Travel Diary – Day 5
The Camino de Santiago is first and foremost a religious walk. A lot claim that they have had an epiphany when walking either on their way to Santiago or in Santiago. Well I don’t know if I had an epiphany but I did spend my entire day drowning in my own tears. I started crying when I spilled my milk during breakfast, that the sun finally was shining, that people were happy and laughing, that I got lost in the woods alone and that’s how it continued throughout the day while my entire life flashbacked before my eyes. You could maybe blame that fact that I consumed very little food or dehydration on my mood swings. Or maybe my tears could have been cause because of the fact that I had Megan Trainor’s song ‘No’ stuck in my brain. But it wasn’t even like the song was stuck in my brain it was more like it was coming from the woods, echoing through the treetops and hills. It was pretty intense mostly because I was out there by myself and figured now its time. Now I’m gonna be the crazy lady walking around in the woods talking to the animals and listening to the sounds of the trees. But also because images I hadn’t thought about in a long time flashed through my retina and caused me to think way too much about it – like it had some special meaning, which obviously just made my cry even harder.
So besides the fact that my mental state was pretty damaged I’d also extreme pain in my toes (which had began to turn white so they were probably suffering a slow and painful death) and my knees, which resulted in me having to walk backwards every time it went downhill – so all the time. At one point I even had to explain to some pilgrims passing me by that I didn’t do it as a religious ritual but because I no longer could bend my legs.
So therefore I had the brilliant idea to hitchhike the rest of the way to Lezama, which not only is hard because I didn’t exactly looked a person smelling of roses and perfume, but also somewhat impossible in some parts of Spain. So all in all I spend two hours of walking 1 kilometre. Finally when I reached Lezama I spend most of my day sitting at a local café (which meant that all the locals were sitting there having a party) while I sat crying, desperately trying to find Wifi so I could call my mother and complain yet again.
Thankfully, later that evening I met Al from Colombia who most likely was a reincarnation of Jesus. He was probably one of the most generous and loving persons I’ve ever met. And what makes the Camino so interesting is the fact that you’re wearing your baggage both emotionally and physically. We were three people on respectively 40, 32 and 20 who all shared our reasons for walking; no secrets even though we had met 10 minutes earlier. Here everybody is curious and understanding. I mean even in our daily routines we can sit around with our loved ones, saying “I’m depressed” and they will just look down their phones replying: “No not at all, you look fine!”
I had a long conversation with Marta and Al and he said; if you haven’t got any crazy stories from the Camino you aren’t enjoying it. And since I couldn’t think of one story that was actually crazy or weird I figured that I had to slow down a bit and find my own tempo. So instead of walking the next day I decided to take the bus to Bilbao to go to the hospital and get my knees checked out.