BACK ON THE ROAD

Leaving the Pais Vasco for Cantabria



I checked out of the hotel early, and headed to “my” coffee shop for breakfast. Having said my goodbyes once, I didn’t want a reprise. From there, I walked to the underground station. I’ve never liked walking through the suburbs, and I’d heard quite a bit about the slums on the west side of Bilbao, and had no desire to walk alone through them for 19 + kilometres. I needed a bit of help to figure out how the ticket machine worked, but eventually, I got on the right train and was in Portugalete, the end of that day’s stage, in about 27 minutes. AMAZING! The few glimpses I got of my surroundings when the train reached blue skies told me I’d done the right thing.

I walked down from the train station, down, down, down, into the old town by the harbour. Portugalete tends to get a bad name in some of the tourist stuff you read, but I found it charming, from its boldly painted buildings, to its tiny winding alleys, to the market setting up in a plaza along the river bank.



I walked up and up to the ancient church and the Torre de Salazar, where I got an excellent view of the transporter bridge, the Puente Colgante, which is Portugalete’s main claim to fame these days. Cars, railway cars, and people are taken across the river Nervion from Getxo to Portugalete in under a minute. It’s a World Heritage Site, but it reminds me of a giant version of the archaic tramway at Dominion Bridge in the Sault, which used to terrify me every time it started rolling when I was a little kid playing in the front yard of my Grandma’s house.

From the church it was another exceptionally steep climb to get back up into the modern town to find the Camino once again. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a moving staircase going up. I got behind another pilgrim and followed him to the top of the hill (erm...cliff). There I stopped for an orange juice, though I hadn’t really done any work at all so far. The camino path was well signed with brass scallop shells embedded in the sidewalk. As I walked through the business district of the town, which was just waking up for the day, I came across a truly ancient couple, dressed rather formally in the way of nonogenarian Spaniards, helping one another into a shop. It brought tears to my eyes to see their love for one another shown in this physical way.




As I left the town on a bike path with a rubberized surface, I was astounded to see that it crossed a superhighway corridor on a skyway! That was something the pilgrims of old never contemplated; nor superhighways neither! I followed that bikepath all the way to La Arena, a beach town on the banks of the Rio Barbadun, which formed the border with the province of Cantabria. I hated to say “Agur” to the Basque country, where I felt very comfortable. But it was time for a new part of the adventure.

In La Arena, I had a coke in a very dirty restaurant, and nothing in the “cafeteria” across the street. It didn’t sell food, just coffee etc. I aired out my feet which were extremely hot after nearly 14 km on pavement and ate the apple which was the only food I had. Luckily, I came across an ice cream truck on the beach, and enjoyed a sugar cone of chocolate ice cream before moving on. I figured I’d get some food in Onton, in another six kilometres.

I crossed the river on a wooden footbridge and climbed the cliff opposite on a set of stairs. I met lots of people out for a weekend stroll, and one young woman, seeing my pack, wished me Buen Camino and asked if I wanted to stay at her house in Santander! Really, the hospitality is quite extraordinary.
The next section, which hugged the cliffs along the sea coast, was almost worth the many kilometres of pavement from the morning. The sea and sky were blue, the sun was warm and everywhere you looked was beautiful.




The path, built on the bed of an old narrow gauge railway took me past the ruins of various defensive structures, and past spots where in the olden days, people rappelled down the cliffs to harvest shellfish and seaweed.




The cattle looked fat and happy as they gazed out at the sea, chewing their cuds and watching the world go by. I got to Onton quite quickly.





I rested a bit on a bench below a bridge before making the somewhat treacherous descent to the town, and as I did, I saw a bus go by. Drat! I hoped it wasn’t the last one of the day. My knees were killing me, and I knew that after Onton, the Camino followed the N-634, a pretty major road. There was an alternative inland route, but that was fifteen kilometres more. In retrospect, that might have been the better idea, but I couldn’t know that I’d have to wait three hours for the next bus, and that there was no food in Onton, nor any drink, nor anything much at all.