This was Dorothy at 7:30 this morning.

The sun still had a little over 20 minutes to appear but there was enough light to see where we were going and in particular to spot the renegade chicken that had managed to avoid the coop last night.

September is after May, the most popular month for starting out on the Camino Frances and some 500+ pilgrims had overwhelmed all available accommodation in St. Jean-Pied-de-Port on one day last week. We seem to be surfing the wave 😞.

Chickens aren’t solitary creatures and neither are humans but this particular human would like a little distance between himself and the 500+ other pilgrims surrounding him. At any one time this morning there were at least 30+ visible ahead with another 30+ in view behind. At the very beginning a distance of a couple of metres between pilgrims was as much as you often got. This doesn’t make for a rewarding experience.

This was the view after half an hour or so when the pilgrim procession had had a little time to thin out.

An hour or so later we passed through a rich vein of mud.

Dorothy is desperately trying to keep her new Altra trainers clean, but to no avail. A chap just out of camera range had tried cycling through it. Amusing for onlookers, not so much for him. He spent the next 20 minutes trying to clean his mud encrusted steed. If only he’d waited a few km.

Some 15km in this shows a typical scene. If you look carefully you’ll find some 20+ pilgrims dotted along the path.

We stopped early for coffee in Azorfa, a small village where last time we were here a couple of hundred people, mostly children appeared from nowhere and danced around the village. Today, the pilgrims probably outnumbered the inhabitants 2:1.

Our second stop was in Cirueña, which I described last time as a post apocalyptic landscape, a town built for a population that simply didn’t turn up. Nothing much has changed, pretty much every house and flat is for sale and there is a genuine sense of a town in which a neutron bomb has gone off, killing everyone but leaving the buildings untouched.

We stopped briefly for coffee in the local golf club

The remaining 6km to Santa Domingo de la Calzada was mostly downhill with a final stop for banana and clementine overlooking the town.

On the way down

we came across this chap. Presumably he was on his way home from Santiago, still some 600km distant.

Santa Domingo was some 22km from our starting point, too soon to stop so we had a leisurely lunch and continued, after first stopping in the local cathedral dedicated to Saint Domingo.

The inside of the cathedral itself is fairly typical of its time and place, heavily gilded

but with a pretty surreal exhibition just off the main building. There’s a couple of El Greco paintings

but the strangest exhibit was

I’ve no idea what this was all about, some 20 feet long

All very strange.

We left Santa Domingo around four o’clock to walk the remaining 6km or so to tonight’s stopping point at Grañón.

On the way we passed large fields full of french beans ready for harvesting.

This large imposing cross with two metal seats – for whom I wonder.

At the end of the long climb up to the village we came across a thin bearded young man sitting on the edge of the road, his large bag in front of him with the remains of some bread and an apple. He was clearly in distress, in what seems to have been a confused, possibly schizophrenic state of mind. Gentle, but mentally adrift. I think by his accent he was German, a pianist studying at a conservatory but gone because they were bad to him, wandering along the Camino, separate and lonely. Heartbreaking. An elderly Spanish pilgrim stopped and we tried to identify how we could help but our words seemed to slip past him. After 30 minutes or so trying to communicate we continued on our way with the Spanish chap headed to the donativo albergue to ask for help.

We later saw the lad walking in the village, drifting quietly into and out of the church and the bar. Completely uncommunicative he finally walked up the main Street and into the albergue.

The Camino has its attractions to many people looking for answers to difficulties in their lives. This chap was perhaps an extreme case but there are many looking for something that they don’t have at home. Many come carrying stones that they leave underneath a large cross sitting on top of a large 4m high mound made up of these stones each of which is meant to represent a problem in their lives. The act of leaving the stone symbolises the release of the problem. The continuous stream of humanity that flows along the various Camino paths has many broken and damaged representatives.

It’s tricky being human.

Buen Camino