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Negreira → Olveiroa 30.4 km (18.9 mi) |
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¡Feliz Día dos Enganos, todos!
Technically, the Spanish don’t celebrate April Fool’s Day. Instead, they celebrate Día de los Santos Inocentes on December 28th and play pranks on each other in remembrance of Herod’s first-century massacre of the children of Bethlehem. Wow, that’s not something I would even think to joke about! I guess the Spanish think it’s pretty funny (flour fight funny) because Herod’s own son was killed in the mess. Still, that’s really morbid! I was suddenly glad it was April 1st and not December 28th!
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Regardless, the joke was on me this morning as I headed west in the pink fog! I’d gone a good kilometer up the road, waking up every barking dog for miles, when I started to wonder if I was going to see an arrow anytime soon. After all my experience, a path without arrows makes me nervous! Then I arrived in Gandara. Gandara didn’t sound very familiar, and as I checked my map, I learned that the first town I should have reached was Zas! The Camino had left the road all the way back in Negreira!
I hustled back to town and started over, spotting the arrow the minute I got back, and set out to catch up with myself. About an hour into the walk, I met a nice lady from Australia, now living in the Netherlands, who is walking the Camino for the second time. This time, her goal is to find a plot of land to start up her own albergue and meditation center so peregrinos have more options between Santiago and Finisterre! Wow, I’d never really thought about how private albergues get started, nor had I even considered the numerous “Se Vende” signs along the way! She has a really cool vision, I think: a quiet spot in the country for people to escape from the tourist part of the Camino. Conversely, she also imagined setting up a recording studio so that the many musicians who walked the Camino could record some tunes together! Now that would make an awesome soundtrack!
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I lost my traveling companion to a soda break. In so doing, I noticed lamprey on the menu. Now that’s an exotic dish! A lamprey is an eel-like, parasitic proto-fish that latches onto other fish with its sucker mouth and drains their blood! That’s not my idea of yumminess, but it’s so popular in Spain and Portugal that the locals have to make reservations when it’s in season! However, that may also be because water pollution is making them awfully rare. Lamprey is normally served boiled in its own blood, which is karmically fitting, but for me, ¡no gracias!
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Morning grossness notwithstanding, today has been remarkably pretty. The smoke in the air is clearing, the seagulls are cackling, and the landscape is so green! Green has taken over the hills, the fields, and even some houses! Since I left Santiago, the countryside has turned quiet and sleepy. Unlike the dead towns of the Meseta, these comfortable towns make me want to curl up in the shade of one of these houses. But I must press on, past the woodlands and the pastures, the rocky hill covered in aulagas, and the distant lake, so very tantalizing on a hot afternoon!
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This led me to the Concello of Dumbría, which sponsored my map of the region. This concello is very proud of what it has to offer, so the Dumbrian map is geared toward tourists with cars, showing all the ancient rock creations that the Camino avoids, like the ancient petroglyphs of the Pedra Ancha and the dolmens, Pedra da Arca and Pedra do Brazal! Megaliths like these can be found all over Spain, but here in Dumbría, they’re supposed to be super abundant, just not along the Camino. Poo!
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By the time I arrived in Olveiroa, I was plenty tired of the Camino’s jokes at my expense. I pulled up to the albergue municipal, only to find a large group of loud children already residing there. After my last few experiences with loud children, I decided this wasn’t my idea of a good time and went to visit O Hórreo, a marvelous, private albergue with spotless beds, private bathrooms, and an open-air patio, perfect for catching up on some late journal entries!
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An hórreo, as I learned from a lady in a shop in Santiago, is an elevated granary made out of stone! It’s built to keep the rain and the rodents from ruining the latest harvest! They were in use for hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years, and can be found in various forms across Europe! Recently, though, with other advances in agricultural storage, the hórreos that haven’t been left to decay now serve the same role as American sheds: storing things too old to keep in the house but too nice to throw away.
I met up with the folks from Deutschland again, and we headed over to As Pias for dinner. There were so many wonderful things about this bar! The menus were on wine bottles! The bread was whole wheat and had a completely different texture from anything I’d tried since St. Jean. When dipped in caldo gallego? Oh my goodness! The fish (merluza) was, as expected, scrumptious, but the dessert? This flan was made with milk from the cow out back and eggs from the hens across the street! No sodium benzoate here! That washed away the last traces of yesterday’s gloominess and the grumpiness from this morning’s April foolishness. Now, I am back on track and ready to see the sea tomorrow!
Buen Camino!
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Total Distance Walked: 809.9 km (497.1 mi) |
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