Estamos peregrinos!

And so!  We joined the great pilgrimage, traditionally starting in Roncesvalles in France and stretching across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela, the site of the burial of St James the Apostle, whose remains were found there around the 9th or 10th centuries after a hermit saw some lights in the sky and led the local bishop to the gravesite.  St James' remains were only of mild (and secular) interest to us, and I could probably fill a whole blog entry speculating on our motivations for following this path, so lets just settle on that we lobbed in Leon and everyone else is doing it but it's too far to walk so how about we ride?

We hired bikes from a Santiago-based mob who sent them to Leon for us.  Obstacle  one: the bikes were delivered to a very inconveniently located satellite town to the south.  We carried our load down there, packed what we needed in the panniers and sent the remainder of our luggage to Santiago by courier.  Our map showed a shortcut from the suburb to the trail but as we approached a freeway entrance we thought better of it and had to go all the way back to Leon.  With only six days before the bikes were due back my mood was pretty dark when we were still in Leon at 12:30pm.  Once on the road the going was easy, with the path well sign-posted and many other pilgrims all along it, mostly on foot.  We lunched in a littel town called Villadangos del Paramo and continued on to our first destination, the city of Astorga, arriving after making our first mistake in choosing the unsealed path over the road for the final few hilly kilometres. We would learn to take the easy way when possible.

The pilgrims (peregrinos) are mostly very supportive of each other and shout a cheerful "buen camino" to each other when crossing paths.  There are so many that there are towns on the route whose existence depends entirely on the pilgrims, and  so the locals are to a man friendly and happy to see you.  We were greeted with "buen camino"'s and other phrases of encouragement at various points by a lady on a bike with a load of flowers, a little girl on her front door step with her grandma, and just about every merchant we did business with on the way.  These short and always pleasant exchanges made this much more than a fitness or sightseeing expedition.    

It was pretty late in the day as we approached Astorga and our minor anxiety was heightened by the sound of crickets, creating a feeling that dusk was imminent even though we knew there were still three or four hours of daylight left.  Arriving in Astorga at 7:30pm we checked in to the local albergue after a few frustrating minutes trying to find the tourism office which of course closed at 7.  Each town on the route has one or more albergues, basically cheap hostels for pilgrims.  Many, many bunks are squeezed into big rooms and everyone just gets the next bed along as they arrive, as long as they show their "pilgrims credentials", a little passport that is stamped at each stop and proves you have made the pilgrimage that you are claiming to have made.  Mercifully, boots are left outside the dorms.  We got beds and strolled briefly around the town, which naturally has a beautiful cathedral and, next door, a palacio designed by the famous Antoni Gaudi.  This building's purpose is obscure and it may have been built solely because Astorga didn't have a Gaudi yet.

This day is otherwise notable for our consumption of two menus del dia.  Just about Every restaurant in Spain has a menu del dia, where the customer pays a very fair price and receives an entree, main, dessert and drink.  It's usually about 9-12€.  The customer is always served a gigantic amount of food and invariably finishes up feeling sick and uncomfortably full unless he or she has the discipline to refuse some part of it (she sometimes does, he doesn't).  For this reason we never really want to order it but because it is nearly always cheaper than three small plates, and we know that two small plates won't be enough, some tight-arsed, "maybe I might never get another meal" instinct prevails and the enormous primero plato arrives and we look at each other like "we ordered it again!?".  Anyway, as foreshadowed above on this first day of riding we each consumed entire menus del dia for both lunch and dinner, an unheard of and massively guilt-inducing level of consumption.  Hopefully clean toilets would be closely spaced along the second day's route.

Day two was a nightmare.  Our camino guide included small altitude maps of the stages and it was clear that there was some climbing to do.  The morning was straight forward, a mildly uphill run to the town of Rabanal del Camino, the only problem being a little bit of walker vs cyclist rivalry pushing us off the path and onto the nearby road.  After morning tea at Rabanal we commenced a steep climb up to the town of Foncebadon and over to El Acebo.  This is where we discovered that riding in mountains is difficult.  Actually, more specifically what we discovered was that riding in mountains into the wind on luggage packed bikes was damn near impossible, and only stupidity and arrogance would allow two smart arses with four months of holiday and eating out hanging around their waists to even attempt it.  We struggled up the mountain agonisingly slowly, being effortlessly overtaken by other cyclists (how on earth we were in front of them in the first place is a genuine mystery), stopping every 100 yards or so to gasp and gulp water, reaching the top genuinely shattered and rolling exhausted down into El Acebo for lunch.  It took more than two hours to cover about six kms.  Upon arriving in this town we were approached by an elderly cyclist, who despite our "no hablo espanol"'s and "no entiendo"'s spoke rapidly to us in Spanish, apparently explaining that he was 80 years old and had ascended the same mountain in one hour.  I fought off an urge to push his head under the water in a nearby trough.

We lingered over a superb menu del dia and then rolled down the hill to Ponferrada.  Far from improve our moods, if anything this descent deepened our depression because we could see that this city had hills all around.  Looking at our altitude maps closely revealed the worst: the next day contained a much steeper and longer climb, rising 700 metres in only seven kilometres (incline 10%, for those that know about such things; I had to look it up on the internet).  That night we gradually moved ourself with enormous psychological effort from despair and consideration of abandonment to cautious optimism and mutual encouragement.  However, that night we both slept restlessly and the first part of the next day's ride was clouded by worries of what lay ahead.  It was a lovely ride though: we followed the walking path through vineyards in the wine region of Bierzo and stopped for morning tea in Villafranca del Bierzo, a beautiful little hill town with a small castle and slim winding streets.  The road continued on through the valley of the Valcarce River, and we began to remember why we were taking this trip in the first place.  We lunched in Vega de Valcarce where I walked hard into a low hanging part of an outdoor gazebo, an accident that would have cut my head open had my sunglasses not taken the blow.  My unconscious had failed in its attempt to avoid the climb.

As it turned out, we walked up the bastard.  It was just too steep.  Some parts were negotiable with considerable effort but as soon as the slope increased the legs screamed, the lowest gear was engaged and we stepped off the bike just in time to avoid toppling over or rolling backwards.  Two thirds of the way up we had an ice cream in La Laguna de Castilla before walking some more to reach the autonomous region of Galicia and the hilltop town of O Cebreiro.  This is a beautiful tiny village, perched in one of those magnificent spots where a person can see panoramic views of the ground they have just covered and turn around and see the next gorgeous valleys ahead of them.  It was also crawling with tourists in buses and every bed in town was taken.  Onward then!  Another eight or nine kms of ups and downs and we arrived at Alto do Poio where we paid for a private room and sat still for several hours.  There was an extensive menu posted outside the door of our hotel but this proved to be a complete red herring; upon sitting down to dinner we were immediately served soup without recourse to a menu, followed by fish and chips handed out by a gruff waiter with an air of "you're bloody lucky to get that too".  I wanted to ask him "What would St James say about your attitude?" but I didn't because I know what St James would say: "eat as much as you can, you've still got 150kms to go".

The rest of the ride was a comparative picnic, and broke out into an actual picnic on a couple of occasions.  We rolled 14 kms down from Alto do Poio to Triacastela in about 25 minutes, descending through a mist that from above looked like a white sea with the tops of mountains peeking out like islands.  Some of these were covered in wind turbines looking like marooned sailors waiting for rescue.  Once down in the mist the gloom and the crickets combined to make 9:30am seem like 9:30pm, and no amount of intellectual effort could shake the disconcerting feeling.  We effortlessly continued down to the major town of Sarria.  This is the last town from whence a pilgrim can set out and cover enough kms to achieve the Compostela, a certificate awarded in Santiago if one ticks all the boxes.  Suddenly we were surrounded by boisterous groups of pilgrims with brand new walking sticks and their luggage travelling behind them in cars.  They pushed into lines and chattered excitedly and paid no heed to any "genuine pilgrim" hierarchy that I thought might exist.  The effect was negative for lovers of bed rest: we arrived at Portomarin at about 1:30pm and were among the last five or ten to get beds at the 200 bed albergue, having established while we anxiously waited in line that every other hotel in the town was booked out.  While we sat around in cafes all afternoon toasting our luck we observed walkers and riders cruising into town looking for a well earned rest and then cruising straight back out of town again looking perplexed and anxious.  Many looked considerably more frail than me but I couldn't quite bring myself to relinquish my bed.

We called many hotels in the towns ahead but all were full for the next night, so we would just have to take our chances with the albergues again.  After another fairly easy ride we arrived early enough and on the fifth night we stayed in a beautiful albergue converted from an original pilgrims hospital in a riverside village called Ribadiso.  This was full of French people who were somehow able to speak simultaneously to each other all afternoon and then from 5:30am the next morning.  A Spanish woman bedded near to us declared them "loco".  The one cafe in town conducted thriving pilgrim-only business despite their spaghetti bolognese looking absoutely ghastly.

We had booked accommodation well ahead in Santiago and so were able to enjoy our final day of riding free from anxiety re: sleeping rough.  We were excited to finish and wondered about how it must feel for a devout pilgrim who has been walking for more than a month to finally arrive at the fabled cathedral.  The city was full of pilgrims and busloads of tourists who poured in and out of the cathedral in huge numbers, compelling us to quickly flee to our hotel room after the obligatory photos.  It is a lovely cathedral whose spires dominate the town, as most major religious buildings do in the parts of Spain we have seen.  We stopped at the pilgrims' centre to get our Compostelas and as I completed the form I noticed that I was the only pilgrim on the page to tick the "non-religious" box under "reasons for pilgrimage".  The attendant was quite put out, having already written "Samuelen Lloyd" on the religious certificate, and grilled me in such a way as to suggest he expected me to say "sorry, yes, I forgot I was religious".  He then tore up the first certificate but managed to spell my name correctly on the much lamer non-religious certificate (general tone of certificate text: "you rode a bike to Santiago, good on ya").     

At lunch we celebrated by eating our first excellent paella, two weeks into our Spanish visit.  After, we lined up for a glimpse of St James' crypt, where I struck up a conversation with a woman next to us in the line.  She was thrilled to see us and said "It's so wonderful to see young people so devoted, you know they say faith is dying, it's not, it's stronger than ever".  We shuffled our feet for a moment before I deftly turned the topic of conversation to the paella.  She was an absolute non-listener anyway, on a multi-stop religious tour of Spain and Portugal and too excited by her proximity to the Apostle to bother waiting for someone else to finish a sentence before telling them about another place that they "must" go to because the Virgin appeared there in a plate of jamon or something.  Inside, she and her friends were seriously excited, and we almost missed the tomb for watching them whisper reverently and touch every idol in sight.  We glanced at the bejewelled coffin and headed out again.  I was a little confused by the fuss but also strangely envious, not really understanding what it was that others in the line felt so connected to while also thinking, actually, kind of knowing in a snobby way, that whatever it is is absurd and worthy of  derision.  I'll end this metaphysical debate now to avoid making this blog entry even longer and revealing too much about the more uppity elements of my nature.

We returned the bikes and consumed alcohol like people who don't have to ride anywhere the following day.  We ate the local octopus dish and found this a small step too far in embracing the local culture.  What does a pilgrim do when he's not a pilgrim anymore?  Takes advantage of his pilgrim train discount and heads to the beach, that's what.