A LITTLE BIT JABBERWOCKY

The weather had definitely changed.  There was a chill in the air as I left Vega early in the morning.  The air was hazy and the sky was pearly.  Rain was in the forecast.

Today's walk would take me to Oviedo.  I wasn't looking forward to the second half of it, which was through the satellite towns and villages of the city, but the first half looked OK on the map.  And it was.  I walked through meadows and little hamlets.  I passed another great lump of limestone called La Pena.  Apple trees were in blossom.

At one point, the trail crossed the highway and went into a wood.  A sign said to be careful because of the Peligroso Socabón.   What sort of thing was that? I wondered.  Lewis Carroll popped into my mind...

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub Bird, and shun
The Frumious Bandersnatch!"

I was conjuring in my mind what a Dangerous Socabon might look like as I entered the wood.  It was a good thing I was looking down because right in the middle of the path was a great puddle of steaming excrement!

I might have thought that it was a sloppy cow pat, had there not been a side order of toilet paper.

  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! EWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Peregrino malo, why would you do that right on the path when there are woods on either side?  Perhaps it was for fear of the Peligroso Socabon?

 There was utter silence as I entered the wood.  It was evident that this part of the Camino had been heavily improved lately. There was fresh gravel on the pathway, with large rounded cobbles.  Little streams had been bridged and chairs and benches cut from the trees along the way.  Utter, eerie silence prevailed as I wandered along.  I had decided that the Socabon was sort of a cross between a giant salamander,or a mudpuppy with its fringed gills, and a Chinese dragon, and maybe a bit like Randall, the scary nightmare monster from the Disney movie. It was probably blue, I thought, with a bright red tooth filled mouth.  Suddenly, I was aware of a looming presence. I started and turned to find....

The friendly Czech, powering along in socks and sandals!  Whew!  What a relief....or it was a relief until I started thinking that maybe he thought that I had been the one to besmirch the trail.  Then I was just horrified!

So, what is a socabón, you ask?  As far as I can tell, in Castilian it would be socavón, and it has something to do with a hole or a cave or subsidence.....but what lives in there?  Only your unconscious knows for sure.

SIMPLE THINGS

When it comes to cooking, sometimes the simplest things are best.  Like pimientos de Padron,  fried in oil, salted and served with bread (and beer).  Last night, I was feeling homesick for Spain.  (I know, it's ridiculous, me being a Canadian and all, but it's true just the same), so I made some arroz con leche, Asturian style.  Five simple ingredients, a bit of time, and presto! A dessert to die for.  I had to give some of it away so that I don't totally blow my diet. 

This is the recipe:  http://www.mis-recetas.org/recetas/show/1091-arroz-con-leche-asturiano

Buen Provecho!

I got this nice picture from http://fusiondelasartes.bligoo.com/media/users/7/399122/images/public/27398/arroz_con_leche_con_canela.jpg?v=1278174467255  (because I couldn't find anything suitable on wikimedia commons).

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGA....

stays in Vega, only nothing ever happens in Vega, it seems, so its moot.  I've rarely seen such a sleepy place.  There were buildings, like a town hall, a medical centre, a church, two bars, two grocery stores, but no people, to speak of.  It was as if a neutron bomb had gone off, and the the place had become re-peopled by actors.  The place where we were supposed to get our sello was shut when I arrived, so I hung around for a while until I got the idea to go to the refugio and knock on the door.  Alain and Jacqui were there already, and let me in.  I did some laundry and waited around for things to open up again.  As I was out on the balcony hanging my clothes on a wire rack,  I saw a white haired peregrino looking lost, so I waved to him and signalled that I would let him in.  He was Czech, and spoke no English, no French, and no Spanish.  Talk about a stranger in a strange land!  He was extremely pleasant in his manner, but evidently wanted to keep to himself, so we let him.  Alain and Jacqui were quite friendly, but Alain was tired (he was no spring chicken either), so it was siesta time for us all.

When the shops re-opened, I went out to get my credencial stamped and see what there was to eat.  I went to the other bar for a cafe con leche.   I was hoping to get a glimpse of the Royal Wedding, (which I have yet to see) but, you guessed it, what was on the TV was the end of the blessed bike race!  Their food wasn't ready for a few more hours and it was expensive, so I headed up the street to the Super Cristina to see what there was in the way of groceries.  Not much.  No people = no food.  I bought some arroz con leche in little plastic cups and a banana.  Then I went to the other grocery store.  Not much there either,  but their bread looked delicious.  There were two loaves on display, and the woman behind the counter asked which one I would like.  I said,  you choose, because there didn't seem to be much between them.  She picked one, and as she handed it to me, she watched my face.  I gasped as I touched it. The bread was still warm!  What a simple and wonderful gift she had shared with me, out of the kindness of her heart.  We smiled at one another, no common language required.

GOING UP!

 What a day!  I left Villaviciosa early in the morning, and walked
through a large park on the edge of town.  As the path left the outskirts of town and went up into the farmland I came to a place where three Caminos converged; the Norte to Gijon, the link to the Primitivo, via Oviedo, and the Camino de Covadonga, which goes to the site of the famous battle where Pelayo began the process of Reconquista.  My road, the one to Oviedo, was full of village vistas, hedgerow floral fantasies, and the sound of church bells.  I had decided to take a side trail to visit the ninth century church and medieval monastery at Valdedios.  The steep climb started at San Pedro de Ambas, with its lovely ancient houses and a restored lavadero, and took me past  a host of interesting sights: sleeping cats; lords of their particular universes; chatty farmwives herding cattle;  beautiful horreos which looked almost like Japanese temples rather than mundane grain storage huts;  people out fixing fences;  and a monk, riding in the back of a car full of what looked like Mafiosi, but who were obviously some of the faithful.  The car stopped, and the monk asked me if I was planning to stay at the refugio at Valdedios.  He assured me there would be someone there to give me a tour, but that if I wanted to stay I would have to hang around until he got back.

From the moment it came into view, the church was perfect.  As the guidebook indicated, it was worth the pain of getting there.  The church, built in 893, looked to me as if it had come perfectly formed from the mind of the architect, yesterday.  It is in the process of restoration, but it still looks and feels very old.  The interior was once covered completely with painted plaster.  Little remains now, but it must have felt very fresh and vibrant at the time.  It reminded me of sixties pop art!  The whole place was wonderful, the buildings running the gamut of all sorts of architectural styles.

Alain and Jacqui, an elderly French couple I met along the road, were my companions for a tour, in Spanish, of many parts of the monastery.  We rested, refilled our water containers, and ate our bread and cheese.  Then, the hard part of the day began.  The next four kilometres were spent climbing the Sierra de Sueve.  The rise in elevation was over three hundred metres,  along the side of the valley, where I watched the red roofs of the monastery shrink at every turn.  Eventually, I could just about see the ocean several kilometres away to the north.  I was very glad to get to my coke stop in Campo at the very summit, but the views the whole way were so lovely, I hadn't really minded the climb.

 Alas....what goes up.....let's just say that it was a "fuerte decenso",  ( 100 metres in a single km)   on a hot afternoon, past the only growling dog I met on the whole journey.  I swear I thought it was a lion hiding under that piece of farm machinery!  My knees were really bugging me, and I was just starting to descend into my old grumpiness about too much carreterra, when the Universe sent a sign to make me laugh at myself.  When I say it was a sign, I mean just that,(and in English),  emblazoned on the side of a tractor-trailer parked in a farmyard far below me in the valley.  RELAX!

Somehow that took the pressure off and I enjoyed the rest of the way into Vega de Sariego.  Roses, cattle, little lizards skittering across the road like the shadows of willow leaves suspended above the ground.  Another beautiful Asturian day.

LOGISTICS AND FREE WILL

No two ways about it,  the Camino del Norte is a logistical nightmare unless you are wickedly fit with good knees and you don't mind a few 40 km days.  I was coming to the realization that although I was fit enough, I was still hampered by my knees, which were getting worse rather than better, and what's more, I liked a bit of time each day to enjoy wherever I ended up.  One of the thoughts which had rolled through my mind as I listened to that toddler clumping around over head  in the hostel was the realization that I didn't need to be at the mercy of the path, that I could MAKE this trip how I wanted it to be.  I was happy to follow the yellow arrows; but as in Santander, I was equally happy to make my own way when the Way did not appear or appeared not to my liking.  Increasingly, I was also coming to terms with the idea that it was all right to take a bus now and again.  As Gisbert was wont to say; "It's cheaper than knee surgery!"

If I had walked the whole 37 km from Ribadesella, I would still have been walking at the time that I was savouring the evening sunshine on the Calle del Sol, taking endless photos of the beautiful nineteenth century bronzes on the fountain and the carvings on the  ancient church on the plaza.  I might have made it in time for the fantastic dinner that I ate in a sidreria, but there might have been no rooms left in the pension where I stayed. On my first Camino, I would have worried about what people thought about my choices; spiritual journey or no, there is plenty of judgmental opinion along the Way; I've even been guilty of it myself.  But not anymore.  I'd entered a new state of mind.

About that fantastic dinner...  There was enough for three people, for a start.  I had ensalata mixta with a balsamic dressing, for a change, followed by an entire dorada, fried crisply, with a piri-piri type green sauce.  Dessert was a mythical arroz con leche, so dense and creamy that it was almost like nougat, with a caramelized sugar and cinnamon topping.  Good thing I had stopped being judgmental, because that was one sinful dish.  I watched the barman pour an after-work sidra or two for some local businessmen.  The bottle went as high above his head as he could reach.  In his left hand, he held the wide-mouthed glass, cocked at about a forty five degree angle.  Slowly, he tipped the bottle until a thin stream of liquid started over the lip and with the left hand he swooped in to catch it, so that it ran smoothly down the inside of the lower wall of the glass.  The servings were small, less than a quarter of the volume of the glass, but they were repeated frequently.  In true sidreria style, the dregs were dashed to the floor.  My boots, sticking to the sweet stuff, made little cracking noises as I walked to my table.

Here's a video of the technique:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=HsR9XBuikaU

Thus fortified, I went back to my little pension, and slept like a baby, awakened only by a hellish charliehorse in my right thigh that I thought would never end, a coughing fit, and the streetsweeping machine first thing in the morning.   But I was in high spirits after two great days of walking, and I couldn't wait to see more, so waking up early suited me just fine.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS!

I'd walked 21 km so far, and it was another ten along the road to the albergue in Sebrayo, where I could probably find room in the albergue, but where there were no shops, but where there might be a chico who would sell you something to eat.  I didn't fancy the roadwalking or the insecurity of perhaps not finding any food.  The next town was  Villaviciosa of the villainous, vicious sounding name.  There was no albergue there, but lots of hotels and hostels and pensiones. That seemed like a better bet to me, so I decided to take the bus from Colunga.  The bus I had hoped to take whizzed right by me as I sat with a group of German pilgrims in what looked like a bus stop, but was in fact, the taxi stand.  On the way into town we watched a bicycle race. More whizzing.  Man, those guys could fly!  It turned out to be a huge deal; for the next two days every time I was in a bar, people would be glued to the TV watching that race, a three day neon thrash across the northern coast of Spain.

The next bus wasn't until five o'clock, so I had lots of time to kill.  I had a snack and some coffee in a cafe near the ACTUAL bus stop and bought one for a fellow pilgrim.  I can't remember her at all now.  Funny how there are little blank spots.  When the bus arrived, a half-hour late, it was because of the bicycle race which had closed the highway for a while.  

The bus journey was the best way to see the sugar loaf hills decorated like Christmas trees with whitewashed villages, neatly terraced fields and plantations.  Fat herds of cattle were pastured in the winding river valley.  The whole panorama was Oz-ly green. One of my favourite moments of the trip occurred when an old man in a plain white shirt, but obviously his best, got on the bus carrying a bouquet of mock orange flowers.  Was he going to visit his sweetheart?  his wife in the old folks home? was his daughter expecting him for supper? Whatever it was, the way he carried himself suggested that it was a special day, and it was sweet.

  The road on which the Camino went was the same as the bus route, with one notable difference.
 I was treated to a ride along the so-called Jurassic Coast, including the famous "hanging" village of Llastres, which I'd read about but which is not on the Camino.  Well, let me tell you, I was the one hanging!.

In order to negotiate a hairpin turn at the top of the village, the bus had not only to go into the wrong lane, but drop the left rear wheel into a stone stairwell.  I think the driver did that every day.  He wasn't fussed, but I was nonplussed!   All I could see from my vantage point in the raised seat directly behind the driver was sky and sea. When we dipped, it seemed to me as if the bus was teetering over the void.   The thing that worried the driver was the way an engine fan was squealing (like a pig under a gate, as my grandfather would say, or a goat stuck in a page wire fence, perhaps).  It continued to do that all the way to the bus station, while the driver tapped and muttered.

As I was getting off my bus, I met Gisbert and Juan de Badajoz getting on.  They'd just come back from a side trip to Oviedo, and were heading to the coast to go to Gijon and continue their Camino from there.  Gisbert and I saluted each other hurriedly with a soldierly hug, and that was the last I saw of my reiki-master philosopher.  We're still in touch sporadically, by email and the inevitable facebook.  Nice to know I have a brother in arms out there somewhere.

NOTAS DE UN BAGABUNDAJE

 I awoke refreshed by my vacation from the camino,  and somewhat rested.  The lumbering antics of a pre-verbal, yet not quiet, toddler in the room above me the night before, in combination with a crashing sea meant that I didn't sleep until sometime after two.  And here I was at seven, already 5k from town.  This was one of my favourite mornings of walking of the whole camino.

I stopped for a bread and cheese breakfast outside San Esteban de Leces.  As I sat on a the cover of a cistern by the roadside I could see the ancient buildings of the monastery and the brand new looking village.  It was an odd contrast but I didn't think anything of it until recently when I learned that the first mention of the village was in 1259, and that it had been destroyed during the civil war and was rebuilt in 1953.  You couldn't tell from where I sat that day that anything at all had happened there for the last millenium.  It was so  quiet and flower filled and dewy.  The worst thing that I saw was a dead sheep.

From San Esteban it was a quick walk through the countryside to La Vega.  Being a seaside town, I thought it might be a bit touristic, which to me meant a washroom and coffee.  However, it was anything but.  It was a lovely quiet aldea, a hamlet, on the side of a steep hill going down to the sea.  It wasn't until I got to the beach proper that there was any kind of commercial development, in the form of a couple of bars, which were closed.  I tried to wheedle a coffee out of one guy, but it was no go.

Even though I was in the middle of nowhere, my education wasn't forgotten.  It turned out that the beach was a natural monument.   In the park at the beach was a huge signboard telling about the bridge which crossed a streamlet there and how it was mentioned in a travel book by one of Spain's major writers, Camilo Jose Cela called Del Mino al Bidasoa; notas de un bagabundaje (think vagabond).  I just loved saying it!  Bag - a -bune- da-hey!   I wish I'd known about the fossilized dinosaur footprints at the other end of the beach.  I might have made a day of it.

As it was, it was a morning of one delight after another. For a while, the way followed the Camino Real, the Royal Road, but to me  Camino Real = Real Camino.  While I hated walking on asphalt, I loved walking on ancient cobbles, between banks of brambles higher than my head.  

For a while the path ran high above the sea, through open pastures.  To the south, I could see the tail end of the Sierra del Sueve, whose name commemorated an ancient Germanic tribe who lived in Spain in the post Roman Empire years.  All around were small herds of horses and cattle who seemed to be enjoying the sun and the fine weather just as much as I was.

I passed blithely through one pasture, realizing only as I passed through the stile at the far end that there were not one, but two! bulls in the field.  They were pretty laid back!

In the area known as the Arroyo de los Romeros, I passed a sparkling, gurgling stream lined with yellow iris which threw itself over a small waterfall into the sea.  From there, it was down to the Arenal de Moris for a stretch of beach walking.  I followed the beach to La Espasa,  where I got back on a paved walkway to La Isla, where I stopped for more food.  I got  tick on me and sat in gum in the space of one minute, so I picked up my stuff and headed onward.

After a stretch along the highway at La Isla, I was thrilled to head off into a field which led to woods and even some mud.  In the Arroyo de Bueno, a marshy little river crossing, I came upon the remains of a rustic medieval bridge.  All too soon I was in Colunga.