My morning in Astorga started, predictably, at five in the morning. The evening before I had gotten back to the room at around nine, but all my roommates were already sleeping except for one. Nice, because I wouldn’t be woken up by people getting back late. Less nice, because this also meant that four of them had not seen me at any given time, and thus didn’t realise they had a sixth person sleeping in the room. You can read that as: they turned the light on at five in the morning. Thankfully, the one person who knew I was there immediately made them turn it off. Despite being awake, I stayed in my bed to enjoy the warmth of my sleeping bag and to try to catch a little more sleep. The upside of this, too, was that by the time I actually got out of bed the room was empty and I could make as much noise as I wanted while I packed my bag.
I started while it was still dark, then almost immediately had to backtrack because I had forgotten my hiking sticks. My early morning was clearly catching up to me, which was made more obvious later on by the fact that I simply started walking without so much as checking if I was on the trail. (I wasn’t, but I walked to the cathedral and found the trail back there. If you’re ever lost on the camino: walk to the nearest church and you have an 80% chance of finding a yellow arrow.) I found Jaco a little later, and we decided to hike together for a while. Melissa was way ahead of us, but Alina had texted us to meet up for breakfast in one of the towns we’d pass on the way. The breakfast place was, fittingly, owned by Germans, and I had a very decadent breakfast in the form of apple crumble with ice cream and caramel sauce. It simply looked too good to ignore, and I had just walked a good nine kilometres so I kind of really deserved it anyway. The rest of the day, I switched between walking on my own and walking together with other people. One of them was one of the schoolkids, who came up to me to apologise for waking me up in the morning.
My goal for that day was a town called Foncebadon, which was quite high up on a hill. Now here’s some truth: the walk up there was beautiful. Like, mouth-dropping-open kind of beautiful. Alas, I was so preoccupied with the climb up, that all I could do was kind of curse to myself about how tired I was. And then, by the time I reached the top and saw the view, I realised just what I had been doing. It goes to show how choosing to look at the positive side of things works. I could have easily gotten up on that hill by looking around me and being amazed, but instead I chose to look at how difficult it was. The power of the mind, and all that.
Upon arrival, I quickly found out that most of the albergues at the start of the town were full. It was only the fourth one where they still had a bed free, and I was shown to a room with eight beds. Only five of them were occupied, and for the first time in what was probably ever, I found myself surrounded by people who all spoke at least one of my languages. It was disorienting, in a way, to know that I could not switch to any language that no one would understand.
I washed my clothes and hung them up outside, making use of the late afternoon sun to dry them while I went inside to have a coffee with Jaco, who had arrived a little after me and was staying in an albergue across the road. While we were enjoying our warm drink, the sky opened up and it started pouring. Like, the kind of downpour where you know you’ll be drenched within two seconds if you’d go outside. Now, one of the cosiest things you can experience in my opinion, is being inside with a warm coffee or tea while outside it rains. Additionally, I can also say from experience that one of the easiest ways of destroying this cosiness is realising that your clothes are still outside. Fun times. The upside? When we went outside to check just how soaked my laundry was, we saw a rainbow.
After Foncebadon there was one last, short stretch that went up, and then we’d go down again. We had heard from several people that it was a rather steep and slippery decline. Because Jaco’s hiking poles no longer fit the definition of ‘functional’, I offered to walk together and share my poles instead. When I went outside the following morning, I promptly added my rain jacket as another layer because it was cold. It was also very dark, and the darkness made me think that I had yet another ‘early start’, up until I realised that it was in fact, not very early in Camino-terms*. The sun was simply rising later.
*It was 6.50 in the morning.
Apart from the cold and the darkness, there was one last obstacle: fog. It was so thick that putting my headlamp on full power was impossible, because the reflection of it blinded us. We set off like that, going up the last kilometres towards one of the most well-known parts of the camino: the Cruz de Ferro. Like the name says, it’s a big iron cross on the top of a hill. Now, iron crosses on tops of hills is not that special. This one in particular is on the highest point of the Camino Frances (1505 metres), which could be argued makes it a little bit special at least. What is truly special about it however, is the collection of pebbles and stones at its base. Pilgrims usually bring a little stone with them that they carry throughout their pilgrimage all the way up to the Cross. And there they leave it behind. I, too, was carrying a little stone – two, actually – one that said “no excuse” and another one that said “self-love”. The few days before reaching the cross, I had thought about the implications of leaving them behind, and ultimately I had decided that the time and space didn’t feel right yet. Instead, I had picked up a pebble the day before. At the cross, it was that one I pulled out of my pocket to place it on the pile. Those stones mean something. Or at least, I wanted mine to mean something. So I put it down with a promise to myself: a promise that I would see this through to the end, not physically, but mentally. That I would keep growing and looking at myself, and that when I arrived, I would let go of my pain and excuses.
We left the cross behind us and continued on, downhill this time. It was a beautiful walk, the sun rising enough for the mountains around us to become visible. The other side of the powerful nature became visible as well though, in the form of a steadily rising amount of crosses that we encountered on the road. The last one was one that made me slow down. The birth year read 1999. It was the first time I saw a cross of someone near my own age, and it brought a new perspective to that day’s descent – one of awareness.
According to the map, the next town was over eight kilometres away. I, however, vested all my hopes on capitalism – if there’s a stretch of eight kilometres without any facilities someone is bound to make use of it – and indeed, after having crested the top of the hill it didn’t take long before twinkling lights greeted us. What was even better: upon closer inspection we realised there was a fireplace. Imagine this: rolling green hills covered in fog, the sun not yet fully risen and thick, grey boulders all over the place, and in the distance: fairy lights and a fireplace. Magical, I tell you. We had breakfast by the fire, the upside was that it was amazingly warm; the downside was that getting back on the road proved to be a battle of wills between my mind and my body’s comfort. But never worry, the camino provides! Next to the breakfast place there was a really big field with lots of cows, and said cows were seemingly having some sort of crisis. Their mooing went from cute to midlife-crisis in 2 seconds flat, and it turned out that doubling over in laughter at the noise was a pretty good remedy against the cold. (In all seriousness, I hope that the distressed cow is okay.)
The next break was spent in a cute little town with a bakery that had cakes that looked divine and simply had to be consumed (by me). While waiting in line, Jaco and I were non-plussed at the sight of a sign that stated that they had boterkoek, and my brain needed an embarrasing amount of time to put two and two together when the woman behind the counter answered to our order in Dutch. Like, she answered in Dutch and I full-on needed a second to realise that she had spoken Dutch and not English. I ordered a carrot cake (sorry not sorry, boterkoek) and a coffee and went outside to enjoy the sunshine. Now, if you’ve been reading some of my blog posts and find yourself thinking, “goodness, these camino-people take a lot of breaks,” you are absolutely correct in that assumption. I once met a man who told me to never skip a cafe, because you’d never know if it was going to be the last one.*
*I would like to add here that this was said in a dubiously morbid manner, and I still haven’t figured out if he meant ‘last one’ as ‘last one of the day’ or ‘last one in your life’.
Since the fog had cleared up and the sun had come out, the downhill road was way easier to navigate for me, and I resorted to my proven tactic of carelessly throwing myself down the hill and trusting that my knees would catch me. It worked well enough, and I made it to the foot of the hill mainly unscathed*.
*I fell only once – a win in my book – and Katie’s helpful response was to start laughing.
The rest of the day went something like this: we made a TikTok, in which I completely killed the Hot To Go dance because I don’t have the kind of limb coördination one needs for that, Katie had to hold me back from adopting various cats, and we ultimately realised that it was way later than we thought it was with still a few more kilometres to go.
“It’s only five kilometres, I think,” Katie remarked.
“Six,” Jaco said, to which I helpfully answered, “Seven”.
(Jaco was right, in the end. It was six kilometres.) In an effort to find energy, we all put on our headphones and used music as a motivator. It worked extremely well – too well, maybe, because two kilometres out of Ponferrada I realised I had been pushing so hard that my leg was now officially about to leave the chat. I slowed down and eventually just stopped entirely to wait for Jaco to catch up so I could walk with two hiking poles instead of one. The last kilometres were absolute agony, and the shitty thing about the entire leg-situation is that nothing could be done about it and I just had to… power through. I stopped at the very first albergue that we encountered, not really up for anything that involved more walking anyway, and nearly cried when they said that they still had space. Alina turned out to be in the same albergue and even in the same room, so in the evening the three of us had dinner together.
The next morning, I made it about a kilometre in before stopping on the side of the road and getting out my special numbing plasters, because no matter how slow or conscious I walked, my leg was hurting every step. The goal that day wasn’t necessarily a city, but just to stop walking around lunch so I could have a chill afternoon that didn’t consist of me arriving at the albergue after four in the afternoon. So around in the afternoon, I decided to stop in a town called – and I cannot write this with a straight face – Cacabelos. The name aside, Cacabelos was quite a nice town. I decided to switch up my routine for once though, and instead of going around sightseeing, I found myself a little bar instead where I ordered a coffee and sat down to write for a bit. The bartender turned out to speak Dutch, and somehow roped me into a very intense and one-sided conversation about why he didn’t like Wallonia and Brussels. My contributions were mostly saying ‘uh’ and smiling awkwardly. His pancakes were tasty though.
