El Camino: The Way

“But the beauty is in the walking; we are betrayed by destinations.” - Gwyn Thomas

I did something exciting!

This weekend I took a bus to Logroño to hike two days of El Camino with Annette, Mark, and Lisa (friends I met at church). The Camino is something I wanted to do ever since seeing the movie The Way and reading about it online.

The Camino is organized in 30 etapas, or stages. We did two of the etapas and the details of each one are included for your reference. I hope you enjoy this brief photographic walk (no pun intended! except I did intend it...) through my short journey :)

Etapa 8

 

The first day we went from Logroño to Nájera, which is a total of 29.6 km, or 18.4 miles. We left Madrid at 8 AM (the 1 AM bus was full), which means I left my apartment at 7:15 AM. It doesn't normally take me that long to get there but I had to account for the strikes... again.

We arrived in Logroño at 12:30, which is the time that most peregrinos (pilgrims) are finishing. Nobody wants to walk in the afternoon heat. Except for us...

The tile arrow pointing the way through the city in Logroño. These are more trustworthy than the spray painted yellow arrows. Anyone could buy a can of spray paint and take the peregrinos 5 km out of the way...

 Nevertheless, we followed the spray painted arrows through the city.

The area we walked through was La Rioja, which is a region known for its red wine. We walked through vineyards both days.

 

You can always find an arrow leading the way... 

 

 

Sometimes the journey would take us along the road; luckily the cars know to avoid peregrinos. 

We walked alongside these crosses for about 30 minutes. Most consisted of sticks or flowers which were woven into the fence.

Then the camino would take you through tiny cities (like really tiny... one of the towns we wanted to stay in had a population of 220 people) where the locals would try to convince you to check out their historical land marks. I loved looking at the quaint buildings and if we had had more time, I would have loved to check out a church or two during the journey. Unfortunately, when you have so many hours of walking ahead of you, you're not too keen or reading every historical plaque.

 The cobbled streets of Navarette

After about 11 km, we arrived in Navarette. This took about 2 and a half hours and since we had to get our peregrino booklets to legitimize ourselves (many albergues will only allow peregrinos to stay there), we didn't leave Logroño until about 1:30 PM. During lunch, we tried to decide what to do with the rest of the day. 

 My first plate from lunch, a typical salad.

The etapa called for us to walk another 18 km, but since it was so late in the day, we thought we would stay in a smaller town and walk a little extra the next day. Unfortunately, when we called the albergues in Sotés and Ventosa, we found out that there was no room in the inn. Thus a little before 6 PM (we were delayed by some rain), we set out again on the Camino to walk another 4 hours. We played a lot of "Zap", a word game that I learned at Jackie's grad party and played on family vacation to kill downtime. I didn't know it was possible to play for 3 straight hours....

On a positive note, since we were walking at such an abnormal time, we saw the sun set over Nájera. It made walking with the sun in our eyes for hours on end worth it.

 Sunset over Nájera

When we finally got to our albergue, the girl sighed, "Finally! You guys took it nice and slow!" She totally thought it took us 16 hours to walk the 29 km. When we told her that we started at 1:30, she could hardly believe us. It seems they all thought the sun would melt us.

Etapa 9

On Saturday, we got up at 7:15 AM and left with a bunch of other peregrinos. 7:15 is actually kind of late though; the earlier the better since it is more comfortable to walk in the cool mornings. This walk was pretty flat and only consisted of 21 km, or 13 miles.

It was more fun to walk with the other peregrinos since we would run into the same groups multiple times throughout the day. We saw them in Azofra (where we stopped for breakfast) and then again at the watering hole at the top of a rather steep hill. (The hill wasn't too bad, except for the fact that it kept winding so that every time you thought you had reached the top you were sorely disappointed.) Then, lastly we saw them when we were sitting outside, eating our menú del peregrinos. The menú de peregrinos is the pilgrim's menu; it is a typical 3 course Spanish lunch but it has earlier hours to account for the early hours of the pilgrims. Needless to say, everyone had bigger smiles when they were out of their backpacks and eating, than when they were trekking up the hill.

 Hearty breakfast for a peregrino

We made friends with two Canadian ladies who were doing the entire Camino over about 40 days. There are 30 etapas (so normally it takes 30 days), but they were planning on breaking up the larger etapas (some etapas are 38 km!) into smaller chunks. Since they are retired and the one woman is 70 (awesome!!!), we approve of their methods.

They had discovered in their first 7 days that they had different walking paces, so we ended up splitting up and walking with them. Lisa was happy to have someone to walk with at a slower pace and gloated at breakfast about how she had found "her match". The fact that her match was 70 years old didn't bother her if she could claim that it was the wisdom of her elder that let her try the grapes, which we had discouraged her from doing the day before :)

Another great part of Saturday was the sheep! Right after we passed them, the shepherd brought them onto the Camino and they completely filled it. Although Lisa was convinced it would be fun to walk among them, I was happy to have avoided the excess of flies that accompanied them.

That would have been a lot of sheep to walk through!

Up closer and even more personal than the PA farm show.

Wahoo! Another awkward photo of me :) But here's some proof that I didn't just download all of these pictures from the internet. Also Jackie, please note that I am repping my t-shirt with Dutch on the back. Too bad he was covered up by my backpack.

Second plate of my lunch. The reward for arriving!

We finished in Santo Domingo, which is a city known for the legend about "El gallo y la gallina." In this story, a peregrino is wrongly accused of making advances on a local girl, and is hung. But wait! He is saved by Santo Domingo! His parents hear his voice and then go to the town to tell the judge that their son is as as alive as the chicken that he was about to eat. And obviously, the chicken on the judge's plate then began to sing. There you have it.

If you know Spanish (or want to pretend you do) here's a YouTube video recounting the story with a bit more detail:

Or if you could care less about the milagro, just know that it gave me reason to eat this cute little chocolate chicken.

Each chicken was a different kind of chocolate (milk, white, dark), filled with a truffle-ish chocolate inside of a different variety.

Well, that's all folks! I hope you enjoyed my brief experience with the Camino as much as I did! I can't wait to do more :)

Until next time,

Amber

Disclaimer: This blog records my personal thoughts and reflections; it is not reflective of the positions held by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program.