Astorga to Rabanal del Camino, 22km. 

Friday, October 7, 2011.  I thought I’d have a solid night’s sleep, but I didn’t get to sleep until nearly 11, and between Mom’s snoring, Barbara’s (according to Mom), and apparently my own (per Carrie), the morning hours came far too quickly.  Mom got up far earlier than we did, as is her wont, and went to the kitchen to make some German-style potatoes.  She found the kitchen a disaster from the pilgrim revels of the night before (Mom thought “guitar-playing and drumming” would be too charitable, but there was strumming and banging involved).  The kitchen was the classic tragedy of the commons, but, Mom being Mom, she cleaned it.

We were on the road at about 7:40a.m.  It was cool, cool enough for two layers of Icebreaker wool.  Unlike in days past, when, after 30 or 60 minutes I’d take off the top layer, I wore both layers the whole 22 kilometers.  In fact, after my hands stopped functioning in any way but to hold my poles, I added gloves.  And my five-toed socks.  My nose ran the entire way, ran so hard and fast I feared it might reach Santiago without me.

Mom was pleased with the new Salomon trekking shoes she had bought yesterday.  “Oh,” she

said.  “I’m going to sleep in these!”  For the first time since we began the Camino, she walked an entire stage in one pair of footwear, and did not resort to her sandals.

Even before we’d left Astorga, we came upon a wonderful aroma of fennel.  It was like walking through a licorice factory.  The blue of the dawning sky was beyond description.  The power lines sizzled and buzzed overhead – something I’ve heard only in Spain.  In Murias de Rechivaldo, we stopped for Second Breakfast at a small but cozy café run by a woman named Pilar.  She addressed me as “senor,” and the bathrooms, to Mom’s delight, had both towels and soap, a rarity on the Road.  (As long as I’m wearing wicking wool, I find towels unnecessary).  These things would earn her a larger tip.

Pilar was playing Tibetan mantras on the stereo.  “For patience,” she said, pronouncing it “pot-ience”.  “And for compassion.”

 

“There isn’t enough of that along the Road,” Mom said.  Pilar agreed.  They discussed Pilar’s liver problems, and her efforts to remain positive, and they shared tips on alternative medicine.  Pilar said that good food had changed her life and her health — notably, she no longer ate jamon.  Meanwhile, I talked with a Galician who has lived in Alberta for many years, his Canadian partner, and an Italian woman from Bologna.

The countryside between Astorga and Rabanal is sparsely populated.  As the earth’s population climbs, I hope that people, especially those in China and India, will keep Spain in mind.  The semi-arid terrain reminded me of the land in and around the Great Basin of the western United States:  yellow grasses, light-green shrubs, heather, broom, wild

thyme, desert flowers, and a few types of dominant trees, none of them very tall, such as scrub oak.  In the distance I saw a few copses of aspens.

It should have been no surprise to see a sign, in El Ganso, advertising a Cowboy Museum.  (I couldn’t do it.  Not after the chocolate museum).  The soil was now red, too, reminding me that Colorado got its name from the Spanish – color red, color rado (red is now rojo in Spanish, but their explorers swept through the Colorado territory centuries ago).

We stopped for First Lunch in El Ganso and I took some notes and checked my email.  Mom fed stray cats bread with butter – “Have you noticed they only eat it if it has butter on it?” – and the cats all ended up standing on my feet because she was throwing the crusts between them.

For the first time since before Burgos – that is, since far on the other side of the plains of Castilla and Leon – we saw walls made of stone.  Some were in the fields, too large to have been a house, too small to enclose an entire property.  I decided they must have been corrals for sheep and cows.  The villages, too, were made of stone.  Roofs were made of mined slate or even thatch.  In the distance, hills, the ridgelines of which were covered with modern windmills too large for Don Quixote to tilt at.

We came upon a tree under which a young man in long curly hair had set up a table.  He had been to Santiago and was now making his way back . . . to somewhere.  For a donation, he was offering coffee, chai, hummus, and cake.  Nearby, and much more alluringly, a slender, raven-haired woman played a haunting flying-saucer-like

instrument called a hang.  Invented by a Swiss, it had small dimples spaced around its perimeter, and by tapping the places in between, she caused it to make different notes.  The sound wasn’t too unlike the music played by the alien ship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.  Hank, a young Dutchman, tried his hand at it, too.  I bought one of the woman’s CDs, and we moved on.

Hank and I walked for a while.  He told me about a man who was on the Camino with his daughter’s ashes, and who was walking an astonishing 75 kilometers per day.

He told me he himself was on the Camino to prove, as he put it, “that I can finish something.”  Shin splints had resulted in his early departure from the army, and his confidence had suffered.

“You thought something was wrong with you?” I said.  “You worried that it wasn’t just the injury but that you were weak?”

“Something just like that,” he said.  He was now traveling the world for a year, and filming his exploits.  He said he wanted to learn how to meditate, and for about an hour I talked to him about it.  Hank is probably the first person I’ve ever heard say, of English, “I love the language.”

“Why?”

“It’s just so easy and smooth.  Dutch is like German, they both sound so harsh.”

“To my ear,” I said, “Dutch sounds a little like German, but also a little like English, so in the end it sounds like the kind of language I would make up, if I were going to make up a language that sounded like complete nonsense.”

Rabanal

The albergue in Rabanal was utterly charming.  Stone walls, wooden beams, an outdoor bar and patio, flowers and flowering bushes scattered about.  There’s even a mistletoe tree, about twelve feet tall.  I thought mistletoe grew only at Christmas, and near doorways.  The proprietress didn’t speak a lick of English, or anything other than Spanish, but she was all smiles, as was her mother, who must have been in her eighties.  The daughter, who was in her late fifties, walked through the dorm and would cry Hola!, and Mom and I answered a few times, until we realized that she was playing peek-a-boo with pilgrims sitting outside the windows.

Once I’d dropped my pack I headed to the restroom.  The light switch was not in the same room as the toilet stall.  That should have been my first warning.  Sure enough, after a few minutes of contemplation, I was cast into darkness.  This saves on electricity, but it necessitates the use of more paper.  I need to research how the Spanish are apparently able to do their business so quickly.  Is it all the oil in their diet?

Mom sat down at a table next to Barbara, the Bavarian woman, and Rainer, from

Cologne.  He’d had a hard day of walking, he said, after having had too much of a local spirit.  Rainer said he was on the Camino because he’d had a rough two to three years, and he wanted to stop thinking about all his problems.

“Is it working?” I asked.  He shrugged.

Barbara had beaten cancer four years earlier.  She initially wanted to walk the Camino in order to spend some time by herself, but now, she said, she was feeling dankbarkeit, thankfulness or gratitude, for her life.  While away from her normal life, she realized how good she had it.  She had been married 26 years and she and her husband still felt about one another as they had when they met.  She had wonderful daughters.  She wanted everything, she said, to stay just the same.  There, I thought, was a dangerous thought to attach oneself to.

Atop the iglesias in Rabanal, the little churches, were more storks’ nests.  One of them, inside, was crumbling and rustic — perfect.  We went there for a Vespers mass, blessedly short, and attempted, in Latin, that odd reading/singing-without-a-clear-melody that Catholics are somehow able to do, perhaps right out of the womb.  We read a Psalm about the Lord crushing our enemies, and then we read from Romans about always doing things to please our neighbors.

“You did that really well,” Mom said to me.  “Like you’ve done it before.  But that priest was not going to let you be lead singer, no way.”

As we exited the church, another group of worshippers was waiting outside.  Two women looked at my footwear aghast, as if I’d just walked across the face of the Lord, stopped, backed up, and wiped my feet.  Soon the whole group had turned to watch me walking away, for all I know clutching their rosaries and crossing themselves.  It’s this sort of thing that could make even a sociopath self-conscious.

Across a narrow road from a hotel that had wi-fi, I sat down with my computer in the cold.  Vodafone charges me by the gigabyte, so when I want to upload pictures to Facebook or the blog, I use free wi-fi.  A cat sat across the road from me, near the door of the restaurant.  We exchanged a knowing glance, we two scavengers.

Morning in Rabanal del Camino:  An Ode to My Fellow Pilgrims

It must have gotten into the 30s last night.  Even with a blanket and two layers of clothes, I was cold.  There was very little snoring, at least that I heard.  I call this a miracle, and credit St. James himself.  Mom said Rainer was sawing away because he’d drunk two bottles of wine the night before.  In the morning he was nursing both a café con leche, from the bar and, in his left hand, a Coke.  He said he felt awful and didn’t know why.

“Alcohol?” I said.

“Could be,” he said.

Although we’re no longer at risk of walking in hot weather, at this altitude and with current weather reports, pilgrims continue to insist on going to bed before 10 and getting up before 7a.m. to begin walking.  And thus begins the second movement of each night’s Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (shout out to Yuka for the 80s reference).  At first, one tentative soul glides around, quiet as can be.  He is soon joined by another pilgrim or two.  There is rustling, but it’s tentative.

But then the broken-window phenomenon sets in.  With each new person, and each new noise, comes more permission for the next person to be louder.  Soon the rustling turns into a manic stuffing, and then a loud zipping, and sotto voce voices turn into whispers fit for artillerymen, and eventually, no matter how many bleary-eyed people are still enclosed in sleeping bags, pilgrims are now calling out to one another, stomping about, slamming

doors.  It’s truly amazing that these are the same seemingly normal, well-adjusted people we have met the night before.  Then again, once on the trail, some of them will also be unable to bury, or even to lift a rock to cover up, their used toilet paper.

I’m used to a wilderness ethic, at least in America, that says you pack out whatever you bring in.  In true wilderness areas, that even includes your own waste.  That’s what plastic bags are for.  The Camino, by contrast, needs either to educate pilgrims better or to provide trash cans.  Pilgrims disrespect their fellows, the locals, and the environment with their trash.

Tomorrow, we will finally reach the Cruz de Ferro, the highest point on the Camino and, by tradition, the place where pilgrims leave something behind — where they let go of something.  It is probably the most important part of the Camino for Mom.  “I’m going to leave my cancer there,” she said, a few months ago.  But will she?  And isn’t the hope itself dangerous?

 

León to Astorga

To give Mom’s toe more time to heal, and because walking from León to Santiago would

have required an aggressive 18 kilometers a day, every day, for 12 days, we took a short bus ride from Burgos to Astorga.  Astorga is a pleasant little town.  Marie Anne had recommended that we be sure to stop here.  There is an embarrassing wealth of cathedrals and churches for such a small town, and a Museum of Chocolate, which Carrie was determined to see.  The old town in which we’re staying sits on a bluff overlooking the surrounding countryside.

Legend has it that both Santiago and St. Paul preached in Astorga.  Both legends seem to me unlikely, but the city did merit a bishopric of its own.  Because it’s at the foot of two very steep climbs, it became a place on the Camino for travelers to rest up before the next ascent.  As a result, there were once more hostels here than anywhere but Burgos.

Astorga was originally a Celtic settlement and in 14 BCE became a Roman stronghold in what was known as Asturica.  Still visible today are the ruins of a sumptuous private home, complete with baths (featuring, as in the baths I’ve seen in Israel, hot, cold, and

even tepid water), and the town’s walls. Plinius called the city urbs magnifica, “magnificent city”, but most of what the Romans built was destroyed when the Visigoth Teodorico II defeated the Suevi tribe that had settled the area after the fall of Rome. The Moors later destroyed the Visigothic city.  After the campaigns of Alfonso I of Asturias (739-757) against the Moors, the city was abandoned until the 11th century, when it became a major stop on the Camino.  The city was unusually welcoming to its Jewish residents until 1492, when all Jews were either forcibly converted, killed, or expelled from Spain.

Astorga has a fine cathedral, to judge from the outside.  But both times we arrived it was

closed, so we’ll never know what’s inside.  It might have held the Holy Grail, or a BMW Z8.  We ran into the same problem at the neo-Gothic, fairytale Bishop’s Palace designed by the great and whimsical Antonio Gaudi.

Happily, in Astorga there is a fine little albergue.  The owners or managers are a Spanish couple, and the volunteer hospitalerosare German, this time a couple from a town near Koblenz.  Mom was utterly delighted with the kitchen, which led to a patio with a view for

many miles, and she could not have been happier about immediately going shopping and making lunch – German-style hamburger patties with onions and German potato salad, along with white asparagus, raw red peppers, banana slices, and grapes.

We got a room with a view – and the room holds only four people, the fourth being Barbara, a woman of a certain age from near Munich, whose daughter was once a satisfied exchange student in Iowa.  She has that Bavarian accent that reminds me of my relatives, and childhood, in Bavaria.  Barbara’s crown has broken, so she is off to see a dentist.  Curiously, this happened to another pilgrim just a few days ago.

I’m tired today.  I didn’t get much sleep last night.  At least one man, and maybe two, sounded like nothing so much as a motorcycle starting up.  I am becoming an aficionado of snoring sounds.  It’s like Nabokov, collecting and documenting butterflies, only with more rage.  Truly, hostels need to provide those little anti-snore strips and require that snorers use them.  It should also be made kosher for other pilgrims to wake a snorer without a strip and ask him to get one or to banish himself from the albergue, if not from society entirely.

I am looking forward to a greater probability of a full night’s sleep.  It would depress me beyond measure for Barbara’s crown, say, to get broken again.

Counting another bus trip, we’ll have about 169 kilometers to go, out of the original 800+.  If we budget 11 days (we leave from Lisbon on October 22, but wanted to spend some time in Portugal), then we need to cover 15.4 kilometers per day.  That’s easily doable, if we can avoid injuries and other health issues.  Apparently one must cover the last 100 kilometers to get the special badge of the pilgrim.  Or maybe it’s an embossed certificate from the Pope, along with an accounting of the sins remitted (and how does he know?  But then, Santa Claus knows, so why can’t the Pope know?)  Julio told us that in Santiago, the townsfolk offer to host pilgrims in their own homes, and that there is some kind of ceremony at the cathedral where the pilgrims’ names are called out publicly.

XOCOLATL

One proud native informed us that Astorga was the site of the first manufacture of chocolate in Europe.  (He also said the first shop was in Aachen, Germany).  I wasn’t able to confirm this with Google, and the Museo de Chocolate, for which we had high hopes, was of no help.  The museum appears to have been carved out of the living quarters of someone’s home, and it offers less an education in things chocolate than a collection of old chocolate-making tools.  But its curators’ primary interest seems to have been Spanish-language chocolate advertising in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Somewhere in the world, a Ph.D. student with an esoteric thesis will be very happy someday.

The Spanish were the first to bring chocolate to the Old World, and like so much else, they got it from the Aztecs.  Montezuma drank the stuff eight times a day, and believed it was the key to good health.  When Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who destroyed Aztec civilization, broke into Montezuma’s palace, in 1591, to rob his treasury of its gold and silver, he was astonished to find only a truck-load of cocoa beans.  Cortés brought Xocolatl! to Spain, where the bitter stuff was made more palatable to European tastes by mixing the ground roasted beans with sugar and vanilla.  When more and more sugar was added, it became edible to Americans.

Foot Massage – With or Without “Happy Ending?”

In Santo Domingo I tried out for the first time one of the foot massagers that, along with Internet-ready computer terminals, are staples of the hostels on the Camino de Santiago.  For 2 Euros, I was promised 10 minutes of massage.  I read the instructions, and that’s when I got nervous.

Put the feet within the machine and chooses the Kneading bellboys and vibrating the intensity of the massage and the vibration

I scanned the room to see from where the kneading bellboys could be expected to appear.  Would they arrive wearing costumes?  Would they even speak English?  Would they have hunchbacks and unusually strong hands?  Still, I was game.  I inserted my money, and then my feet.

Immediately a hospitalera rushed over to hand me some prophylactics to slip on my bare feet.  Now I was really nervous.

It was only when the machine began to bang and vibrate that the CAUTION written on it started to make sense:

Not recommended for minors of 12 years, embarrassed or people with Hypertension.

Embarrassed??

When it was over, the older, male English hospitalero asked me how it had gone.

“Where,” I asked, “are the cigarette vending machines?”

 

Leaving Santo Domingo de la Calzano

Mom was running a manufacturing facility in her sleep last night, and she did all the sound effects herself.  When she stopped, or maybe before, one of the Japanese took over, turning in an impressive performance on behalf of his countrymen.  When all this is over, I definitely see him in the medals, certainly on the podium.

We were up at 5:30a.m., also known as oh-God-thirty, and on the road not long after 6, just ahead of the Japanese.  We walked in the dark, beneath starry skies.  It felt good to be underway.  It was chilly, though, and a slight wind made it colder.  I put on my wool cap and gloves.  We passed a herd of sheep, fenced in.  The sheep dog eventually barked at our intrusion, but by then I had given the mutton the detailed escape instructions they would need.

“Did you get your computer?” Carrie asked me.  I hadn’t had an outlet near my bed and had been charging it under hers.  I said I had.

“Are you kidding?” Mom said.  “He’d forget his mother before he’d forget his computer.”

“That’s going in the blog!” I said.

Most of the path ran parallel to the national highway that runs between Logrono and Burgos; in a few places, we stayed on the highway rather than take detours through tiny villages that were all closed up in any event.  “Thees one goes to a village where there is notheeng,” Julio said.  “Three extra kilometers for notheeng.  What you want to do?”

“Let us never go to nothing,” I said.

The beautiful landscapes, though, were behind us, and the vineyards had been replaced by fields of what used to be wheat, now cut down to eight-inch stalks.  The land was growing drier and drier with every step.

Mom was hurting.  I could see it in her face and in her step.  The toes of her right foot were painful to look at.  Her kidneys hurt.  And during a trip into the weeds she cried out, “I’m a bloody mess!”

“You can always take a taxi or bus from the next town,” I told her.  Julio had now come back to check on her too, and we stood there, the three of us.

Her eyes welled up, more from frustration than from the pain.  Mom is, in her own words, “a tough old broad.”

“I don’t want to ride everywhere,” she said.  “I want to walk this.”

I put a hand on her shoulder.  “It’s okay, Mom.  Whatever you decide.  What about your ibuprofen?” I asked.  “Have you had any today?”

“Oh,” she said, now hopeful.  “I could try that.”

Before it could start working, we stopped again in a café-bar in Grañon.  Sitting at a table in the bar, she looked disconsolate.  “You don’t have to walk every bit of it,” I said.  “All you’re supposed to do is your best.  There’s no rule about how much we have to walk, or how fast.  The whole point is that you do what you can, but no one expects you to do more.  You’re probably walking through more pain than anyone here.”

We had our morning desayuno – coffees, teas, drinkable yogurt for me – and I worked on Mom’s back, near her kidneys, drawing out the negative qi, sending forth loving qi.  Mom asked how far it was to the next village.  4.4km, Julio said, consulting the chart they give you at St. Jean Pied de Port.  Mom decided to press on, but not before exchanging her too-small boots for the light sandals she’s worn for most of the trip.  I put the boots in my pack.

“We’re gonna get rid of those sonsabitches soon,” she said.  “You can put that in the blog.  I should have listened to my little voice when I was still in Colorado, but I didn’t want to spend money on another pair.”

As we left the restaurant, she was still in pain — the ibuprofen had not yet kicked in. “It’s just something different every day,” she said. And then: “Oh, look at those roses in that balcony, so pretty!”

Between the jettison of the boots and the ibuprofen, her pain receded, and she kept a respectable and uncomplaining pace for the next 10km.  It was Marie Anne whose Achilles and other pain kept her far in the back.

The Taciturn Waiter at the Cafe Leon

We stopped for another snack at the Café Leon, in Redecilla del Camino.  It was a very beautifully done up place, inside and out.  The passage to the bathrooms smelled of lilacs, and the bathrooms themselves were spotless and aromatic.  The men’s walls were painted with stripes of glistening white and blue.  One thing I like about Spain is that, if you’re a man and you’re going to the bathroom, you get to call yourself a caballero – literally, a horseman, or cowboy.  Excellent.

Unfortunately, we all felt very badly about our visit to Café Leon.  We appeared to have interrupted the proprietor in the middle of attending his mother’s funeral, or perhaps his own.  As we approached, the only customers in the area, he eyed us without welcome, hola, or smile.  “You can’t bring your backpacks inside,” he said, in Spanish.  I don’t think he ever did make eye contact with anyone in our party, nor with the party of Russians (whom he chastised), the Koreans, or the other customers who came in over time.  He served us entirely without pleasantry or comment.  It was odd.

He stood next to us, and asked Julio where we were from.  He complained to Julio, in Spanish, that tourists to Spain didn’t speak enough Spanish; he himself had once been to Turkey, he said, but had had a bad experience when he couldn’t understand anyone and was never going to leave the country again.  “Typical Castillano,” Julio said, of the man’s evident disdain for all that he did.  Either that or he was depressed.

As we were leaving I noticed that he was wearing blue suede shoes.  Which explained a lot.

We continued on.  The sun beat down, and we marched over the graveled road, parallel to the highway, that has characterized the last 40km or so. And then, after 21 to 23km, we were in Belorado, and the Albergue Santiago beckoned.  It would be our first private albergue, but with a price of 5 Euros, flags of 20 nations colorfully flying outside (not including that of the U.S.), and the promise of a swimming pool, a menu peregrino, a bar, a “mini-market”, washing machines, and a kitchen, it was terribly inviting.

Mom had made it.  Over 20km!