Last nights alburgue (Cirauqui) was a 200 year old house at the top of a UNESCO listed village. A terrace overlooking the church square had a long timber table with cushioned benches where you could bring wine up from the bar and watch the sun set. Every room was beautifully appointed with small pieces of art or period furniture (the bunks are chunky timber with nicely printed cotton sheets) and Juanma, our host, personally took each guest through the place and explained how it all worked. Juanma also served us our superb dinner!
Tonight we’re in a municipal sports centre in Ayegui. It’s hospital sterile; steel bunks with blue rubberized mattresses and pillows, polished concrete tile floors, toilets and showers you’d expect to find in a gym and, wheres in Cirauqui we dined in a stone cellar, tonight’s dinner was in the sports bar overlooking the indoor soccer field. The young man at reception handed us small plastic bags with disposable sheets and pillow slips and says ‘upstairs’ pointing to a door marked ‘rooms’.
Same price, very different experience.
We left Cirauqui in the dark at 6:30am and followed the Camino’s yellow arrows and shell-shapes, under orange sodium vapour lamps, down the town’s winding streets to the old roman road that would lead us west to Estella and eventually Ayegui.
As the sun rises the green of the wheat fields starts to glow. We pass a roman bridge and cross two medieval ones before stopping for coffee in Lorca and demolishing our picnics lovingly prepared by juanma. It’s still cool and Di pops on her puffer as we caffeine up, steaming rising in the morning sunlight.
In Villatuerta there’s a shop-come-dispensing machine that offers ‘grow’ and ‘sex’. From the pictograms we understand the former to be cannabis. There were no pictograms for the latter. The town’s church (the one on the way at least, I think there were three) is closed but the lovely little garden affords us a pleasant place to stop and rest amidst the trees and shrubs as we march up the hill.
Coming out of town, the scrub bordering the plowed fields is on fire with red poppies, self seeded yellow canola flowers, and purple iris still glistening with morning dew. A small church atop the hill, nestled in an olive grove is empty save an alter covered in photos and prayers for loved ones.
Our trail then joins the river Ega and swiftly the cultivated fields become, first sheds and a weir gatehouse then the four story terraces that line the paved streets. The river is forded by an ‘A” shaped stone bridge that leads into the old town and up the stairs to St Nicholas. We visited the churches stunning cloister by accident after Di asks a shop owner about a beautiful post card.
Hungry now we stock up on walking snacks at the supermarket and find a little restaurant-bar ‘el sitio’ in a dodgy industrial area, as most of the cool ones in town are closed for food now.
This place is cool. An old bloke at the bar in grey slacks, a shirt and Cardy sips his red. ‘Good’ he says intimating the wine the barmaid poor us. The barmaid cuts us two big slabs of tortilla (potato egg cake) with veggies and ham (mine) and some kind of black bean (Di). Delicieux! She exclaims smiling with fingers to her lips. Another bloke is drinking espresso and reading the paper at a small table while his friend gambles on a single gaming machine. A man in a light grey green track pants and hoody is standing outside the door gesticulating passionately at his phone. The bar maid knows them all. A panel beater works on a car in the garage next door.
It’s only a kilometer or so up the road to our hospital like alburgue and we get settled in and take a rest before dinner at the sports bar – watching the five year olds soccer.
We’re kind of getting things sorted now. Walking in the cool of the day is definitely the go and we can get to Santiago de Compostella in 45 days averaging 18 to 20 km per day with some breaks. Solo, Di would probably prefer a little less and I a little more, but the idea, of course, is that we get there together – ‘team Di and Jeff’, so far so good, although my little toe blisters are turning to mushy pea paste in my boots, which, disappointingly are starting to come apart (where the sole is bonded to the leather). Perhaps I shouldn’t have dried them by the fire so long in the lake district?
Tomorrow Los Arcos then a couple of nights in Vianda for a breather ( to dry my toe paste 🙂 )