Way back in the donativo in Bercianos I said to my fellow peregrinos that I was doing the Camino to prove to myself that I’m not dead.
As we approach Pedrouzo I feel more than simply not dead. I feel completely alive. My 56 year old legs have walked 1,000,000 steps on this trip and they feel great. This is what they are supposed to do. Walk. Move.
I follow Jen through the hills of Galicia in the rain. We are in amongst a huge group of new pilgrims, doing the Sarria section. They are a strange combination of slow and competitive. Small groups of young men see Jen approaching and they try to speed up to avoid the ignominy of being overtaken by a girl, and a 5ft 4in girl at that. They can keep her at bay on the downhill and on the flat but on the uphills they have no chance. Jen powers on by with Hamish and me following in her wake. We’ve been walking for five hours now and haven’t been overtaken once. It makes me smile.
Cartesian dualism be damned! This body is me and I am this body. We are one and the same. This bag of bones and skin and organs is working like a Swiss watch. Everything is in its place. The rain is making the path slippery but the eyes send messages to the brain and the brain tilts the leg and the foot just… so… and the foot hits the ground in exactly the right place. And again. And again. Thousands of times.
And suddenly I think of the two members of this family who are not here, whose bodies do not work like a Swiss watch and who will rarely, if ever, feel such utter joy in simply walking.
There’s Muriel, who has turned a life blighted by ME into a shining example of how to deal with adversity. And then there’s Alister…
Oh Lord, Ali…
I am grateful for the rain as it hides the river of my tears.
Well, it looks like we did it. Sometime around when this picture was taken at this morning’s second breakfast…
Cafe dog gets lots of attention
… we walked our one millionth step on the Camino.
I’m wearing a Fitbit and have been recording steps, amongst other things, since we left St Jean. When we started this morning the cumulative step count was 989,060. The cumulative count right now, as I type this in Pedrouzo, is 1,019,088. By our calcs the 1,000,000 mark was passed around Cafe Lino, near A Calle, where the photo was taken.
One million steps. Hmmm.
We all skipped the 70 km from Santo Domingo to Burgos. Jen has taken a few buses and taxis due to her foot issues. I jumped from Leon to Hospital de Orbigo and accompanied Jen on her bus and taxi trip to Herrerias. But Hamish has walked everything bar the Burgos jump. So he’s probably walked another 60,000 steps on top of the one million.
Jen says, hopefully (and possibly, accurately), that she’s walked more steps because her legs are shorter. When we get back home we’ll do some experiments to see if she’s right.
But, as of right now, we lie on our comfy beds in a Pension in Pedrouzo and feel the satisfaction of the righteous.
Everywhere is indeed walking distance, if you have the time….
Steve : There is great delight at having a private room for the three of us, with a private bathroom. Our alarm goes at 5:30am and is ignored. I crawl out of bed at six and take advantage of the TOWELS!!!! to have a pre-walk shower, the first of the trip. Normally you slide out of bed, pull on a shirt and some trousers and are out getting your boots on in 5 minutes. Today is very slow in comparison. Jen has a major I-want-a-lie-in grump but eventually we’re up and out the door at 8am.
The new peregrinos are milling around, looking lost and tired. These are the newbies who joined the trail at Sarria. You must walk 100km of the Camino in order to get your ‘compostella’ certificate, so the last 100km from Sarria onwards brings a whole batch of new, clean, fashionable pilgrims. Today will be day three of five for them and they all look exhausted. The make-up is bedraggled and the hair is lank. Good, we think.
We find a cafe to sell us croissant, toast and coffee for breakfast and we’re off…
The weather forecast for the day says 100% chance of rain so we’re ready for it. I have my luminous visible-from-space rain jacket, Jen has her Very Hungry Caterpillar thing and Hamish has his huge clear plastic bag that he blagged from a bakery way back on the rainy Estella day. We’re set, 26km to do today.
A man in a bag and The Very Hungry Caterpillar
It does, indeed, rain. And rain quite a lot. Because we’re up so late we are in the pilgrim rush hour. There seem to be hundreds of hunchbacked peregrinos wearing the huge all-in-one rain covers. It’s actually a little difficult to maintain a walking pace. We are quite fast, especially up hills, and the trail is narrow in places. Overtaking is difficult. A new peregrino with a huge rucksack in an all-in-one rain cover is quite an ungainly object. It lumbers around like a rhinoceros or an articulated lorry. Our 700km of race-tested familiarity with ourselves and our kit makes us Ferraris, in comparison. We confess to feeling more than slightly smug.
Crossing the highway, looking at the sign…
But the rain falleth on the new and the old peregrino in equal measure and soon we are all very very wet. It’s warm so we don’t really care and when the rain stops it’s still quite windy so we dry fairly quickly. Note to prospective peregrinos – ‘technical’ clothing is well worth the extra money. My Rab top and Montane trousers will dry in minutes in a good breeze.
We have a second breakfast around San Xulian and eat huge bocadillos whilst listening to a Spanish gent of consequence conduct business very loudly on his phone. I would guess him to be 60ish, with an ample belly, and he’s dressed head to toe in the latest Lycra cycling gear. ‘Tis a thing of wonder. He eventually mounts his bike, an incredibly expensive Trek electrically assisted mountain bike and waddles off, uncertainly, up the road.
The day is uneventful and quite long. It’s too wet to take photos and too wet to wear headphones. We discuss the best parts of the trip, our favourite gear, and what we’re going to do in Santiago. Jen wants us to run into the square. I’m not so sure. If we’re doing this properly we’re supposed to go in on our knees but that definitely isn’t going to happen.
Clouds over Melide
Melide brings lunch and we hide out in a cafe whilst the heavens open. My luminous jacket does a good job of minimising the rain soaking but it does, for reasons unknown, make me smell like a chicken farm. I decide I don’t care, but I do feel sorrow for any non-peregrinos who are too close by.
The terrain is up and down and we walk through the greenest of tunnels made by the old growth forest. If the weather had been better I would have some excellent pictures.
We approach the hill before Ribadiso and all of us are firing on all cylinders. We power up it. I think of the quote from the film ‘Gallipoli’:
Jack: What are your legs?
Archy Hamilton: Springs. Steel springs.
Jack: What are they going to do?
Archy Hamilton: Hurl me down the track.
Jack: How fast can you run?
Archy Hamilton: As fast as a leopard.
Jack: How fast are you going to run?
Archy Hamilton: As fast as a leopard!
Jack: Then let’s see you do it!
We overtake everyone and steam, literally, into town.
We’ve booked ahead and are staying in Los Caminantes. We arrive around 3:30pm and find some beds. The albergue is pleasant enough, if a little cramped.
We unpack and I discover that my Platypus water system in my backpack has sprung a leak. My sleeping sheet is now ever so slightly damp. In the grand scheme of things, given what’s been falling from the sky all day, it’s not a problem. The Platypus goes in the bin, after 10+ years of good service. I shall replace it on our return.
H looks like he’s got bed bugs, so we shove everything in a washing machine and do a full debug. Let’s hope it does the trick.
Bed bugs to peregrinos is the equivalent of shouting ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre. They are absolutely the last thing you want. A fellow traveller, Zoe, from Australia, is wrapped up in an albergue blanket waiting for her clothes to dry. She spots a bed bug in her blanket and drops it with force. She informs the hospitalero, who seems indifferent and asks Zoe to put the blanket back on the shelf and get another one. Oh dear. Not impressed. Perhaps best avoid this albergue….
Zoe takes the blanket and dumps it outside, in the rain. And another few blankets for good measure.
We adjourn to the local cafe and eat a highly unhealthy dinner of yet more spaghetti, fried eggs and chips. We are all crawling. Hopefully from imaginary bed bugs and not actual ones. We return to our albergue and spray everyone and everything with anti-bed bug spray. And we wash H’s clothes again, just in case.
Bed is early, at 8:30, as we’ve run out of things to do.
We have a friendly room but a number of snorers. It takes two episodes of Jon Finnimore’s Souvenir Programme to pass the time until sleep.
…a line from the JRR Tolkein poem, ‘All that is gold does not glitter’.
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
I’m unclear as to why we got up to early but up early we were. And out around dawn.
We find a cafe for breakfast but are really struggling to wake up.
Today it is wet.
My luminous yellow jacket gets its first outing, as does Jen’s red thing she bought a long time back in Logrono. We dub her ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’…
The Very Hungry Caterpillar.Jen in her raincoat.
We walk on through the rain.
Hamish has a plastic bag that he got from a bakery weeks ago that is a surprising effective raincoat.
Caterpillar and man-in-a-bag head off to heaven, apparently
Our plan is to get to Palas de Rei, a walk of around 17km. We arrive in the non-descript town to find the main albergues are full of tourigrinos. We panic somewhat until the San Marcos hospitalero tells us we can have a room for just the three of us for 20 euros each. A quick conference later and we accept, and head to a secondary albergue.
The room is great! We have a private shower, towels, sheets, duvets. Marvellous!
Drying out the caterpillarA soggy day in Palas de Rei
We find a grim restaurant for tea and decide we’ve had enough. Hamish and I go on a junk food expedition and we return to the room with chocolate, Cola Cao and dodgy Spanish crisps.
We have a TV with a USB port so we plug in my stick and settle down to eat rubbish and watch ‘Saving Mr Banks’.
Steve : Up and out at a reasonable hour and on our way…
First requirement of the day was breakfast at A Pena and it was here that we experience our first peregrino traffic jam. The new influx of peregrinos at Sarria has overwhelmed the local bakery. We loiter for nearly an hour here. But the bread is very fresh and very good…
Bakery at A Pena, Jen with new walking polesCloudy day
And then – glory be! – we reach the 100km marker!
699km down, 100km to go…A moment of reflection…
It’s a pleasant walk on a cool day. We meet up with an American couple who are quick to apologize for Donald Trump (a common theme with Americans on the Camino)…
…and we stroll into Portomarin.
We eat spag bol (veggie version) at a cafe and carry on out the other side.
This is good farmland…
We come across a number of impromptu roadside ‘shrines’, the reasons for which are never clear.
We arrive in Gonzar just before 3pm. We are lucky to find the last three spaces in the albergue and so we do the rinse, repeat thing and wile away the afternoon reading.
You were so smart then
In your jacket and coat.
My softest red scarf was warming your throat.
Winter was on us,
At the end of my nose,
But I never love England more than when covered in snow.
In a heartbeat I was 14, on some church weekend trip to a Youth Hostel somewhere in England. A group of us had gone for a walk. It was winter and snow was on the ground. We came to a road junction and were uncertain as to which way to go. Someone threw a snowball which gently hit a girl who was wearing a black coat and a red scarf.
As we make our slow way across Spain we try not to think of the many many faster ways there are for getting from one place to another.
Many years ago, in my student days in London, I was training to run the Glasgow marathon. My friend and I were in the lab, getting our shoes on, when a colleague asked what we were doing. We replied we were going to run to Richmond, a distance of some 10 miles. He asked, not unreasonably, “why don’t you get the bus?”.
Last year when Jen first walked the Camino, I joined her in Sahagun and we walked for three days to Leon. I returned to Madrid, to fly home, on the very fast Renfe train. The train went from Leon back past Sahagun in about 18 minutes. It had taken three days to walk that. Three days.
We take travel over vast distances so much for granted. I recall throwing things at the TV during some holiday program I saw a few years back. A couple were being interviewed. They were in Goa, in India, and were complaining that whilst it’s all very sunny and all that it does take a long time to get there. “Why does it take so long to get there?”. Why does it take so long to get there!!? Because it’s stupid far away… that’s why, what’s wrong with you?
Someone famous and wise once said that the only way to truly know a place is to walk through it. I don’t know if I ‘know’ Spain particularly – I fear that I walk in the ‘pilgrim bubble’, a parallel place that is layered on top of Spain. But I would second the notion that walking is the ‘human’ pace.
Here’s a simple experiment to try…
Get yourself out into some woods on a sunny day. Put on your sunglasses and start walking. Look at the trees as you walk.
I was doing this early on in Galicia and I was struck by how much the world looked like an ultra high definition 3D movie. The skinny trunks of the larch trees slid past each other at different rates depending on their distance away from me. I then was struck by why I was struck by this.
In day to day life you go so fast through the natural world. I would bet that most folks out there reading this will pass through nature in a car and at a pace where the 3D-ness of the world isn’t particularly obvious. It happens too fast.
So when I walk through a larch wood on a sunny day with my polarising specs on, my reference point is the cinema. It’s in the cinema that I see 3D movement in the woods. Crazy!
Steve : Today we are back to normal and intend to walk around 6km beyond Sarria to Molino de Marzan, some 23km in total.
Sarria is a largish town some 110km from Santiago. According the the ‘rules’ of the Camino a pilgrim must walk at least 100km to be granted the ‘Compostella’ certificate. And so Sarria sees many new pilgrims arriving, with shiny white shoes and hairdryers, to spend a week or so walking that last 100k. As a result the town is busy with school groups and tourigrinos (a derogatory term – “tourist peregrinos”) and probably best avoided.
Sad to leave El Beso, we are up and out around 8am.
Leaving El Beso
It’s an uneventful walk to Sarria, taking in a second breakfast at Pintin, and we cover the 17km or so in good time.
Sarria – we are now in the final stretch…
We pass quickly through the town, stopping off at a hiking shop to buy Jen some walking poles and me a waterproof jacket – a shockingly luminous thing that comes to be known as the-jacket-you-can-see-from-space.
Sarria
We stop off for a huge pizza and head off early afternoon to cover the last few km.
Wildlife spottedDecisions…
After some uncertainty as the where we were actually headed we arrived at Molino de Marzan in the early afternoon.
This is rather a grand albergue. It’s a recent conversion of an old water mill. The dorm is a single large room and we’re amongst the first in.
The frogs in the pond are loud!
Dinner is rather simple and a little disappointing. This albergue is listed on the ‘Vegetarian Way’ and so we were expecting something a little more interesting than yet-another-tortilla.
However it truly is a beautiful peaceful place. Not even the extremely loud snorer at the other end of the dorm could damage the mood.
Steve : As explained yesterday A Reboleira is a big albergue in the middle of nowhere. There are two dorm rooms, each with 20+ bunks. We managed to get ourselves right into a corner, which was nice and quiet even if it meant a long trip to the loo in the middle of the night…
Our corner…… of a much bigger room.
Today we are facing up to the horrors of Jen’s foot and we’re only walking a short 10km or so. Which, happily, will bring us to A Balsa, in which we find Albergue El Beso (‘the Kiss’) – where Jen worked for month last summer. She is very much looking forward to catching up with her albergue colleagues. They don’t know she’s coming and she wants to surprise them. So we phone up and book under a false name.
But, first things first. We need surgery. For Jen’s toe and for her boots.
Hamish gets to play Doctor and apply some antibiotic cream. I play Engineer and take a pair of scissors to her boot insole. The idea is to remove enough of the insole from the little toe region such that there’s no pressure coming from either the boot or the sole.
The (un)willing patient…Now, tell me where it hurts… Check out that body language.This’ll work, he says, confidently….
Outside the main entrance of the Albergue is a vending machine….
In a normal world this would contain bottles of sugar water and other unhealthy delights. But not on the Camino. Oh no, this machine dispenses Compeed, blister plasters, antibiotic cream and all sorts of medication for the weary traveller.
After our surgical endeavours are complete we finally get out on the trail and are the last to leave at around 9am. We’re a day or so from Sarria, well into Galicia, and the weather has completely changed from the furnace of last week.
We set off into a pleasant misty morning.
The clouds roll over the hills as we amble towards Triacastela.
Sub 150km!
Panoramas left…… and rightHamish interacts with the recurring penguin grafitti
We have a second breakfast at a very splendid albergue in Filloval. Possibly the nicest breakfast thus far.
We walk on through small villages and farms…
..and amble into Triacastela around noon.
Jen’s feet are holding up, much to the relief of us all. The antibiotic cream and mechanical adjustments to her shoe seem to be working. We stock up at a chemist and, as it’s too early to check into El Beso, we eat chips and fried egg and delight in the short day – only 9km so far.
Junk food and preening.
At around 2pm we head off to walk the last 2 km to El Beso. Jen is much excited…
El Beso is a serious attempt at a ‘green’ albergue. The hosts and owners, an Italian/Dutch couple, are intent on recycling and making as much as possible themselves, be it food or furniture.
View over the albergue into the valley below
We check in with this year’s hospitaleros and Jen gives us a tour. The dorm room is dark and cool and very comfy. The owners are out for the afternoon so Jen can’t introduce us just yet.
Rinse and wash…
Jen takes us to her favourite place, a collection of hammocks up on the hill side.
This place is beautiful and peaceful. I settle down in a hammock to read and am asleep in minutes.
The owners come back around 5pm and are very surprised and pleased to see Jen in their dining room. Many hugs are given and much catching up is done.
Dinner is served around 7:30. The green ethos continues into the food served at dinner. Everything is local and most of it grown by the albergue staff. Nettle soup is their speciality. It tastes like brocolli…
Dinner table and view
We’ve had a very leisurely day. I do believe that the feet issues are finally behind us and we’re ready to make good progress.
