O Cadavo to Lugo – 100kms to go!

The weather has taken a turn since last week’s sunset musings. The temperature has fallen and so has the rain, but that doesn’t matter when you are travelling virtually and most of your steps are indoors. I am also back at my virtual office, spending my days on Zoom calls, sending emails and drafting documents from the coffee table in my living room. During my week off we made good progress on what will become our dining room and I am very much looking forward to having a proper table to work from, probably just in time to go back to the office for real!

I have accumulated a little over 30kms since I last wrote, 209.14kms in total. This brings me to the town of Lugo, 100kms away from Santiago and two thirds of the way through our journey. At my average rate of travel it will be four more weeks before my pilgrimage is over.

I have been feeling a little disconnected to the route, clocking up distance just by living and almost arbitrarily assigning it to stages of the Camino Primitivo. Following the success of watching YouTube videos of ‘real’ walkers, I decided to look and see what other inspiration I could find and came across a film called ‘The Way’ on Amazon Prime. Written and produced by Emilio Estevez, and staring his father Martin Sheen, the film follows a group of pilgrims who are walking the popular Camino Frances which starts just over the border in the French Pyrenees (hence the name) and at almost 800km is much longer than the Camino Primitivo. I won’t give anything away about the plot, in case you would like to watch it for yourself, but I must admit that I enjoyed seeing the landscape of northern Spain and the interiors of some of the Albergues (pilgrim hostels) more than the story. The plot itself is full of potential but for me the execution left a bit to be desired and some of the characters were poorly executed. Despite a claim not to carry any particular ideologies or messages, there were elements of the main female pilgrim’s back story and the conclusions that you were invited to draw about the reason for her journey, which personally made me uncomfortable in the way they were represented. That being said, overall the ‘The Way’ was an interesting, and at times funny, watch and it was perhaps naive of me to be surprised to find conservative Catholic undertones in a film about pilgrimage.

Berducedo to O Cádavo

I have made up some ground in the last week and have covered about 70kms, completing three more stages of my virtual Camino Primitivo: Berducedo to Grandas de Salime, onwards (and upwards if I were walking the route for real) to A Fonsagrada and then over the last high and steep stretch to O Cádavo.

The pick up in pace is partly thanks to the 13kms I covered walking to and from my office on Friday (read about that rather strange experience here https://virtualcamino.art.blog/2020/06/20/workplace-pompeii/) and party because I have taken this week off work. Since Saturday every day has been full of house renovation tasks, including 6 hours of floor sanding yesterday. I have DIY’d my way through those mountains and oh do I feel it!

Today has been a bit of a rest day and a hot one in my city. I am writing this in my back garden, watching the late evening sun of northerly midsummer dip below the rooftops and listening to the bedtime birdsong. Tonight’s performer is a blackbird who has become a bit of a resident fixture in the last few months. This week I have also noticed regular visits from one particular pigeon, identifiable because it only has one eye, and who is often accompanied by two crows. I have named him P’Odin. A good omen for a traveller.

Tineo to Berducedo

It has been a slow week. Not much writing, not much walking, but I’ve finally made it through the mountainous stages four and five of the Camino Primitivo. Just outside Borres the route temporarily splits. I chose the higher option which is the older and now no longer ‘official’ path. My guidebook, yes I bought a guidebook for a walk I’m not actually doing, recommends this route for the views and for the history as it passes the ruins of three traditional pilgrim hospitales (hostels). Although steeper than the alternative trail via Pola de Allande which my fellow travellers chose, the ridge line path is 4.5km shorter, so as I begin to descend in to Berducedo I am not too far behind.

It might be the change in altitude but my head is a little fuzzy. I read some survey results today which report that a lot of people in my profession are relishing working from home. They are finding a work/life balance that they didn’t have before, they’re working shorter hours, productivity and efficiency are up. They are spending more time with their family, exercising instead of commuting. I have always been good at keeping these parts of my life separate. I don’t work late, don’t read my emails on holiday and so, if anything, working from home has had the opposite effect for me, introducing a mingling of worlds which has left me feeling like I’m always at the office. It’s not that I’m working any more hours, it’s that there’s no separation. 9 to 5, Monday to Friday the coffee table in my livingroom is my desk. At 5.01, with only the shutting of a laptop to mark the moment, work becomes home and all the stresses of the day instantly melt away and an evening of relaxation immediately begins. But of course it doesn’t work like that. We need to be careful that we don’t mistake working from home for a holiday. I was no more having a break from work last week than I was hiking mountains. So, tomorrow, I am taking a day off and hopefully the air will clear and some good progress will be made along the trail.

Salas to Tineo

It took three days but by yesterday evening I had covered the distance from my campsite 6km outside of Salas to Tineo. The bulk of the journey was on Sunday with an 11km walk around my neighbourhood.

I live close to the docks in a part of the city with a long industrial history which means that the real scenery I passed was quite different to the woods, waterfalls and mountains of this stage of the Camino Primitivo.

I decided to explore a road that seemed to lead to the sea, by the local waste water processing plant. There are no houses here and the phrase ‘out of sight, out of mind’ could not be more fitting. Most of the sheds and warehouses are no longer used and in various stages of decay. An abandoned lot, it’s former purpose long forgotten, has been claimed as a track for dirt bikes and quads in an entirely unofficial capacity.

The dereliction and detritus alone was enough to make me feel like I was walking through the set of some post-apocalyptic film, an experience all the more surreal during a very real pandemic.

But there is a weird and poignant beauty to be found if you are open to seeing it. It’s there in the strand of pink tinsel caught in an unraveling fence of barbed wire, in the weathered signs and the rust patinated metal, in the disused railway tracks peaking from the undergrowth like the bones of a buried giant and in the rescued remnants of broken plastic heroes.

One piece of graffiti seemed to sum up the atmosphere perfectly. Exploring this discarded corner of the city was as successful an escape from reality as last week’s walk around the loch, perhaps more so. It certainly gave me much to contemplate and isn’t that the purpose of a pilgrimage after all?

Escamplero to Salas via San Juan de Villapanada

With a 7km run on day 2, a 5km walk on day 3, plus some vigorous typing, trips to the kitchen and circuits of the garden, I made up enough distance to join my fellow travellers at San Juan de Villapanada on Wednesday evening for my first night in a virtual bed rather than a virtual field.

The intention for day 4 was to get as close to Salas as possible, which for me, realistically, would mean another virtual night under the stars. The weather has turned cooler and wetter so instead of a lunchtime walk I opted for the exercise bike. My bike is in the livingroom and I often put something on the TV to distract myself whilst I peddle. I have seen footage on Youtube taken from the helmet cams of cyclists, which let you join in on a ride from home, and decided to have a look to see if anyone had filmed their journey along the Camino Primitivo.

There were a reasonable number of videos to choose from but most were sped up compliations and I liked the idea of watching the stages as I did them. Luckily a lovely Canadian lady named Sara Dhooma had documented each day of her solo hike in November 2019 and I watched the first three of her vlogs during my 30 minutes on the bike. This brought Sara to Bodenaya and my total km count to 6km short of Salas.

I learnt quite a few things about the realities of walking the Camino Primitivo from Sara, not least that it rains A LOT in the North of Spain in November. Other important lessons are always to do a dance when you cross a bridge, say hello to animals when you see them and don’t feel bad about having the occasional glass of wine or beer when you stop to refuel.

I am travelling slower than Sara and now I have a bit of extra motivation to make it to Bodenaya today, 13.11km from my current position, so that I can watch the next installment of her journey.

Desire Paths and Intention Lines

They are all over the city. Everywhere there is a footpath across an open space, everywhere there are steps next to a slope, everywhere there is a gap in a fence or a wall or a hedge, there is a desire path. These unofficial shortcuts, unsigned, unplanned, untarmacked are both a bane and blessing to city planners. They betray the secrets of pedestrians, revealing with dead grass and trampled plants, how we react to our environment, where we want to go not where we are told to go.

These intention lines are most often equated with the path of least resistance. They cut corners, cross junctions not at the lights but next to the bus stop. By their very nature they differ from the planned route, they rebel against the rules.

But these are strange times and what we desire is no longer the quickest way from A to B. Unable to visit friends and family, unable to go to the office, the gym or the pub, our journeys are slowing. The time outdoors is as important as the destination. But there is a problem, everybody is doing the same. In the city there are only so many outdoor spaces, only so many paths and we have been told repeatedly, and forcefully, in messages sculpted by government psychologists, that we must keep apart. And so a new form of intention line is appearing in the parched parks, one that shadows the official route but a few metres away, an eroded echo allowing us to go walking together, but apart.

Oviedo to Escamplero-ish

One of the handy things about a virtual walk is that if you fall short of your target you don’t have to spend the night in a field by the side of a path, unless you want to.

The classic first leg of the Camino Primitivo is 25.5km (15.9 miles) from Oviedo to Grado, often split in to two days with a break at Escamplero 12.2km along the trail.

Five hours in to the first day of our adventure and I had gone 0.9 of a km and most of that was my Garmin mistakenly recording my arms moving whilst typing. There is, no doubt, something clever and meta to be said about undertaking a virtual journey sat in front of a laptop, but I had hoped that the majority of my travel would be literal, even if it couldn’t be geographically correct.

So at lunchtime I ventured out for a walk. Something I have rarely done during the last ten weeks. Close to my house the route of an old railway line has been turned in to a footpath, a hidden green corridor which can be joined and left at points along its length. I followed it to a small park. Once part of the grounds of Lochend Castle it is now an incongorous oasis amongst the housing estate tower blocks that encircle it.

Most of the park is covered by the lake or loch from which it takes its name. We are coming to the end of Spring in Scotland and baby birds were in abundance, amongst them Moorhen chicks, cygnets and ducklings. Further out in the loch three herons perched, and the banks were filled with yellow iris.

It should have been a tranquil spot, the birdlife certainly seemed well at ease, but I found it hard to relax. Although most people I passed were observing social distancing not all did, and more than once I found myself much closer to someone than I would have liked. I am in a low category of risk, a white middle class woman in her 30s, non-smoker, healthy weight, working from home. But ten weeks of constant messages to ‘Stay at home, save lives’, leave their mark and I didn’t linger. One circuit of the loch and I headed back to the railway path, stopping briefly to take a photograph of the stone doocot (dove cot) that would have housed the castle’s pigeons. Five centuries later and the descedants of those birds still perch there, though now without the prospect of being eaten.

With time to spare before the end of my lunchhour, and keen to clock up as much distance as possible, I followed the path, past some allotments complete with mask wearing scarecrows, to its end at a much larger park at the end of my street.

Later, after finishing work, I ate a Spanish inspired salad in the garden followed by a little light gardening to close the day at 10km of typing/walking, 2.2km short of Escamplero. I could pace up and down a bit, maybe spend some time on my exercise bike but choose to stop. A night under the stars in a field sounds just fine to me.

An invitation

‘Would you like to walk the Camino Primitivo with me?’ A question I was not expecting nine weeks in to lockdown. I live in one of the most densely populated parts of my city, with an estimated 26,000 people per 800 metres, making exercise outdoors in a socially distanced way almost impossible. I’ve barely ventured beyond my garden in months. The thought of going to the supermarket is challenging, walking 230 miles through mountainous Spain? Incomprehensible.

But of course this would be virtual travel. Measuring the distance we move each day and plotting it against the oldest pilgrimage route to Santiago. Seasoned walkers can complete the journey in under two weeks; with work and other commitments our pace will be slower but this is not about targets and records, it is not a race. It is about mutual experience whilst isolated, completing something together whilst apart. It is about family and creativity and escape. It is about the journey.