Since the shots are taken into the sun and the shadowed side of the subject is exposed, I'd bet theres a mirror of sort in play.
Living here in the Frozen Wastes (ie, snow usually on the ground 1/3 of the year), I've wrangled with snow and sun shots myself before - they aren't easy.
My best suggestion would be to 'stage' your first shot - ie, find a subject with the angle you expect the sun to be, shoot it via the LCD with the best exposure for the subject with highlight exposure warning enabled, then save that setting (since the lighting shouldn't change all that much when you actually get out shooting for real, you should be golden from there). Once you get to post, you can then bump shadows and darks up to whatever level works for you. You'll still probably find shadows very dark, however.
Short of getting a camera with a massively wider dynamic range (I'm looking at you, 645Z) youre probably going to be stuck unless you get very lucky in the placement of your subjects and the light.
My personal favorite 'snow' shot I've taken is this one and even then it was a gray day and the post processing was stupidly difficult to pull off (the highlights are still somewhat blown - but then again they weren't the subject). Had I attempted this on a brght sunny day I doubt it would have come close to working.
The best "blue sky and sun" shot I took was probably this one - again, it involved a bit of post to not look awful, and if I remember right it involved a liberal use of sliding the highlight and white sliders leftwards. It was also a stitching of a slew of shots (I was experimenting with the Brenizer method on the tank), and obviously had the saturation cranked. My PC almost died trying to crunch the thing together. If I remember right I also bracketed each individual shot so I could cherrypick which set worked best in post - which basically means I cheated.
If you don't have to worry about your subject moving my best suggestion is to go the HDR route simply because you can then use all those shadows and lights for the final image.