www.thegilmours.co.uk

Well most of you will have noticed the absence of postings on our website since August 2007.

We’ve not only been very busy but, of course, technology has moved on and, despite my early misgivings and protesting about Facebook, I, like most people, have found it to be a more effective networking tool and spend more time updating it than our own website.

Well rather than calling a moratorium or just ignoring the emptiness, I’m posting another video i’ve added to YouTube and letting you know that posts to our site will be highly selective and irregular. We will still publish prayer points and the site still serves to provide a useful profile for both of us as individuals. It is also a great reminder of our life in Chile for the first two years.

As I’ve noted previously, my testimony is the most read page of our website and so I figure that even if for this reason alone, it would be worth retaining the site.

Well now for that video. This was taken on the return leg of a recent trip to Mendoza, Argentina. The trip takes around 6 hours and on the Chilean side, has an amazing complex of curves and zig-zags to climb/descent almost 2800m in just 10km laterally. The video illustrates this from the dash of our Land Rover.

31 Minutos (Chile) Education Show (re-directs to YouTube)

This show for kids was filmed at Paranal last year and features a familiar-looking astronomer, named Luna Menguante (”The Falling Moon”). With (nearly) blonde hair, thick rimmed glasses and a jumper fit only for someone who “boldy goes where no (wo)man has gone before”, Luna Menguante explains how Paranal is one of the finest spots for observing the stars in the world.

We hope you enjoy it. We were in fits…

While it is in spanish, it is spoken slowly and clearly and is recommended to those learning the language!

This is a video we took on the largest salt lake in Argentina, Las Salinas Grandes. Here they “mine” or grow the salt under the desert sun, dig it up, dry it, then pack it into sacks for export.

We took a small diversion off the main pass from Chile to Argentina and had tea in the middle of the salt industry.

The Salinas Grandes are an incredible sight. The salt forms homogenous hexagons of around 1-2 feet in diameter, divided by small ridges, where the crystals accumulate as the ground water (from surrounding altiplano mountains) evaporates under the perishingly pure sunlight. This surface formation extends into the nothingness… broken by little except the road and some deceiving mirages.

The lack of a near horizon makes judging middle distances very difficult. Thus with clever positioning you can appear to lift someone with one hand and pick up a Land Rover with the other! After taking lots of perspectiveless pictures of ourselves and the Landie, I thought it might be fun to video the Landie for the Land Rover Club Chile (and the rest of the YouTube world). So here it is! Enjoy!

This slideshow contains highlights from San Pedro de Atacama, a village on the rather fictitious and distant shores of the salt lake in the Atacama desert. Founded on an oasis, the village offers a little bit of humidity and some great restaurants in an otherwise empty and extremely dry desert.

It serves as a base for tourists venturing to nearby desert “sights”, salt lakes and the Andes.

Oh its hard to say “Hoolima Kittiluca Cheecheechee”,
but in Tonga that means “no”.

If i ever have the money
‘Tis to Tonga i shall go.

For each lovely Tongan mainden there,
will gladly make a date,
And by the time she’s said “Hoolima Kittiluca Cheecheechee”,
It is usually too late!

(by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann)