Camino de Santiago Day 28: A Laguna to Triacastela
We enter Galicia and the final section of the Camino, and after yesterday's adventures we're in no rush
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The Morning After
“How’d ye sleep?”
“Unreal”
“How are the legs?”
“Ah they’re grand”
It’s funny now how at this stage you just get up, and you walk. We’ve been doing it for 4 weeks. Yesterday was a monster effort in pushing past ourselves and in doing so being entirely at one with Being itself, the universe, god, consciousness, your own spirit – whatever you want to call it.
But it takes it out of you, by definition. Exhausting yourself physically and mentally so you can become more than yourself by becoming nothing. Sounds exhausting even trying to work out what the hell it all means.
We all slept like logs, Los Cincos de Camino Dragonte thankfully put in a room together. By the time we got in I wouldn’t have been able to hack listening to anyone who hadn’t gone through what we’d just been through – they just wouldn’t get it.
And I’m sure they would have got the smell of our socks, and not got what our problem was too.
There’s something great though about that feeling of having put in a solid day’s graft and when you get to the end of the day, wherever it is, you’re so spent you’re not concerned with how you feel or what way you’re sitting. You might get dirty looks off posher types in in their fine clean clothes but you’ve gone beyond caring yourself.
“Bit stiff but I’ll be fine.”
Same as every other day. Funny how no day now is really one extreme or the other. I mean, they’re all incredible, extremely enjoyable, extremely fascinating, and so on, in that sense. But the physical challenge, nor the mental, now just sits at a particular edge. It might tip one way or the other but it rights itself by the end of the day, you course correct your state by walking a bit slower or spending some time alone.
Finely balanced individuals.
The road has prepared us and now we all just adopt the mildly debilitated but permanently ‘fine’ personas of pilgrims, nothing more, nothing less.
That’s all we are, all of us.
The road has broken us down.
Bitta breakfast. A coffee. Bitta chit-chat. Out the door.
Standard.
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“It’s just like Ireland”
But – we’re taking today fairly handy all the same. No rush. We’ve nothing to prove anymore. 40km and two Carrantuohills worth of climbing on a hot day. You wouldn’t get it.
But sure anyway, we won’t go on about it anymore.
A short hill for a couple of kilometres to start the day – for children, really – and we’re at the high point of O Cebreiro.
Funny name, isn’t it? Like a Portuguese hurler from Portumna or something. We’re in Galicia now – home of the Spanish Celts. The language isn’t like Irish at all – this was third hand knowledge I’d got off a reliable German lad near Leon, who’d got it off an unreliable Irish fella a couple of years before. It’s actually quite close to Portuguese, which makes much more sense.
But still – this place mightn’t sound like Ireland but it absolutely, 100% looks like it. Could the people who lived here have influenced the environment? Or is it just a coincidence of climates.
It’s like we’re in the Wicklow mountains, near down in Kerry. Stone walls and the grass is green. Every few kilometres we stroll through a farm with yards and round bales and cement buildings, with splatters of cow shite on the roads reminding me of home.
Fellow walkers must be wondering what I’m getting so excited about.
And of course, I don’t shut up about it all being like Ireland, to anyone who’ll listen and to those who don’t. You’ll never beat the Irish, of course. Or wherever you’re from.
A lazy day’s walking, after yesterday we slow everything right down and take long breaks.
I look down the main road around Triacastela and I could swear it’s like some small town in Tipp or something, the houses even look the same.
Not to mention the oul one in the albergue – I swear to god she looks like a Nóirín if ever I seen one.
Once again the landscape has shifted dramatically – compared to our adventures on the Dragonte Camino, this does feel like a different country again. A different group of people, a different mood, a different way of walking.
Yesterday feels like a lifetime ago already; by tomorrow it’ll all be forgotten about as we move onto somewhere different.
But still, a feeling in the evening as our group went through by now the standard routine of checking in, sharing laundry and finding dinner – that this was it – that I could see how the final week would play out. It’s not far to Santiago now – only 6 days, tomorrow we reach Sarria. I guess we are all going to be walking it together.
If you’ve done the Camino, are thinking of doing it, or are just interested in discussing the Camino or travel in general - then please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.