Steve : The Camino is supposed to be what you make it. You do what you want in your way. It’s your Camino.
That said – you want to do it ‘properly’, and ‘properly’ should not involve getting on a bus. More on that later.
My feet were giving me hell. 21.3 km to do today.
Leaving Najera
Past the route markers and through Azofra and Ciruena…
..with the compulsory breakfast stop of strong coffee, potato tortilla and an orange juice.
It was getting properly hot, at least for this Scotsman. As a former skin cancer patient I always keep full covered, which I reckon is the best idea anyway. At the end of this day H’s legs were traffic light red.
We arrived in Santo Domingo and had a crisis meeting.
We’d lost two days because of the British Airways IT failure. And our original Plan A required us to claw back a day at some point in the trip. The idea was to take three 20-ish km days and do them in two 30-ish km slogs. But our experience of the last few days has told us that 30 km is too much.
So, to make our flights on July 3rd, and to have something of a good time in Santiago (after all, the point of the exercise!) we decided on Plan E…
Take the 14:58 bus to Burgos, cutting out three days of walking. Jen tells us that we’re not missing much in these three days, in fact today’s walk was too much road and not enough country. Looking at the map, if we were to skip any section this would be the one to choose.
This would get back the lost BA days and might give us enough time to do something that both J and H really wanted to do – go on from Santiago to Finisterre ‘the end of the world’ on the Spanish Atlantic coast.
So that was our plan. We got the bus and went to Burgos. And we hope to make it to Finisterre.
I took no pictures of this sad departure from plan.
As the air-conditioned and completely splendid coach pulled out of Santo Domingo for the 70km trip to Burgos we were conflicted. And rather startled at the speed of the bus! After all these days of being a pedestrian it was rather a shock to roar along the road – the pilgrim trail follows the main road for much of the trip – and pass all the Camino route markers. In an hour we were there in Burgos. It felt like cheating.
We booked into the enormous municipal albergue. Very modern and very splendid. And very cheap, 5 euros each.
Burgos albergue
Jen performed surgery on my feet, with sharp scissors and a safety pin that had been sterilised with a cigarette lighter that we’d bought for the occasion, plus a lot of tissue paper to catch what Jen refers to as ‘blister juice’. I put on my sandals and felt grim.
Take good care of your feet
Somewhere along the way Jen had picked up some bed bugs. Jen greatly loves all kinds of animals but bed bugs aren’t in the approved list. They bring out the screaming heebie-jeebies. So she hot-washed everything – clothes, sleeping bags, the lot. And wrapped her backpack in a couple of plastic bags to be left out in the sun. The little beggars stood no chance.
Burgos has a truly magnificent cathedral. The albergue is just up the street from it, so we took our broken feet for a small walk and went to see what we could see.
There was to be a pilgrim’s mass in the cathedral at 19:30, so we scrubbed up nice and went along. This was a very different affair to Los Arcos. A real priest showed up and conducted the service. Being neither a Catholic nor a Spanish speaker I didn’t really have a clue what was going on but it was nice to watch other pilgrims for whom this was clearly a meaningful experience.
After that we found a restaurant that had a good vegetarian selection and we splurged. J and I continued our discussion on liturgy and authenticity. Whereas I rather like the Burgos pilgrim’s mass, she thought it was totally lacking in sincerity.
Maybe Jen will fill us in on her ideas on ritual and religion at some point.
Back to the albergue, just in time to miss a thunderstorm.
Thunder in the air
A few words of advice….
As the Beach Boys put it in the classic 1971 album, Surf’s Up, you need to take good care of your feet, …
Day 9 : Stats
Najera to Santo Domingo de Calzada
Steps 38,071
Distance covered, according to Brierley
21.3 km direct, 22.8 km actual walking
565.4 km to go
Other Fitbit stats
34.3 km walked (based on 0.9m stride length)
335 ‘active’ minutes
5,088 cals burned
Santa Domingo de Calzada to Burgos by bus.
Bus trip removes, according to Brierley, 72.7 km and 3 days of walking.
Muriel: Just spoke with the very weary peregrinos who are now on about Plan E, or was it Plan F or maybe even Plan G?! The British Airways debacle has left them seriously short of time and in spite of VERY long days they have not been able to catch up enough so have resorted to something they had hoped to avoid at all costs….they got a bus at a cost of E5 each. Sadly, the little villages they are travelling through have no internet so we’ll have to wait for one that does to get their updates. In the meantime, they are well, utterly exhausted and looking forward to another snore-filled night…
Logrono is a pleasant town with a huge park on the outskirts.
We’ve now come far enough to get a better calibration of our physical abilities. I was fine, except for probably the most important part of the walker’s body, the feet.
My trusty Merrells, which have transported me without incident for nearly two years, were producing blisters. And then blisters on top of the those blisters. I was hurting a lot.
My default position when in physical pain like this is just to knuckle down and go. This is fine when I’m at home in the Scottish hills and I can spend the next day resting up. But the Camino is relentless and you simply cannot rest up. If we are to get to Santiago in time for our flights home for J and H’s graduation we have no slack at all in our schedule. In fact we need to claw a day back somewhere.
At the end of this day we knew that wasn’t going to be possible. We can do 20-23 km days, we cannot do 30 km days. At least not without sufficient rest, and that’s just not possible.
We’ll need to make an alternative plan.
In spite of all the pain it was another beautiful day in the Spanish countryside. Lunch in Navarrete…
Navarrete roofs
..and a climb over Alto San Anton. Then a long descent in Najera, a rather scrappy town by Spanish standards. But it does have this rather famous landmark.
We trudged into town, absolutely exhausted. This abandoned sofa next to a yellow ‘go this way’ sign felt like an appropriate metaphor…
The municipal albergue was full so we went private, which was probably a good idea. Jen had a spot of sun stroke – nothing serious but enough to send her to bed for the evening. We had a room with shower for just the three of us – a rare luxury. No snoring!
Our fellow albergue occupants were a gregarious bunch of South Africans so we sat in the back garden and talked.
H and I dragged ourselves for an evening walk around town, primarily to try and prevent our legs from seizing up.
Muriel: I spoke with the peregrinos this morning and they are all well and walking again after a memorable communal evening meal and breakfast with the ‘blessed’ bonus of a snore-free night. It was their first night in a donativo (donation hostel). They’ll no doubt tell you more when these very long days of walking ease up a little. They are currently walking through industrial areas but the sun is shining, the locals are very generous and friendly, their packs are lighter and their spirits are good. Please help our ME Research UK Charity to raise more money and get closer to that “breakthrough” we are all longing for by sharing this blog and/or tweets with your friends and family or maybe even your work colleagues. Every donation helps! Thank you so much.
Here, at home, our ME constrained lives have very different highs and lows. A big high, for me, was enough energy to have lunch with a lifetime friend yesterday. Delicious food, charming and friendly cafe (Comrie Croft Tea Garden http://www.comriecroft.com/tea-garden/introduction.html ) and the always pleasure of a best pal made for a very special day for me.
Ali continues to regain his extremely limited strength at home. He’s helped by the boundary pushing Herbie dog who is determined to make the other half of Ali’s double bed his own in spite of knowing full well that the house rules preclude such antics from a dog. While we completely understand Herbie’s line of reasoning – cats are allowed on the bed, they are smaller and obviously less significant in the ‘family pack’ than he is, so where’s the problem?! – we know full well that if Herbie wins Ali will soon be pushed off one or other edge of the bed by Herbie’s expansion of territory behaviours. To not be master of your own bed seems a step too far for a severe ME person!
An additional blessing in our day is that the sun is shining (yes, it does shine in Scotland!) After a thrashing – from 3 of the 4 compass points at some or other point in the day – wind and rain storm yesterday, today has dawned with a largely clear blue sky. Bliss! I see a few whispy clouds creaping in over the Sma’ Glen but I’ll just ignore those and hope they go away! If my energy looks good at any point in the day I might even get to plant out my bok choi, parsley and kohlrabi seedlings that have been ready to go out for weeks now. Yes, I do eat my greens – as many and varied as I can find them!
Steve : Today is the first of two long (c 30km) days, back to back.
Paul Simon once wrote “I can gather all the news I need from the weather report”. The Camino is one place where that is true.
Thunderstorms were predicted and the sky looked like something from the ‘Twister’ movie. Beautiful and deeply threatening.
We left Los Arcos and headed west…
Thunderclouds to the east. Thunderclouds to the south. Thunderclouds to the west. But blue sky above us, which is what matters as we still haven’t got any raincoats.
We strode out at a good pace. H has a new app that tells us that we’re averaging over 5km an hour. And, without wishing to brag (ok, allow me to brag a little) we were not overtaken once on this particular day.
20km of walking found us in Viana, another simply beautiful Spanish hilltop town. An early lunch of goat’s cheese salad and we were off again, 10km still to go.
The walk into Logrono took us through the outskirts of town, something most people zoom through in their car. This hinterland between the picture perfect country side and the ancient medieval town centres has become a common feature. Let’s just say they are never the favourite part of the day’s walk.
We arrived in Logrono and went for a wander to find raincoats and a cheap bag for us to fill with all our rubbish that we want to forward. That done, plus some ice-cream and a visit to a rather splendid photography exhibition about Chicago. We were overwhelmed with the visuals of Spain and now we were immersed in Chicago for an hour. Surreal…
Donativo, with church on right.
Today we booked into a donativo. These albergues are free and are run, usually, by the Catholic church as a service to the pelegrinos. There is a rather different ethos to these places. There is a simple communal meal for dinner and for breakfast the following morning. Today was a vat of pasta and tomato with salad and red wine for the 25 or so pilgrims. The priests welcome us, offer a grace and help get the conversation going. Sitting around us were Mexicans, Germans, French, Koreans and Bulgarians.
After dinner and a communal washing-up (where we fought to help) …
…the priest led us through some tunnels under the ancient donativo building into the equally ancient church. We crept through the huge dark sanctuary into a back room. There we had a short service of blessing and he stamped our pilgrim ‘passport’ with the official albergue stamp.
Service and stamping. Priest at the back centre in red.
As you’d expect by the name, donativos, are kept going by donations. But at no point did anyone even mention money. As we were leaving the next day I had to hunt down the donations box. And when I found it, it was open, with money in it and was just sitting there. As I’ve said already the Camino does things to your sense of honesty. Good things!
I think the donativos are the best albergues. They preserve the original intent of the Camino. This is supposed to be a pilgrimage, and a pilgrimage isn’t just a long walk. You are supposed to think about life, the universe and, indeed, everything. Even if all you can really think about is how much your feet hurt…
Steve : In spite of the previous day’s sog-fest, we were up…
Checking out the feet damageBoots that go squelch
…and out by 7:15am.
A man too depressed to look up
On the outskirts of Estella is the village of Ayegui which has two things going for it. Number #1 is the ‘100km’ marker. Yeah!
100km !!!!
Number #2 is the wine fountain. Yes, indeed. A fountain of wine…
Free booze
Check it out for yourself.
The weather was still a bit dreich (a quality Scottish word – look it up) but the panoramas raised our spirits.
Monastery on the hill
And then the sun came out and the perfect Spanish landscape revealed itself.
We rounded a corner and came upon a orange juice vendor. He was playing aged rock music very loud. The slightly surreal combination of Steppenwolf ‘get your motor running, head out on the highway’ and the slow pace of the actual trail was duly noted. We head-banged with AC/DC as we drank our orange juice – freshly squeezed from actual oranges.
This boot was made for walking, but not any more
We are getting closer to Spanish wine country and the vines are more frequent.
We roll into Los Arcos mid-afternoon. Jen remembers this from last year and the Albergue La Fuente came highly recommended.
Albergue la Fuente, Los Arcos
Town square in Los Arcos
In the town square we had a “Who looks coolest in Hamish’s Ray-Bans?” competition.
No contest, if you ask me…
The Camino is a real Catholic pilgrimage, through a country with a long and strong Catholic tradition. In the town square photo you can see the Church of Santa Maria. There was to be a pilgrim mass at 8 pm and we slipped in to the church in good time.
The overwhelming first impression of these small village churches in the extravagance of the altar pieces. The contrast between this…
and the rather austere village architecture is marked.
We’re not Catholics (S and J are Christians, H is ??) and we weren’t quite sure what to expect. We thought the mass started at 7pm so we were sitting in the beautiful church for around an hour before things started to happen. An elderly lady was moving things around and opening and closing various sections of the altar area. A few more locals of advanced years ambled in and then at 8pm recorded voices came over the speaker system. For 30 mins or so there was a recorded ‘call and response’ – our Spanish isn’t good enough to interpret the meaning. But the surprise to me was that the whole thing was pre-recorded.
I don’t know what I make of this. I’m well aware (being both a Christian and a scientist) that there are those who would side with the Pink Floyd lyric
And far away, across the fields The tolling of the iron bell Calls the faithful to their knees To hear the softly spoken magic spells.
I understand the power of words, and I understand the purpose of liturgy. The extreme form of liturgy in this church is not my cup of tea (maybe, as the Camino progresses and wifi permits I’ll elaborate on my own theology) and I wouldn’t like that in my church.
But, but…
I recall many years ago reading a Clive James article in The Observer about some TV documentary on Lourdes. The programme was rather sniffy about the tourist tat often to be found side by side with some important religious place. But, says James, “objections to Virgin Mary holy water bottles are objections to the universality of the faith”. It seemed clear to this onlooker that the elderly audience were clearly getting some benefit from this peculiar service. Maybe Clive James’ comments apply to this case, too.
What exactly is the purpose of the ritual of of Catholic Mass? Are the words the important thing? Do they, in themselves, serve some purpose? If so, then the fact they are recorded is collective culture where a recording of emotions is a good-enough stand-in for the real thing.
I own hundreds of LPs (yes, I’m old…) and thousands of CDs and have access to the infinity of internet music. If listening to the Afro-Celt Sound System play live in Glasgow is the ‘real thing’, then my complete CD collection of their works is a good-enough replacement for those occasions (99.9% of the time) when such a real interaction is impossible.
In which case you could say that the recorded Mass is functionally the same as a recording of your favourite piece of music?
Meanwhile back on the Camino…
Jen made us dinner in the albergue kitchen. We marvelled at a group of Koreans (about 12 of them) who were cooking up a storm every night in a whirlwind of food and efficiency.
Rain, rain, rain, rain, inclement weather, rain, may as well stand in the shower, rain, rain, drain pipes emptying on my head, thunder, rain, rain, no *^£$^%& raincoat – whose idea was that?
Arrived, H’s bag send to wrong albergue, rain, rain, get to albergue, soaking, laundry, more rain, miserable cafe, lost my glasses, rain, rain.
Time for bed – the sun comes out!
Municipal albergue stinks of Eau de Wet Pilgrim.
Yuck.
Miserable sopping wet photos of miserable sopping wet people and a miserable sopping wet landscape will be not be uploaded as they’ll just put you off. So, take a break and go and watch this…
Steve (again, a few days later): Well, you’ve got to tell it like it is. Just prior to the downpour I did see this at the side of the trail…
Hmmm….
The day was overcast from the start as we wandered out of Puente la Reina. The first 15 km to Lorca were quite splendid.
Lorca has a first rate cafe on the right hand side as you pass through. The proprietor was playing Maria Callas at maximum volume. She seemed able to communicate with all the customers in their native tongue – Korean, Japanese, English, German, Danish. Impressive.
A km or so before Villatuerte the rain started. I tried to wait it out in a tunnel running under the main A-12 road. After about 40 mins of waiting it looked like things were easing off so off I went, hurrying to complete the last 4 km to Estella. Big mistake…
The rest of the day was pretty much as described in my first draft of this post…
