Camino De Santiago - Day 5

Time of Visit: October 4, 2022

The day started off with an asinine 3km detour over a hill to avoid passing through a 200m tunnel with no sidewalk. I expected better from you, Spain! The rest of the morning, however, was an easy walk along a slightly graded highway whose shoulder had been cordoned off with concrete for pilgrims’ safety. Every few miles, the path would take a slight detour into a quaint village.

The picture quality looked a lot better on my phone...

My surroundings became greener with elevation. By the time I crossed the provincial border into Galicia, the golden-brown of the Meseta had fully given way to verdant pastures and valleys dotted with livestock.

At around 11:00, I paid 50 cents for three oranges from an agricultural co-op's roadside stand and ate them with an omelette and bread at the neighboring rest stop's diner. The diner was packed with burly truck drivers eating loaves of bread, flirting with the sour-faced baristas, and spinning the two slot machines at the entrance. One of them eyed me curiously and offered a konnichiwa. I responded with an equally lukewarm hola. Taken aback at my masterful command of the Spanish language, he widened his eyes and began speaking to me at a zillion miles an hour and insisted that I eat some of his bread. I gave him an orange in return and we parted ways with a smile.

The rest stop, with the produce stand on the bottom right.

The trail soon diverged from the highway and began winding through wonderfully idyllic valleys and villages. Pilgrims filled the cafe terrazas that spilled out onto the street, enjoying glasses of beer under the warm sun.

This cat gobbled up breadcrumbs of my tortilla española. Beggars can't be choosers, I guess.

Bliss.

At around 1pm, I arrived at the hardest part of my¹ Camino. Veteran pilgrims the previous night had warned me about it: a 5km long, 700m vertical climb on nonstop switchbacks through dense forest, all at the tail end of a 30km day. To make matters worse, the trail was littered with horse shit covered in black fleas that would swarm you if you stepped too close to said horse shit. But the uphill was so exhausting and the horse shit so dense that I had no choice but to rest every minute or two by a pile of horse shit and get swarmed by fleas.

See if you can spot all three piles!

I emerged from the forest into a fairy tale landscape. A few pilgrims had scaled the barbed-wire fence into the cow pastures and created their own makeshift picnic site overlooking the forested valley below.

I had booked an albergue 1km to the east of O Cebreiro, where most pilgrims stop, saving me a bit of climbing that I absolutely would not have been able to complete. Unfortunately, this meant I had only one choice for food. I choked down a plate of caldo gallego, a bland Galician turnip-and-bean soup, along with the saltiest chicken I had ever consumed. According to Apple Health, I had burned 3000 calories, but I had no appetite for the meal in front of me.

My bunkmate for the night was a convivial Floridian Navy vet who persisted in making loud conversation with me as everyone else in the dorm tried to take an afternoon nap. He asked about my opinion on Bernie Sanders (positive), where to find the best Chinese food in NYC (Flushing), and whether I had cheated on my girlfriends (I hadn't) because he had cheated on his wife and really regretted it and his now ex-wife wouldn't let him see his daughter.

song of the day: Brian Eno - An Arc of Doves - meditative ambient textures to decorate your dreams.