LLANES TO RIBADESELLA

 ¨Hasta Luego¨ as they say in Asturias. Like Aloha,  it seems to be good for hello and goodbye. It was good to say Hasta Luego to Llanes and good  to be back in the land of the living.  Even so, my approach was tentative, as I set off  from Llanes.  My first goal was Poo (the place, silly); if I made it there, I'd go on to Celorio (nothing to do with the vegetable); and so on.  My lungs were a bit creaky, but I had to get going.  It turned out to be a surprisingly lovely experience.   Finally, I was into the kind of Camino I remembered so fondly from last time. Little laneways with herds of cows on either side, their bells clinking gently as they chewed. Wildflowers everywhere, and by wildflowers I mean roses!



When I had first started to research this trip, I was really taken by the pictures of Our Lady of Sorrows, the church at Barro, surrounded by the sea on three sides when the tide is high.  I told myself that I would go there and commune with Our Lady on the subject of motherhood and the other vicissitudes of being a woman.  As the planning went along, it became a bit of an obsession with me.  I was thankful on this day to be able to walk again and achieve this goal.

 When I arrived, the church was, of course, locked,  but I sat on the wall and admired the view out over the very picturesque cemetery.  I was glad I had come, not just to fulfill my "vow", but to have seen this beautiful place.  And I thought, not for the first time on this trip, of the long line of supportive mothers from which I come, and I was thankful for that too.

 And then it was back into the hills and more beautiful country, including wonderful views of the sea from above the abandoned monastery of San Antolin de Bedon.  The beautiful medieval buildings were disfigured with graffiti, which put me off going to explore the ruins, but now I wish I had.

 At about 15km my body told me I wasn´t quite well enough to do any more for the day, so I looked for some form of transportation out of the small village I found myself in. The next train was in five hours, according to the signboard at the station in Vilahormes.  In a dark and dirty bar where an animated genre painting was in progress; (grubby, almost certainly unemployed, middle-aged men playing cards), the proprietress informed me that the next bus was in about three hours.  I drank a coke there, but wanted to look somewhere else (anywhere else, actually) for food.  I wandered up to the far end of the village where the little autoservicio grocery store was just closing for the afternoon and bought the only two things I could see that were portable, possibly palatable, and which did not require cooking; oranges and chocolate covered doughnuts.  These latter were a surprise.  The waxy faux chocolate coating hid unsweetened bread, like Wonder.  It made for a strange disconnect between expectation and experience.  I sat on the glass-strewn steps of a failed hostel, and zipped off my trouser legs.  I'd worked up quite a sweat, not all of it due to exercise, and I needed to cool down.  I was surprised at the furriness of my shins, and there and then, I whipped out a moist towelette and a razor, and shaved them.  I must have been delirious.   That is possibly the most outre act of public rudeness of which I've been guilty, but since it was siesta time, and nobody was about, it wasn't THAT bad.  Apart from the fact that a bus whizzed by while I was searching my pack.  AAAARRGHH!

I knew enough about Spanish buses by now to know that it probably was not my bus in the first place, and might not have stopped at this particular parada (if it was actually a parada) in any case.  I also knew that it couldn't be the only bus for the day.  I could wait.  But maybe not just here.   I asked confirmation of everyone I met of the location of the bus stop. No one had thought to mark it ¨Bus Stop¨ or anything useful like that. People kept telling me things like ¨Just a little bit down there...or the house with the trees (really?) ...across from the train station¨ Finally, I took the bold step of knocking on a door. The young lady who answered it, said. "It´s right here!"  She meant directly in front of her house!  Finally, some precision!  Then she got me a lawn chair and told me how to flag down the driver. A long discussion amongst the family ensued about a) whether or not there was a bus that day b) whether the lady in the bar knew what she was talking about and c) whether in fact, one was due any minute even though nothing about it was mentioned on the horario. If you picked c) as the right option you were right. I ended up on the schoolbus a few minutes later, and was happy to be there. It didn´t look like I was missing anything fantastic in the 15 minutes it took to do the 15km left to Ribadesella either.

Ribadesella had been one of the more interesting places I'd researched.  There was an annual horse race on the beach in Easter Week, which I had missed, and I thought I would also have to miss seeing the chief attraction, the Paleolithic cave paintings hidden in the cliffs within the town.  They're closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and if I hadn't been sick, and held up in Llanes, I'd have had no chance of seeing them. but now it was Tuesday and they'd be open the following day.  You can never tell WHICH cloud is going to have the silver lining!  I booked in for two nights in the local youth hostel, an Indiano mansion right on the beach, with chestnut floors and fancy wrought iron banisters,  and settled in for some rest and recuperation in the sun.

The road to the caves was not completely smooth, however.   The ¨lovely¨girl in the Turismo, assured me that there was no way on God´s Green Earth that Ï would be seeing those caves because they were totally booked up until the end of April. I pointed out to her that I had seen and heard all sorts of differing information about the structure of reservations. She swore that it could only be done by telephone. I said, that didn´t seem fair, and that I didn´t have a telephone. She shrugged her shoulders in an effyou kind of way, and said she supposed I could check at the Centre to see if there were any cancellations. Of course when I got there, there were spaces. Not tons, but some. I was able to make a reservation not only for myself but for Philip, who was also desparate to see the caves, but who, unlike me, had believed the girl at the Turismo.

I told him that I was his madrina de hadas (fairy godmother) for the day. You should have seen his face light up when I gave him the ticket.