7 apr

Walked another 36 kilometres, from Hospital de la Condesa to Sarria, the closest to Santiago town to go and start the Camino and still get an official credencial. This includes, but is not limited to, the forgiveness of all sins and the waiving of any stay in purgatory. One also gets a calligraphed ‘diploma’ with Latinized name showing that one has finished the Camino with honours.
The total amount of kilometres is 1324. Since I have been walking today for six weeks, this makes an average of 31,5 kilometres a day.
Yesterday afternoon we arrived in Galicia, the province that Santiago is part of. It’s the poorest area of Spain with supposedly the nicest people, which does not necessarily go together, but poverty seems to help. This morning there was a nice old Galician woman who shot out of her barn as soon as we were passing with a plate full of pancakes. She started sugaring them and handing them out. Carmen was her name. She asked me where I was from, and then was able to say accent-less that these were ‘pannekoeken’. I was impressed. When we left she said ‘dank oe’, which was pretty good too. She was adorable, partly also because her aprin was still wet from having handmilked her cows just before we arrived.
This handing out of pancakes is not pure gentleness, Manuel, the Spanish guy I was walking with, told me. These people are dirt poor, and this way they make some extra money. He warned us for the ‘friendliness’ we could expect towards Santiago. ‘Learn to say no’, was his advise. ‘But when you accept a ‘gift’, be generous.’
The landscape is mouth watering. We’ve passed the big mountains on our way, but the path meanders through hills full of oak and slate. I’ve never seen so much slate in my life, not even in Wales. Fences, houses, roofs of course, everything is made of this beautiful slate. It makes me want to live here.


After feeling strong yesterday, I felt mostly weak today. Slept in a clean and nice aubergue, with less people in the room, but it was so warm that I woke up at 1.30AM. It’s one of those funny moments when I assumed it was almost 7AM, and couldn’t believe my eyes when I looked at the time on my phone. After reading most of The Economist, finishing a Sudoku and stripping off most of my clothes I fell back asleep for a few hours. No breakfast, no morning coffee, no orange juice, it’s funny how the quality of life seems to depend on little habits.
Was hoping to attend one of the services at Samos monastery, the most important Benedictine monastery of Spain according to Manuel. He assured me they sang Gregorian chants. But when I arrived, after having exhausted myself in and out of lovely river valleys, it turned out the Nones (3PM communal prayers) were not accessible to public. The monastery itself would only open at 4.30PM.
Which was a pity. This important monastery had one of the most exquisite libraries in Europe. Most of it was destroyed at a disastrous fire in 1951. Since then the saying above the library door: ‘A Monastery without books is like an army without weapons’, has gotten a kind of surreal meaning. My favourite book saying is from Cicero: ‘A room without books, is like a body without a soul.’ Notice the fact that it is not the reading of the book that matters, in both sayings, but the ownership itself.
Anyway. Santiago is getting closer. It is being counted down with concrete markers every half kilometres. According to this accounting system there are still 111 kilometres to go. My own bookkeeping systems assumes Santiago is closer: 108 kilometres to go.