Kenny had a back tail photo on it last year, I can respect that.  So you are seeing it on this blog and not in a mag
I know you what you are thinking "damn Freddy's looking fat" but please note that he actually weighed in less than Shier and Clint.


This is the last photo I shot pre flash drama that would plague me for the rest of the trip. His board flew out into my flash breaking the bulb, lucky not over the barrier and into on going traffic 50ft below like Freddy's did minutes before. Anyways, I brought a spare bulb, which was the wrong one even though the camera store assured me it was the one I needed. No, biggie I have been meaning to get a back up flash and now was the time. So I found a small used camera store in Vina that had what I was looking for, but by the time I got there it was closed so I would have to return in the morning. 

On the way back to the hotel we found these perfect hubbas that were at the city hall. The crew was fired up and started skating before I could even break out my "let's come back when I can shoot photos" speech. Being the city hall in South America there was the security guard inside freaking out and he eventually called the real police to deal with the scene we had created, 10 gringos, grinding down hubba's, a van basting 36mafia, random 40's laying around, and about 50 bystanders gathered around to see what the hell was going on. The real police showed up about 10 minutes later, some one yelled cops and we all made like Carl Luis and literally jumped into the van in under 5 seconds and took off. We thought we made a clean get away for about 2 blocks then were cornered off by the same cops we just dipped from. Me being the only spanish speaker I was asked to get out of the van to deal with the situation. Policia in latin countries are usually pretty mellow, but they can basically do what ever they want, so I played the easy role of dumb gringo and he let us go just promising that we would never return to the city hall. Shier thanked me later for breaking my flash, if not we would have never, found that spot, had that experience, or these bnw low light photos that I was forced to shoot but that I like more than if I had all my normal working gear.
 Cheers Mate.

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