Camino bore, Day 26. One-up-pilgrimship cont'd.

 Tuesday 25th May, Day 26. Sarria to Portomarin.
Very odd (continuing the one-up-pilgrimship theme) that many start at Sarria, and we are now in to a downhill-all-the-way kind of feeling. Just surviving, no new thoughts, just getting there. We have now booked all of the places we intend to stay, as even the huge refugio you can see just to the right of the end of the bridge - holding 120 beds and christened 'the chicken run' by our friend Stefan - is 'completo' by about 1 pm.

The day was marked by oddment happenings; a little mole that ran about the road and then was stunned and killed by the one car that passed by that day. The funny little bulldozer that was laying camino paths that we didn't photograph, as it seemed we'd always be on the camino and so it seemed unremarkable at the time; then later.... we are well and truly camino-ified and can't imagine any other life.

Portomarin, today's destination, is a town very much remodelled between 1956 and 1962, as the old town had been flooded in the course of making a reservoir to produce hydroelectricity, and the buildings, including the church, had been reassembled stone by stone higher up. The church - late 12thC - is the largest single-nave Romanesque church in Galicia, and was also a fortress that housed the knights of St John (here I'm relying on Gitlitz & Davidson). We didn't go to see it, as we were so tired. That's the trouble with being a pilgrim.

2.00 pm pm arrival at the albergue. First things first.

Here, I'm sleeping peacefully on arrival, but it didn't last long as D soon roused me excitedly with, 'The lads are here!' We'd chatted a lot in previous days with Francisco & Carlos but had lost sight of them for a few days; well D had chatted, as his Spanish - 37 year old 'A'level no less - had come on with the practice. I stuck with smiling a lot. We went out to a restaurant with them in the evening and had our very first pimentos de pardron, and learned how to eat them follwing  Carlos's example. Our first mistake was to go at them very much like eating a banana sideways, and then we were enlightened. Francisco and Carlos had somehow found a bunch of fancily dressed Spanish women who were doing the camino in some luxurious way, and were wearing high heeled shoes and immaculate blouses, and this turned our small gathering into a party. They were very pleasant, and I smiled a lot more while they chatted excitedly and examined their immaculate fingernails, while I was secretly looking through the phrase book to find something that I really did want to say, and to show willing, as my Mum brought me up to do, and I couldn't quite find the way to say 'I love your blue shoes'. There really wasn't anything much in the book that resonated with me, but I had to find something, so I made a bit of an announcement that I was about to say my piece, and managed '?Ha visto un grupo de Australianos?' Well, they MIGHT have done! They all tucked into pieces of octopus, but somehow I could not get the stuff past my lips.

We have booked all the places we need to stay now, including in Santiago. Seems sad. The end is nigh. I think we felt a mixture of elation at the idea of making it and seeing Santiago, and also sadness that this way of life was soon to come to an end; but I don't think we really believed that it would. But did we have anything that seemed at all like enlightenment? The 'camino doing its work'? Not that I remember.

'The lads', Francisco and Carlos.

Paper camino day 18: mind in free fall.

The paper camino for day 18 depicts the mind in free fall; we are now on day 26, and probably competely wrecked.