Camino Day 1 - Roncesvalles to Zubirit
Got about 23 kilometers of walking done today. That's the good news. Got about 767 to go, not really bad news, but tell that I the four one inch screws and the plate in my left ankle! Only carrying about 25-30 pounds in the pack, but at times, of course, it feels like more.
The Camino de Santiago, or The Way of St. James, is a Catholic pilgrimage route that dates from the year 814. There are, in point of fact, quite a few Caminos. We are walking the Camino Frances, the same one represented in the film The Way, and it crosses Northern Spain from the Spanish-French border in the Pyranees to 30 miles shy of the Atlantic Ocean at Santiago de Compostela, made famous recently by the awful bullet train crash that left over seventy persons dead some months back. Some of the other Caminos include the Camino Plata, coming North from Granada, the Camino Norte, which follows the Bay of Biscay through Asturias, and another who's name escapes me that comes down from Belgium and through France. Thy all end at Santiago de Compostela, the supposed burial place of St. James the Apostle.
The timing of the announcement by the Catholic Church during the time of the most Northern advancement of the Moorish control of Spain, suggests that perhaps the desire to flood the remaining strip of Christian Spain with Christians had more to do with politics than with religion.
But back to my tired feet...we took a bus from Madrid to Pamplona for about 36.00 Euros each, then caught a bus for $6.00 Euros more to Roncesvalles, the starting point for the Camino Frances that lies within Spain. St. Jean Pie-du-Port, or St Jean at the foot of the mountain, is the rstarting point lying about twenty klicks further Nopeople.grb, but to which one needs to spend $107.00 Euros to reach by cab during the non-tourist months. And one needs to hump up and over a three thousand foot climb to pass between the tiny towns. Roncesvalles (Ron-they-VAY-as in the Spanish tongue), for instance has a population of thirty eight people.
Upon reaching our destination, we disembarked, sat off to the side looking at the ancient buildings, some dating to the sixteenth century, and then walked into the Albergue Municipal to pay 2.00 Euros for our Credencials the 'passport that marks you as a perigrino, a pilgrim, and which you have stamped at each place you stay in order to demonstrate your completion of the route in order to receive your certificate of completion, known as the Compostela. We paid $10.00 Euros apiece to pay for our bed, a bunk bed actually, in the dorm upstairs. The dorm was nice, clean, the entire inside remarkably modernized and very tastefully made over.
We ate our first Pilgrim's meal in one of the two bar/restaurants nearby. Seated with a fifty five year old Irishman named Garrod, on his first walk (doing, in fact, only one week's worth of walking, and an older Spanish native of Mallorca named Juan, on his fifth full Camino, we ate our way through a delicate and flavorful potato creamed soup, fried trout with pomme frittes (calling them French Fries, especially this close toFrance, seems somehow a bit too pedestrian), and a yogurt for dessert. The meal cost 9.00 Euros apiece and also came witha bottle of tinto, local red wine. The conversation was pleasant, although Juan's inability to speak any English and Garrod's to speak any Spanish left Teo and I in the role of interpreter. And since Juan talked very fast, it also meant that much of the conversation was left, in essence, unsaid.
We made the ten o'clock curfew by an hour and got into bed. Unfortunately, before we fell asleep one of the gentleman in our two bunk bed cubicle (the room is like the sleeping car of a train in that the cubes are adjacent with the entry facing an outer hallway that loops the outside edges of the floor) began snoring, a sound not unlike a gas powered chainsaw.
Because there was wifi in the dorms, I got a Face Time call from Karen after lights out and went down to a sitting room in the also clean, aesthetically charming basement and video talked with her twice during my insomniac time there. It was great to chat as she prepares for a crazy work adventure in Abu Dhabi in the next couple of weeks. Talking and viewing your dearest while sitting in the stone surrounds of a many hundred year old building is of itself a peculiar and surreal experience. I fell asleep around one. Lights come on and Hospiteleros, retired men who speak at least English, Spanish, and French, come to wake us at six am and we're out and walking an hour and a half before the sun breaks the horizon.
The first third of the Camino Frances is through the forested foothills of the magnificent Pyranees Mountains, green, often tree covered woodland trails much like portions of Northern Washington State's section of the Pacific Crest Trail. As I've become older I find that the downhill portions are more difficult than the uphill ones in that my ankles doth protest too much. Ibuprofen and the occasional rest allows it to be a doable walk.
We stopped for an hour in Biskarette, a small, tidy village looking somewhat Swiss Chalet style, with sixteenth and seventeenth century homes lining the narrow road that passes directly through the center of town. Teo's guidebook stated that the local Tiendika was reputed to be 'surprisingly' well stocked and appropriately priced. Indeed it was, both counts. I bought a six pack of eight ounce Heinekens for $2.00 Euros, a small miracle after having dropped $12.00 Euros for two twenty ounce Heinekens in the bar last night. We ate part of the sandwich we each had made from supplies purchased in Pozuelo de Alarcon, the ritzy suburb of Madrid where we Couchsurfed for three nights, as we sat outside the store, swarmed by teeny, feral cats and drank some beer before heading back down the trail.
We got to where we now reside at two o'clock this afternoon, crossing the Puente de la Rabia (it was said that any rabid animal that crossed the central pillar of the bridge three times would be cured of its disease) and promptly sat down by the bank of the small river so that I could re-up my Ibuprofen and chill down my not so trusty lower joints. We moved onto a private albergue not much later, paying $32.00 Euros for a really top notch double room next to a bathtub (yeah for the hot soak) containing bathroom. Free laundry facilities, free wifi, a talkative and warm owner who showed us around the place, and remarkably enough, no other persons staying in the place has made this place a keeper as far as we are concerned.
In lieu of the Pilgrim's Meal, which is offered at the cheaper rate, like the albergues, so long as one has a Credencial, we chose to go to an Alimientos store, a small grocery type store, to spend $11.00 Euros to buy baguettes, cheese, and two types of local cured pork to make sandwiches for tonight's dinner and tomorrow's lunch, thus putting our total costs for the day at $46.00 Euros for the both of us, covering our meals until tomorrow evening as well. The room cost us each $6.00 Euros more than we could have gotten had we chosen the dorm style Albergue, but given the three free nights spent Couchsurfing in Madrid and the two more that I have arranged starting tomorrow night in Pamplona, really means that our average over seven days will be about $4.00 Euros, or about $5.20 American dollars apiece.
We've got our start. One leg down, thirty two to go! Can't hardly express, as the father of this twenty year old man who accompanies me, can't certainly adequately translate from my heart and head to yours, dear reader, what a forthright, stalwart, intrepid and sure young man he is. Whereas I fall down, get back up, falter in my emotional self, allow it to disrupt my physical world, he is more the example of not all who wander are lost. I, I hate to say, am much more the type who wanders often precisely because I am lost. He's got the better of the two guidebooks, he walks in the lead, his Spanish is probably better all in all than mine, he's less easily distracted than I, yet allows my side shows and cigarette breaks to occur with no complaint.
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