When I woke up from a fairly restful night of sleep, was still feeling under the weather. This was either the worst case of motion sickness ever, or I just happened to come down with the flu while on the bus. Either way, I wasn’t too thrilled about throwing on my pack and walking twelve miles. We first went to eat breakfast at a small restaurant down the street. Breakfast was simple: toast and jam with coffee or tea. Everyone else was hoping for eggs and bacon (in Spain, this is everyone’s dream – an American breakfast), but for me this was perfect. After eating I felt considerably better. At this point, I realized that I was probably feeling sick and weak because I had drunk less than a cup of water the day before, and had eaten very little.
Next we packed up our sleeping bags and got in the bus one last time. The guides promised me it would be a short ride and I prayed that it would be. Twenty or so minutes later we arrived in Sarria, our starting point for the camino. Sarria is a fairly popular spot to begin the camino because it is the first city before the 100km marker to Santiago, which is the minimum required distance to walk if you want to receive your compostela (which is a certificate of completion, more or less). There’s not much to say about the town; we just drove through it on the bus to get to the path of the camino. So, the bus driver pulled up along a curb and we got off. It was at this point that I realized that my butt was wet. It had rained so much the day before that a leak had begun in the roof of the bus just above the seat I chose to sit in. Haha, if I were more religious, I would say that God didn’t want me to take this pilgrimage. Or maybe, it was the devil trying to prevent me from walking to my salvation? But, I’m not more religious, so I just kept walking and hoped for a light breeze to dry my bum.
We watched the bus drive away, knowing we wouldn’t be seeing it again until Santiago. It was a strange feeling. Most of us had butterflies in our stomach, a kind of nervous excitement about what lay ahead of us.
So, the walking begins. The camino path today was a combination of a dirt path and paved road. It started in a wooded area, where we saw the “famous tree” that is over 1,000 years old. Well, it looks like more of a stump than a tree, but still pretty cool. The landscape was beautiful and reminding me of Switzerland. It’s very green in northern Spain. This day I saw beautiful rolling hills of tall grass, small rock walls marking boundaries, cows, tiny villages of about 3 homes and a café for pilgrims passing by.
After an hour of so we took a bathroom break at one of these cafes and got our first stamp on our camino passport. All pilgrims who plan on receiving their compostela (certificate of completion) in Santiago need to carry with them a camino passport and get stamps in it at various locations along the way to prove they actually walked. You only really need to get a stamp at the albergues (hostels) that you are staying at each night, but it is fun to get them when you can because each stamp is unique and serves as a small reminder of each place you visit.
At the halfway mark the entire group stopped to rest and regroup. Because there is only one way to go on the camino, and it is clearly marked, we are allowed to separate ourselves during the day and walk at our own pace. Since it was the first day though, they wanted us to regroup before the end point. The break was nice; we refilled water bottles, ate fruit, nuts, sandwiches for energy, and continued on our way. By this time the sun had come out so we were all in t-shirts and shorts. I don’t think it was actually that warm, because our arms and legs were cold to the touch, but walking made us sweat. The path today was fairly flat, so today was more of a walk than a hike, however carrying a heavy pack on your back makes it a bit more tolling.
At around 2pm we arrived at our final destination of the day: Portomarín. As you arrive in Portomarín, you cross a long bridge (more than350 meters long) that passes over a river below (Rio Miño). Portomarín is a small town that has been transferred from the lower river basin to higher ground. In the 1960s the river was damned to create a reservoir, putting the old village under water. The most historic buildings of the town were moved to higher ground, brick by brick. The entrance to the town, for example, is made of one of the arcs from the old Romano-medieval bridge that exists as a foot bridge today under the modern, new bridge that stretches high above it.
After walking just a few blocks into we arrived at our first albergue (hostel). Since we were a group of 20, we mostly stayed at private albergues (public albergues don’t allow reservations and usually have a limit of 10 people in a group). As far as I can tell though, there doesn’t seem to be any significant difference between public and private albergues, at least not that I could tell. This albergue had one large room of about 100 bunk beds with a curtain partitioning the space into rooms of about 20 bunks. There was one women’s bathroom and one men’s bathroom, each with about 3 showers. (Fortunately, this didn’t seem to be too big of a problem. I had hot water, although I had to push the button every 10 seconds to keep the water running).
A half hour later, which seem like much longer at the time, we walked up the street to a café for lunch. After a breakfast of toast at 8am and five hours of walking, at 3pm we were all starving. When the bread and water finally came out, it was a sight to see! We all looked like someone had put a pot of gold before us, only better, because we could eat it, haha. To my surprise, they also brought out bottles of wine and pitchers of beer. (Up until now we hadn’t been allowed to order alcoholic drinks when we traveled with the CIEE program. Even though the drinking age is 18 here, they feel a little uneasy about giving alcohol to students who are still minors in the U.S.). It’s a good thing out first course didn’t take to long to come out, otherwise I think a few of us would have gotten tipsy sipping on wine (or gulping down beer) with empty stomachs. I ordered the traditional Gallego soup for my first course. It’s basically potato, leek/spinach (something green), broth, and bits of bacon. It was very salty had a strong bacon flavor, but I gulped in down. If I hadn’t been so hungry, I probably wouldn’t have liked it at all. It’s funny, when you are hungry and have been waiting for food, everything tastes amazing. My second course was hake with potatoes. (Everything in Galicia is accompanied with potatoes.) I can’t exactly be a very good judge of the taste of the dish, but to me it tasted delicious. The comida in Spain is usually big, but on the camino the portions are enormous. I guess they know we’re all hungry hikers. Still, only a few people were able to clean their plates.
After lunch we walked back down to the albergue to relax and put up our feet. Of our group of 20 only about 6 of us were in the same camino class. The others are in the other Spanish levels of our program, so I didn’t know them. We also had a guide (Alfonso), a student helper (Spanish alumni of the University, named German), and his two friends (Miriam and Alberto). Our albergue had some chairs and tables outside with a beautiful view of the river below and, since it had warmed up quite a bit from the morning, it was the perfect spot to rest. I had a great conversation with two other girls and German about showering and how we considered it a hassle more than anything and showered only when we needed to. He couldn’t believe that we all felt the same way…and then proceeded to joke with us and made sure we all showered throughout the entire camino, haha. Then it was our turn to be surprised. He began to argue with us that Madrid paella and Valencia paella taste distinctly differently simply because the water is different. Even if all the ingredients and conditions except the water are the same, you can note a difference, which is why Valencia paella is the best. A Spanish man from Madrid was sitting next to us and overheard our conversation. We asked him his opinion but he remained neutral saying he hadn’t tried paella from Valencia. We joked with German about this the rest of the camino too. For example, “I wonder how paella would taste if made using holy water.”
Without knowing it, a couple hours had gone by and it was time to take a small trip with the group to the local church. (Tutu – you will be happy to know that this was an educational trip, one that road scholars would approve of). The church, La Iglesia de San Juan, was originally built in the 8th century, but was moved brick by brick once the dam was built. It has elements of Romanic and gothic architecture (a half circle arched entrance and a rosette window). The entrance has a beautiful façade, one that, looking now, I had taken a better look at. (The façade mimics the famous façade in the cathedral of Santiago, which is currently under construction and almost completely covered in plastic tarp and scaffolding).
For dinner we had the option of either going out to eat dinner at the same place for lunch or going to the supermarket and eating a picnic style dinner. I choose to go for the picnic style dinner and it was delicious! I asked them to buy a jar of garbanzos beans for me (good protein source) since I wasn’t going to be eating any yogurt or ham and I got the strangest look. (Apparently you don’t eat garbanzo beans alone in Spain; they go in a soup or something of the sort). Nonetheless they bought the jar and every single chickpea got eaten.
At about 10pm we were all in bed, exhausted. The snoring that night woke me up, but fortunately I had remembered to put my ear plugs in an easily accessible spot. This helped dampen the noise, but it was hard to fall back asleep. Snoring is such a funny phenomenon; some of the noises that I heard from snorers throughout the camino literally had me laughing out loud! (A little of this was probably nervous laughter wondering if the person was choking on something or had stopped breathing). Well, at least it made for good conversation the next day and broke the ice in our group a bit as we all began to point fingers at whom we suspected was the culprit.
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