After three to four days on the Camino de Santiago, you really do start to become well-acquainted with the faces of your particular clan – that is, those who are walking the same stages as you and, by extension, staying in most of the same albergues, too.
I’ve fallen in with a group of younger pilgrims ranging from eighteen to thirty-four, and rather than being an unsociable bastard and cannonballing my way toward my next stop, I decided to hang back and take the road with them today. The result? A more leisurely, more talkative Camino – and ultimately, more fulfilling. In some senses, quite literally!
While I didn’t manage to track down Enrique the muleteer today (though there were clear signs on the road that his horse and mule had gone on ahead but recently), I did track down the Professor (the Californian I met on day one), the Sailor (a Spanish/Australian globetrotter and his wife) and the Carabiniere, an outrageous but loveable Italian former policeman for whom the saying “the man, the myth, the legend” might well have been coined. And because I had company on the road, I was much more inclined to stop for food, which made today’s long, sun-scorched hike across the plains of Castile a lot more enjoyable.
Top tip for pilgrims on this stage: just as you reach the village of Viloria de Rioja, the Parada de Viloria on your right as you hit the town is one of the friendliest places on the whole journey. They don’t have a menu peregrino, but rather the husband and wife who run the albergue cook up a simple lunch with a donations box on the side – you give what you can. The eggs, the bread and the tomatoes are all fresh and presumably their own produce, if not sourced from the farmers a few houses down the road. I had what was probably the best tortilla sandwich I’ve ever eaten in my life today. Hell, I’d do that stretch again for another bite.
We left La Rioja behind today and started out upon what will become the Meseta Central. In a very real sense it already felt like we’d reached the middle stretch between Burgos and León – sun high overhead, the Camino cleaving close to the road, dust clouds and rolling wheat fields replacing former river valleys and distant mountain ranges. It’s stunning, but in a different way – a very Castilian kind of beautiful, austere and proud in its starkness.
Fortunately I had company to chew the fat with rather than lapse into the same clichés that other (and considerably better-versed) British travellers have used before me.
We arrived in Belorado shortly after two o’clock to find the town heaving with both pilgrims and locals – the festivities for Jueves Santo had just begun, and between that and the concentration of pilgrims in this small town, the albergue municipal was already fully booked. Luckily there were other options, and the place I ended up – Cuatro Cantones – could hardly have been a friendlier establishment. It even had a covered pool, which was a godsend after a twenty-three kilometre hike across the dusty plains.
I’m now over halfway through the walking stage of this attempt at the Camino. In two nights it will be over: I will have reached Burgos, at which point I will take my leave of my companions as some move on and others return home while I stay and rest in the city of the Cid. I will be immensely appreciative of the break, but no more so than my feet, which are not used to this much walking – even from somebody who doesn’t drive!
Tomorrow, we either roll the dice on San Juan’s one pilgrim hostel or push on in search of pastures new. Luck be an albergue tonight, I guess. BB x
The Book of Barnabas 