mid-morning. Mid-morning came and went and it was raining more solidly than ever and clearly settled in for quite a while, although by this time we had already enjoyed views from high in the hills of cloud filled valleys before the weather deteriorated and before we dropped down to breakfast in the small town of Triacastela. After breakfast we set off again, accompanying walkers who were beginning their day from here, and started a long and hard climb through woodland in the persistent rain, made more bearable by the fact that sections were on a narrow tarmac lane.
I pressed ahead at my own pace, having agreed to meet Gale three miles down the route, and pushed on past a number of other walkers as I worked to keep warm and reach the dry of our cafe meeting point as soon as I could. The route then turned off the tarmac road and up into the woodland, signed on the tarmac by the Camino's yellow painted arrows and agreeing with my guide book. But after seeing nobody for what seemed an eternity, knowing I would have travelled further than the guide suggested, and feeling in the middle of nowhere, I began to doubt my route. However, I eventually dropped into a village of a few tired stone houses and at the entrance of the open courtyard of a hippy style cafe: chairs and sofas, guitar music and painted 'fridge magnet philosophy' signs plus drinks and snacks available on a donation basis all included. As I sat in the courtyard in a threadbare chair enjoying coffee and watching the rain more walkers soon arrived, most of whom I had passed a long while back. It soon became clear that despite the signs and my guidebook I had taken a much longer alternative route; it was not the first time that day the guidebook would let us down.
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| Hippy Cafe |
Before long Gale arrived and after a rest we headed out into country lanes again. Our aim today was to get beyond Sarria, where the girls had trained it to yesterday and set out from this morning. It seemed a soulless town but once through it we hit some very English countryside: small rivers and pastures with oak woodland and grass verged lanes, the scent of elderflower hanging in the air. The sun was shining and the path was flat so although we were experiencing late afternoon tiredness we enjoyed an easy and pleasant walk. Eventually though it was time to call it a day and we decided to try the albergue marked on the map about a kilometre further on. We walked for some considerable time, the route only roughly corresponding to the guidebook although problems here were not uncommon: we had already found that some main features were not marked; that the diagrams on the route's steepness for the day often bore no resemblance to the reality; and on the map you could see that the visual representation of some of the marked distances were longer than other marked distances twice as long. In general the maps were only representative. But never until now had we found an albergue marked on the map that didn’t exist. After some time, and knowing we had walked a lot further but unable to pinpoint our exact location, I asked the first person we had seen where we were. After two minutes of her trying to get me interested in buying a walking staff or a pilgrim’s water gourd (I wasn’t), although if she had a couple of beds I was interested (she didn’t), she eventually told me we were in the tiny hamlet of A Brea. Despite following the Camino we had crossed streams not on the map, supposedly ascended a steep hill to get here (which we hadn't) and made no end of turnings that the map didn’t show. But the good news was we were much further on than we had hoped and near a small village with accommodation. It still took half an hour and three attempts to find a place with beds in the handful of buildings we encountered but eventually, twelve hours after we set out this morning, the Camino provided. And the good news is that the local bar was just up the road (where we enjoyed a well deserved drink and meal) and that we are now well placed to catch the girls tomorrow.
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