Travel Diary
Day 2
When you’re walking the Camino de Santiago, you have to get up early in the morning so you can reach your destination in time, before the Albergues get full, which means you’ll sleep outside or on the floor. Even though you don’t get more than one-hour of sleep because of all the 15 people in the Albergue snoring, which makes it sound like a symphony (there’s the old woman from Spain snoring very loudly, there’s the young man from Britain talking in his sleep, there’s the old Canadian guy screaming in his sleep etc.) it’s no excuse. So around 6:30 in the morning I started walking towards the town Deba with my new friend Marta. I’d even set my alarm clock to 5:30 just to be sure that Marta wouldn’t leave without me (as I said, you have to hold on to the people who want your company – even though they might not know it yet).
And it would probably have taken 15 minuets to go to Deba by car, but it still took us around 6 hours on foot with no particular long breaks.
The first part of the walk was on an old track from the Middle Ages – something I read in my very useful guidebook, but not something I particularly noticed, since all I could think about was: “19 Kilometres? Who are you trying to fool – you can’t with the condition your feet and knees are in after the walk yesterday! I wonder if you could cheat and take the bus instead… Would it even be cheating? I mean it’s pretty obvious that I’m wounded and it’s pure survival, because soon I won’t be able to walk”. So this was what I had to deal with for 6 hours – but nevertheless, the road was very pretty. It just kind of looked like the path my dad tried to make in our garden, all primitive and that.
Marta had walked the Camino Francés before, but I was very glad to hear that she was just as annoyed about all the freaking mountains (which some would identify as hills) that we had to climb on the Camino del Norte a million times a day as I was. The Camino del Norte is of course one of those routes that doesn’t display the arrows clear enough (you have to follow a lot of yellow arrows or sea shells on the way to find out which way you’re meant to be going). And even though I had only been on the Camino for two days, I already saw nothing but arrows when I closed my eyes. This was even worse than that time when I got addicted to Tetris.
Some say that your feet get better and stronger after first 100 kilometres, so at least I had something to look forward to… And my lovely guidebook told me that the landscape would be more flat by then, which sounded like angels singing in my ears. I mean, even in Deba there’s an outdoor elevator and a rolling staircase, because the city has a lot of different plateaus. There’s of course also a normal staircase for the courageous – which I really doubt is being used much.
Marta and I met an old man who knew a shortcut for the next walk instead of taking the long route, which of course led up to a mountaintop. As you can imagine, this really cheered us up – until we started asking around and found that there wasn’t any shortcut.
715 kilometres to Santiago and the only thing that kept me going was the thought that I might get Kim Kardashian’s butt thanks to all those damn mountains I had to jump around on.
Julie Stiboldt Soerensen