Day Something. Logroño and some other places. Cats.

 Logroño

It's a long, slow drag down. Underpasses and retail parks. Still ants though. Ants and bees and thistles. I make it into the city.

One downstream consequence of my poor language skills is that I become more flirtatious. More eye contact, more smiling, excessive politeness but with a bit of a wink like we both know I’m about to run out of words. Most of this flirting is directed at elderly women. Without language you have to rely a lot more on tone, body language and confidence. At home I tend to fade into the background but here I feel the need to act the guest, demonstrate my good faith and harmlessness, put the room at ease. So the big show of magnanimity and friendliness and wide smiles.

An American is surprised and perhaps a little offended that my knowledge of the colonial era is so poor. Chesapeake Bay - rings a bell! I’m afraid it just doesn’t matter to us. She is especially disappointed as she was gearing up to tell me about her several generations which she can trace all the way back to England and the pilgrims. You know - Williamsburg! From the Jeffrey Lewis song? 

Listen, cards on the table, I was not expecting to see Samuel Smith’s posters in a random bar. I have been ambushed by the word Tadcaster. I am not in a place where I ever expected to see the word Tadcaster. I don’t think I had thought about Tadcaster for some months, though I still think about Tadcaster an above average amount, on account of living in York for a while and also enjoying both the beers of the superior Smith brother (Samuel, not John) and the associated trivia (rival breweries! Opposite sides of the road!). 

Now I look around, the whole pub seems Brit themed. There’s a Beatles poster, The Who, Muse. What a treat, a British bar abroad. At least it isn’t those dreadful Irish! Placebo on the speakers now. In any case this is not the vibe I’m looking for. Cordoba vs Albacete is on the TV, but I look it up and it’s a mid table dead rubber. The bar unaccountably smells of popcorn.

It’s a good game. Fair enough.

The street outside smells of burning rubber but I don’t see any obvious cause or plumes of black smoke. Is smelling popcorn and then burning rubber in quick succession evidence for a neurological event? It has the feeling of a third act revelation in House. Someone mentions casually that he was smelling popcorn and rubber and then we have a slow pan on House doing his Genius Face. Have you recently been to New Guinea? Was your mother a Quaker? Get this guy 30 milligrams of garbodine and massage his feet. 

In Logrono a glass of exceptional wine (we are now in La Rioja, which is serious wine country even by Spanish standards) is about 1 euro. There is a vineyard which has a publicly accessible wine tap as a tourist attraction - I walk past it on the road out of Estella. It is what it sounds like. Twist the faucet and wine comes out. Fill yourself up a little plastic bottle if you like. Subpar wine it goes without saying since it is mostly swill aimed at gawping tourists and pilgrims but still - christ! The wine truly flows like water here!

Here is a list of the things I eat with several glasses of exceptional wine which costs approximately 84 pence:

• Brandada (a salt cod and olive oil emulsion) with salmarejo (a local variation on gazpacho, with a massive hit of garlic)

• Some chicken gyoza in a curry broth (this is a misstep on my part - why did I think the Spanish knew how to make curry? Why did I think microwaved gyoza wouldn’t be leathery?)

• Grilled tuna steak with pipperada (red pepper, onion, tomato, a sort of Gascony shakshouka). 

• Slow cooked cheek (I think beef?) in a red wine gravy with truffled potatoes. 

Here are some things I eat the subsequent day with several more glasses of exceptional wine.

• A mini-bocadillo with pickled anchovies and flame-roasted green pepper.

• A bruschetta with goat’s cheese, ham, and strawberry relish.

• A red pepper stuffed with mysterious but heavily peppered meat, deep-fried. 

This is what I do on my rest day in Logrono. I eat. I read The Honourable Schoolboy. I look out of the window at biblical rain, torrenting down the cobbled streets, thrashing past awnings under which locals huddle in an unflustered sort of way, this kind of thing being apparently commonplace, they keep smoking and drinking wine like they ever have. 

In the albergue that night (another municipal, we’re really packed in tight on this one) I meet a strange, savant-like Ukrainian called Lisa, who has a shaven head and goes around asking blunt questions to people. “Why did you break up with your girlfriend?” she asks an Italian man. “It was finished,” he says with an eloquent shrug. She is the third Lisa I have met. The other two are both from Colorado. There is something in the air. This is the season of the Lisa. 

I have no idea how these two are communicating. I cannot understand either of them. Perhaps there is a degree of Italian-Ukrainian mutual accent comprehensibility. 

Azorfa

A day’s walk in which nothing happens, at least nothing which persuades me to reach into my pocket to take down a hasty note. My albergue is in Azorfa, a serious rural village. Cracked cement between crumbling terraced houses. The smell of wood smoke. A single shop with an avalanche of one star reviews accusing the place of keeping out of date food and ripping off tourists. I wonder where the locals buy food. Perhaps they just get special prices. 

The bar is equally tumbledown but is widely loved (by people on Google). A clutter of metal seats and little plastic napkin dispensers out front, cafeteria style seating out back. Olives, lumps of cheese, boquerones and red peppers on skewers in massive catering sized plastic jars. Imagine how good that oil tastes - I don’t need to because I buy several and then lap up the oil from the little plate after, since I don’t have bread but I hate to see it go to waste. There are fag ends ground into the cement outside under a black and red Estrella branded sunshade which flaps aggressively in the rising wind and threatens to take off. White vans pass by. A local child watches me without saying anything, standing in the middle of the road. “Hola,” I say. He gives a limp little wave. 

There's a thunderstorm coming.

Pintxos are funny because while they're sensational even aged in the glass cabinet, they're surely better fresh. But they're so rarely fresh at the time I arrive. Only in San Sebastian were they fired out fresh and demolished almost immediately by the waiting drinkers. I am forever eyeing up a slightly congealed looking glob of something or other on a slice of bread and thinking, this isn’t the right experience, this isn’t correct, and then I three glasses of beer later I eat it anyway and it’s glorious. 

A local painter and decorator (or so I deduce from his trousers) - whose skin is so tanned he looks like a good pair of boots - has a Dragonball Z backpack. I don’t ask. What would I ask?

I find myself slipping into this frantic, experience-hungry backpacker mode of thinking (and prose). Rapid fire and transitive. Unsatisfying, but less scary than sitting still. I can see the merits of letting things breathe but there just aren't enough years in a life. Fear of death is the main reason I’m out here. Fear of silence. 

Much of this leg is much like Azofra. A little industrial, a little crumbling, winding between fields and vineyards. I see peas and potatoes as well as grapes and hops. I soon miss them as the path takes me along the long brown smear of an unbuilt motorway, which will be my company for large tracts of the day. They must still be at the stage of excavating the passage, though they have built (or perhaps pre-fabricated) several bridges which now straddle the wide motorway bed but go nowhere. It is a little eerie seeing a bridge which connects to nothing. Squatting like a discarded Lego piece. The sun beats down and perhaps some dejection creeps into my posture because a cyclist passes and slows to a crawl. “All okay?” All okay, I guess. Hasn’t he seen the bridge?

Redecilla del Camino 

I leave La Rioja as quickly as I arrived in it, and we are now in Castilla y Leon. I am off-stage now (there are loosely-defined “stages” which many pilgrims follow, though there is no particular obligation) and so the albergues I reach are half-empty. This one in particular is barren, in a village called Redecilla del Camino. I have to cross the motorway bed to get there (it looks much like a dry river bed, though the network of culverts and drainage are designed to make sure it doesn’t turn into one), something I toyed with doing for a couple of kilometres anyway but decided against. I don’t have enough cash to pay for dinner but thank God I made too much pasta the night before and have some leftover bread and butter, plus my trusty Tabasco. No thanks God, however, that I walk halfway to the next town on bone-weary legs before remembering that I have it.

I saw two scabby kittens hanging around at the entrance to the village, and both came scooting out to meet me, crying in tandem. There were three men mowing grass, but for who? Nobody else seems to live here. It’s so silent. The dirt of the unbuilt motorway stretches away.

Will the motorway bring prosperity? Could they wedge in a service station between the old church and the derelict garage?

Next day…

Tired legs today. Nightmares of fly eggs and lesions under my eyelids. Dogs fighting, but one of the dogs has strange grey skin, sharp teeth and an almost human face (though is very friendly to me: the other, normal dog is the antagonist). Arsenal lose badly to Brentford in the dream and I am furious, making everyone miserable around me. The ashen man-dog looks worried at my outbursts. His teeth are like those of a shark; glistening white. I wake up for real and I can't check my eyes as there are no mirrors in this albergue, but I’m 98% sure there are no fly eggs. There are no plug sockets in the dorm but there is a half-built room of unclear purpose on the other side which has six. I share the room with two men who report that at one point the hospitaleros downstairs simply leave. They don’t lock up. The two of them push the door shut and hope for the best. It remains a ghost town outside.

Why am I doing this again? I can't remember. It was something to do. A narrow road to cure my aimlessness. Guard rails on the bowling lane. Steady forward progress. Right now it feels like work. I had awful nightmares, my legs ache, and I’m walking along the fucking motorway again. You read about people going through periods of despondence mid-pilgrimage. I think I’m in one.

I decide to walk without music or audiobook to clear my head a bit. A few minutes later I realise I've been singing Land Down Under because I saw a Men at Work sign. Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?

Maybe the ugly terrain on the stretch is good for the pilgrimage. It plants the guard rails higher. What are you going to do, stop? Here? No choice but to keep driving onwards in the hope there’s something less unpleasant over the next hill. 

We haven't even hit the Meseta yet. Everyone talks about the Meseta like it’s a patch of hell. Featureness terrain, no shade, just fields on fields on fields. At one point there’s a 17km stretch without water, shade or towns. There is a guide I use which is in Spanish, and there is always a moment before the browser translation picks up the slack. In a second the Spanish words transform into: “the incandescent fireball from the sky falls mercilessly on the pilgrims”. This is the bit you’re meant to hit your mental wall. This motorway is just softening me up. 

I hit my breakfast stop. I have a microwaved empanada, a Napolitano (pain au chocolat), a cortado. Lorries crash past. One of them has a phrase written across the top of the cab - “Dios nos guarda”. God watches over us. Even the lorries. 

Belorado. Nice little town, overlooked by the ruins of a castle. More large birds roost atop the bell tower. There were storks on top of the church in Logrono too. The silhouettes, now I notice, always have that little lumpy, spike outgrowth. I don’t see if these are storks - they could be eagles. Spain is full of eagles. The luggage transfer vans pass. I drink my second cortado of the day and feel, if not restored, at least at peace.

I reach my destination for the day. The name is gone already. There are so many Spanish villages. I overhear a conversation between two arrivals from my bunk. Can you still say henpecked? Is that an acceptable term? Let it be said there is a certain avian character to the interactions between this husband and wife, as he is directed as to his preferences for the evening. Preferences he has to be gently coached and chided into, apparently being unaware of them. This village is nice, this albergue is nice. Lots of stray, feral or otherwise scratty little cats. I took them to be kittens but they can't all be kittens. Maybe they're just malnourished.

One in particular hangs around. This one is extremely vocal but apparently oblivious to the food already dispensed. Maybe she just likes to scream. She does her mewling rounds efficiently and gets some scraps for it (the hospitalero provides her food but she seems more interested in what she can beg). She's all skin and bones. When I stroke her I can feel the notches in her spine. You can see why tourists are constantly trying to take street animals home.

The cat is not just vocal but compulsive. Now staring at a wall chuntering to herself. She leaks mews like a dripping tap. I wonder if she's mad. A human behaving like this would be mad, or strung out on something, edgy and uncomfortable, grubbing around at the fringes of pity and charity. 

Dinner with henpecker and henpecked. White retired Floridians who seem ill at ease and make no attempt to speak Spanish. We don't like to assume but they are certainly fascists. They say that the food is a little salty for them, that food isn't salted so much in America. Ha! You won't believe how many arguments I'll win on the internet with this! We talk about mountain lions but the little pilgrim dining room is so loud I struggle to hear anything they're saying.

An Italian man in the bunk below spritzes himself with perfume before bed, which strikes me as an aggressively Italian thing to do. 

3:58 AM. Is it sleep apnea when you worry they're actually going to die?