Lugo and Sarria

I waited for Ivar Revke outside the Hospederia. He brought the box with the 20 copies of Camino Lingo which Paul had sent to Santiago for Reinette. We had a chat and then I called my friend Luis Angel (a Santiago taxi owner) to collect us at 10am to take us to the bus station.  He organised two taxis to take  the 4 of us.

The bus left at 11am and all the way to Lugo we could see pilgrims hiking on the Camino paths. It looks like the Camino is going to be very busy. When we arrived in Lugo we found the taxi rank, loaded our stuff into two taxis and told them to take us to the Hotel Puerta de San Pedro.  The taxi driver looked at us in surprise and pointed to a building about 250m away!  We told one driver to drive the Irish lady and our bags to the hotel across the road and the rest of us walked.

After checking in we walked to the 'gate' in the wall and entered the old city. The Lugo walls are the best preserved complete Roman walls in Spain and one can walk on the top, around the circumference of the walls for about 2.5km.  I got a message from Adrian. His Iberia flight was delayed by 9 hours and he wouldn't be able to meet us in Lugo after all.  He would catch up with us in Sarria instead.

We had a few tapas and drinks then walked to the church and had a look at the Roman baths where hot springs once bubbled up.  We returned to our hotel and decided to order dinner in.  The receptionist, a lovely, accommodating young woman, set a table for us and we phoned a nearby Italian take-away restaurant for dinner. Bob kept us in awe of his stories about his previous Camino walks and in stitches with his lovely sense of humour. After dinner we returned to our rooms and resorted our baggage.
In the morning we dragged our bags across the road to the bus station, bought tickets to Sarria and found the lifts to go downstairs to the platforms.  Our bus left at 12h45 and we arrived in Sarria half an hour later.

We found two taxis to take us to Pension Escalinata.  I had a small daypack with 4 bottles of Amarula and Mrs Balls chutney for Gordon Bell.  I gave one Amarula to Jose and when Gordon arrived, gave him the other bottles. Someone called my name - it was Janet who was sitting with her mother Pat at an outside table.  Not long after, that Adrian arrived. Our Camino Caracoles were all there.
 Belin arrived to take us to the apartments where we would stay for two nights.  Once we were all settled into our rooms - the guys in a room with an en suite shower - Reinette and I went down to the river and found a nice sidewalk café-bar called 'Santiago' where we ordered different tapa dishes for lunch.
That night we went back to the Restaurant Santiago for dinner.  I gave each one a South African beaded badge and a pin as well as the little name magnets I had found in Santiago.  I then started the 'Breaking the Ice' discussion where each one in turn told us their name, what they liked to be called, where they lived, a place they might have lived before and when they had first heard about the Camino.  When it came to Adrian`s turn we listened enthralled as he told us about his extensive experience in the hotel world, living in many different countries around the world where he learned to speak about 8 different languages.  He and his Manchester born wife live in Costa Rica.
I told them that the taxis would pick us up at 8:30am to take us to Barbadelo where we would start walking.  we walked back to the pension, to our respective rooms, all excited about the start of our Slow Camino the next day.

We are no longer peregrinos - Just tourists

We are no longer peregrinos - just tourists - and we had our first tourist upset this morning. When we arrived at Santiago’s airport none of our credit cards (all four of us tried the Visa Cards and I tried a Visa and a Master Card) would not work as the banks would not accept any of them. This meant that we could not pay for our hired car. As you know, car hire companies don’t accept cash (in case you crash the car and they need to charge you). Then an ‘angel moment’ when Marion B and Fran, who were waiting for their flight to London, saw us in the airport lobby and came to say goodbye. We explained our predicament and Fran very kindly offered to use her credit card and we were able to complete the hire process. (We have an automatic, diesel Citroen with a great big boot for all our baggage.)
But back to Santiago. Yesterday morning we spent a couple of hours in the cathedral museum, the Bishop’s Palace and the cloisters - very beautiful - whilst Anneliese attended the pilgrim’s mass in the cathedral. In the evening, after a good meal with Marion B and Fran, we did a ‘nocturnal walking tour’ of the city which started at 10:30pm and finished at 12:30am. The rain held off and it was a lovely evening for walking through the old city of Santiago including a visit to the cloisters and inner courtyards of the old pilgrim hospice which is now a Parador - a 5 star hotel. The evening ended with a ‘quemada’ (fire water ceremony) at a local bar. Very strong stuff - 50% alcohol - orange and lemon rinds, sugar and coffee beans all set alight until blue flames leap up the ladle. We all had to sample the fire water and the fumes got up Fran’s nose so much so that she had to leave the bar and catch her breathe outside!

We could hear the rain during the early hours of the morning and decided to get a taxi to the airport. After the initial hassles with our credit cards we drove off in our beige Citroen, heading west to Finisterre - the ‘End of the World’. The weather improved and the mist cleared so that we had a beautiful view of the ocean (our first sighting of the sea for 7 weeks) and a gorgeous view of the headland which is very similar to Cape Point in South Africa. We had lunch in the restaurant at the top of the hill and after having our photographs taken at the very last camino bollard - it reads 0.00kms - we headed east towards Lugo, a city with the best-preserved Roman walls in all of Spain. It was entering the city that we had our second 'angel moment'. Finn decided in Santiago that I should drive first as I had an idea of where we should be heading. So I had to drive a left-hand drive car on the right (wrong) side of the road with Finn cringing every time a vehicle overtook us and I edged away from the centre lane. (Okay Joy - now I know what it was like for you!!) By the time we got to Lugo I was whizzing around the round-abouts like an old pro but I whizzed the wrong way and took us away from the old city. We stopped and an old fellow told us to go back up the hill. I drove back up the hill, decided to take a right turn at the last minute and ended up driving through one of the 10 puertas – ‘gates’ - into the walled city. There in front of us was a sign for our hotel and about 200m later we pulled up outside. What luck! Any other entrance and we would have been driving around all afternoon trying to find the hotel.
We checked in and then took a walk along the top of the over 2km wall that was built in the 3rd C by the Romans. Greg, you would love it! Many of the buildings inside the walls resemble Dickens-like crofts, with ramshackle walls, shingle roofs, dormer windows and two or three chimneys squashed between modern, high-rise apartments and offices. Some of the houses can only be 2 or 2 ½ m wide but go up three floors so they appear to be squashed into tall structures. Very quaint and medieval. We had dinner in the main square and marvelled at how smartly dressed the locals were who took their walks around the square dressed in their Sunday best with ties and jackets, ladies in high heels - many with designer doggies tripling alongside them! Tomorrow we will drive back down to Sarria (where Finn started his walk) and drive as closely to the camino as possible all the way to Hospital dÓrbigo (the place with the longest bridge in Spain) before turning north to Oviedo where we will spend the night. Oviedo is famous for a very old relic, a shroud that covered Christ’s face before the Turin shroud was used to cover him completely. Recent tests have shown that the blood type on both shrouds are the same. There is a Spanish saying that says one should not visit the servant (Sant’Iago) without visiting the Master (meaning the relic of the shroud.) So, having visited the servant at his resting place in Compostela we will now visit the Master in Oviedo. Will let you know more about that in our next post.

Love to all,
S A M & Finn