Sorry for the gap in between updates. Ended up staying in a whole series of little one-street towns with no internet access, so I've been incommunicado for a little while. I am currently in Calzadilla de la Cueza, yet another small one-street town right smack dab in the middle of the Camino. A few days ago I finally got to the most infamous part of the Camino: The Meseta. The Meseta is a long stretch between the cities of Burgos and León, about a third of the Camino, and it has a bit of a reputation amongst pilgrims. It runs through Spain's breadbasket, which basically means it runs through Spain's Nebraska. The whole thing is incredibly flat, and stretches on for miles and miles with little to see in any direction aside for endless corn fields and enormous mountains of straw bales.
At times it has been incredibly beautiful, with the path taking me along deserted dirt roads through empty, rolling fields with nothing but the blue sky above my head and the faint outlines of mountains behind and in front of me, the world completely silent and eerily still. At times--like today--it has been boring as hell. The walking today reminded me of an old Looney Tunes cartoon, where Bugs Bunny is running away from Elmer Fudd and you see the same scenery repeating over and over again in the background. There was a particularly brutal 18 kilometer (11 mile) stretch where the Camino was literally a stock-straight dirt road with no civilization to be seen and no other pilgrims. Sometimes I feld like I was walking on a treadmill, and was constantly talking/singing/beatboxing to myself to keep myself from going crazy. I was bored and hot and dusty by the end of it, and stopped at the first albergue I found.
That's been the scenery for the past few days anyway. At first I had been toying with the idea of skipping the Meseta since it has such a bad reputation, but I'm really glad I didn't. It's been challenging at times (like today), but it's actually been some of my favorite walking of the whole trip. Plus, after over two weeks of walking 25-30 kilometers a day, I feel like my body and my mind have adjusted to constantly being on the move. Everything is easier, the kilometers go by quicker, and I'm having a fantastic time. When the end comes I'll be a little sad to say goodbye to it. Not too sad--by the time I reach the end I'll have walked over 500 miles--but a little for sure.
Anyway, other news that I couldn't fill you in on:
-In the past few days I've become really commited to the idea of doing this whole thing from start to finish and walking every kilometer. At first I think I approached the Camino more as a tourist. I figured I'd take my time, see what I wanted to see, walk as far as I felt like walking, and then if I didn't have time to finish it all by foot I could just take a bus and not feel guilty about it. Since then, though, I've had a lot of time to think about it, and I don't want to cheat or cut things short if I can help it and give the Camino its due respect. I recalculated things and figured I need to walk about 28 kilometers every day to finish on time, which I've been keeping to pretty well so far. So, excepting illness or injury, I've really decided I want to walk the whole way, kilometer by painstaking kilometer. When I started walking I was a tourist, and now I've made the transformation into a pilgrim. It has been a powerful experience.
-Ended up walking a really brutal 40 kilometer (24 mile) day to Burgos a few days ago. Initially I had been planning to stop about 10 km before Burgos and stay the night in a village there. Turns out, however, that there wasn't actually an albergue in said village, which I only figured out after checking in my guide book upon arriving and not seeing anything. In total I was walking for 11 hours, most of which was on some sort of paved surface (road/highway/sidewalk), which is much harsher on your legs, feet and knees than nice dirt roads, and all of which I did by myself, which gets lonely. I have since learned to read my guide book a little more carefully.
-Stayed at what is surely the most amazing albergue on the whole Camino two nights ago. The albergue, the Hospitalero de San Nicolás, was a squat, square stone and mortar building off the side of the Camino just before the town I had intended to stop for the day. I saw some of the Italian pilgrims I had befriended on my third day of walking, and they were staying there for the night, so I figured I'd stop just a little early and enjoy their company a little more. Plus the albergue was very highly recommended in the book. The place is run by an Italian cofraternity, and the interior of the building isamazing--like a 15'th century Spanish church. No electricity, no running water, when it got dark we lit the place with candles. The Camino de Santiago is hundreds of years old, and in previous years a lot of albergues like this one were built along the path to house and take care of the millions of pilgrims who would walk it in the Middle Ages. Most of them are ruins now, but this one was very well preserved. Before the communal dinner that night the volunteers who worked there performed a ceremony to welcome us. They all donned capes, and performed a foot-washing ceremony, which mirrors a scene from the Bible where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples in Galilee. We all sat in a half-circle, and had our right feet washed and kissed by the leader of the cofraternity in a bronze basin. The next morning when I left the leader blessed me in front of the enormous wooden door and wished me a safe journey. Unbelievable experience, and one I really value.
No comments:
Post a Comment