Camino de Santiago Day Twelve: Arrés to Ruesta: Life Among The Ruins

I walked the extra mile on the Camino this morning. I hope it helps me get to heaven.

We'd left the Albergue in tiny Arrés early and started down the winding road out of town. Arrés is one of those typical Spanish villages that started life as a mountain fortress of sorts, and as such sits high - at least 400 metres - above the plains on a rocky outcrop. We'd just reached the valley floor when It dawned on me that we'd forgotten to feed the donation box. So it's back up the hill with a fifty clutched in my hand. The Cordoban looked suitably impressed when I dashed into the Albergue, sweating profusely and too out of breath to speak, and dropped our contribution into the box.

Like I say, I hope it earned me bonus Camino points.

We had our two tins of sardines and an apple we shared for lunch in a nice shady spot followed by a quick siesta, and then set off to Ruesta. For more or less the entire time we had monster construction vehicles rushing around kicking up dust and making a huge racket. They seem to be working on expanding the man-made lake we're walking next to. I'd read that this lake is the reason why the village of Ruesta was abandoned years ago, as it was expected that it may disappear beneath the rising water.

Which is why I was looking forward to our stay.

Ruesta didn't disappoint. It was like we'd just arrived at Angor Wat; the place is stuffed with overgrown ruins, crumbling towers and windows through which vines are crawling (which, coming to think of it, is a description of many Spanish villages. But that's another story). We had to search for a few minutes to find the folks running the albergue, two young hippies who were sitting under a delapidated pergola reading dog-eared copies of Isabel Allende and a Spanish translation of a Trotsky biography, and consuming massive mugs of beer. Not only were we at Angor Wat, we were also at an ashram in Goa! A Spanish radio station blared sixties music from tinny speakers. Their welcome was warmhearted and sweet.

The albergue building is a spacious, very new stone building and we got the presidential suite, so to speak, because we were the only visitors. I sniffed around the ruins for the rest of the afternoon, camera in hand, but much of it was off-limits for fear of the whole lot tumbling down on an unsuspecting pilgrim.

So I sat down below the high walls in the greenery and imagined arriving here as a poor pilgrim, and being welcomed to his expansive castle by a hospitable, aristocratic lord.

We shared the evening meal with two friendly late-comer pilgrims. The food was absolutely five star (I tried enquiring whether there was a chef in the house but never got a straight answer), and the lengthy meal felt more like an outing at a class restaurant with good friends.

Just like it would have been eight hundred years ago, coming to think of it.

Bottom line: Don't miss Ruesta on the Camino Aragones. You're treated like a noble.

Camino de Santiago Day Eleven: Santa Cruz de la Seros to Arrés: Air Guitar and Catalans

So we're doing a brisk pace, about two kilometers down this out-of-the-way footpath from Santa Cruz leading down to Santa Celia. I've got the headphones on, jamming to Frank Zappa. I'm standing on a little grassy knoll playing air guitar; Adeline's gone ahead, too embarrassed to have me in sight.

Suddenly this little fiery-eyed fellow, about five foot four surprises me from behind, shoots past and pauses. He gives me a look, like, dude, what are you on? and I compose myself. He's carrying about twenty kilos, wearing a blood-red ultra-marathon T-shirt and well-worn Merrells. As these scenes go, he hits me with his five words of English and I hit right back with my five of Spanish. Turns out he started in Barcelona, going all the way to Santiago.

Then he disappears into the bushes up front.

xxxxxxx

Earlier in the morning we'd been standing, backpacks on and ready, waiting for the Santa Cruz church to open. At exactly ten o'clock a young Spanish chap appears, ignores us, walks up to the massive wooden door, closes his eyes, leans his head against it for about thirty seconds.

Then he turns, greets us politely, unlocks the door.

The visit to the rather over-renovated church I'd largely forgotten, but I remember his good-morning prayer so clearly. These are the golden moments of El Camino.

The 18km walk right up to Arrés, our overnight stop, was uneventful. But as usual a thought occurred to me. The town of Puenta la Reina de Jaca on the way there is a dusty, featureless truck stop, even though the 16th century arch bridge it refers to was important, no, vital to early pilgrims. Now pilgrims walk to the town by crossing the bridge, buy chips and a cold drink from the petrol station, walk back across the bridge and carry on without giving any of it much thought or photo moment.

We reached the Arrés albergue late afternoon and lo and behold, there was fiery-eyed Catalan sitting on a bench in the fading sun with his Merrells off. The rest of the evening was surreal - a dinner featuring our Catalan friend, a sixty-something, boisterous Bavarian with an impressive Bayern Munich tatoo, and an Italian priest freshly back from Cameroon after being chased away by Boko Haram. All hosted by a cheroot-smoking Cordoban with dark eyes and purple hair. We just sat there taking in the conversations, simulcast in French, Afrikaans, English, German, Dutch and a smattering of Catalan.

And then we went to bed. It's been a long day.

Camino de Santiago Day Ten: Jaca to Santa Cruz de la Seros: We Are Puritanical

Despite our best intentions, we were the last of the ten or so pilgrims staying in Jaca's well-appointed albergue to get up, do ablutions and hit the Aragones road. We should just give up trying and accept we're not early-morning pilgrims. Even the odd snore and the notorious 5am risers can't stir us into crack-of-dawn action.

We walked around the corner to Jaca's rather fasionable Calle Mayor and joined two or three fellow late starters for coffee at a bar. (By the way for those not in the know, a 'bar' in Spain is more like a coffee shop and snack place than a drinking hole). We were three sips down when the girl behind the counter slipped complementary croissants in front of us, fresh from the oven. As the saying goes, 'the Camino provides'. Even small luxuries like free fresh pastries.

We followed a small, scenic farm road out of Jaca, with no pilgrims around. I was being sneaky - it's an alternative I found on the GPS to the main route, and a good, leisurely way to start the day's walking. Our destination is Santa Cruz de la Seros and the nearby monasteries of San Juan de la Pena, a leisurely 15km walk away. The first part of the way is boring – highway walking – but after the Santa Cruz turnoff it's a pretty, winding road leading up into the mountain.We reached our hotel in Santa Cruz just before one in the afternoon. Our room has a view to die for onto the village church, and we cooled our feet for a while on the balcony.

Being puritanical pilgrims we turned our noses up at taking a bus or taxi from the hotel to the monasteries, and opted to walk the very steep footpath to the Saint Juan de la Pena monasteries. Before we left, the bar guy at the hotel glibly assured us it was an 'easy forty minute walk' to the Monastery. Yea, right.

An hour and a half later we were still huffing and puffing up the path, and then almost took a wrong turn that would have taken us to the old, and not the new monastery where entrance tickets are sold.

The tough climb was well worth it, and then some. The exhibition at the new monastery is high-tech and high-design, geared to teach visitors about monastic life in the middle ages. In one huge section we walked on a glass floor below which full-sized, white plaster models of monks circa thirteenth-century were going through their daily routines. Obviously serious money (UNESCO, I think) was spent here, generally to good effect. Life's too short for boring museums, and our time here was entertaining and fun. We would have like a few more English descriptions, but maybe we missed a handout somewhere.

Then it was a short, steep downhill walk along the main access road to the old monastery. The atmosphere and vibe here couldn't be more different from where we had just been; this was an austere, authentic relic of an age-old monastery that has acquired almost mythical status in local lore. Swathed in legend, fact and myth, abandoned leftovers of the monastery cling to the mountainside, an impressive reminder of religious will-power and inspiration. Back in it's heyday the monastery, if one reads between the lines, was a religious powerhouse well connected to kings and aristocracy of the day. I need to read up more on this: The handouts only hint at what was going on here nine hundred years of so ago.

We were more or less kicked out at closing time, so much were we enjoying sniffing around the hidden corners of the monastery. From what I could see, even though what is on display makes it worth a pilgrim visit many times over, I have the idea that, for whatever reason, a lot more exists which is not being shown to the public. Perhaps secrets embarrassing to present powers? I don't know. Intrigueing...

Camino de Santiago Day Nine: Sabinanigo to Jaca: We Join The Aragones

Excuse us if we emerged from our hotel in downtown Sabinanigo looking a bit bewildered this morning. Someone decided to turn on the radio speakers in our room, at top volume, at exactly 6am. So we woke up to an overly cheerful singer I didn't recognise trying to convince us to be "happy, happy, happy". At the ungodly hour of six in the morning. How that happened remains a mystery, but it got us out of bed and on the road at just after seven, considerably earlier than our usual time.

We've been walking for nine days and have never once seen other pilgrims. Well, there was the group of Dutch people outside Betharram but it was a fleeting glimpse, they were on another route. We love the quiet solitude of this section of the Camino so far. It's been a journey of magic, beautiful nature, history and good food.

So it's with some trepidation that we tackled today. It's the last day of this off-the-beaten track section; today we reach Jaca where the Camino Aragones joins in from Somport. I'm not sure how busy it'll be but we're bound to see more pilgrims enroute.

It was an easy walk throughout the day. It started with a climb out of the valley to the sleepy village of Alto Sabinanigo. The village seemed quite poor - you can tell the status of a village's inhabitants by the state of its parish church. Here the church was of basic design with few adornments and in dire need of restoration. Its grounds were overgrown and unkept. However, a few kilometres further we spent a few minutes in Ulle, a model, gentrified village if ever there is one. Unfortunately the church was locked but it was just a little too grand for the size of the village it stood in, had clearly been restored more than once, and its massive wooden doors were gleaming with a fresh coat of varnish. Everywhere tidy fences sported neatly trimmed rose hedges. Even the village mongrel looked well-groomed. Clearly there's a land developer or a kind benefactor at work here.

Speaking of village life. All towns we've walked through has a local stud. In Alto Sabinanigo it was a gorgeous if slightly scruffy ginger tom cat who posed for a photo in the nook of an old fig tree. Five steps further three kittens ran across the alley, all of them exactly the same shade of ginger. A little further we saw another, and then another one with white paws. Clearly this is a family affair happening here. And we could see who was in charge.

We walked into Jaca around 3pm, and culture vultures we are, headed straight for the cathedral. It was exhibiting a brilliant collection of ancient, pre-gothic-era wall art saved from various smaller and neglected churches in the Jaca district. The walls of almost all of the small parish churches we've seen have bare walls, but back in the day they were colourfully decorated in the style typical the time with biblical images and depictions of saints. Thankfully archeological research have discovered many of these decorations, probably hidden under layers of newer paint, and saved them for posterity here.

Many people may shake their heads at such displays of odd bits of faded art, but I stood in wonder for at least two hours, imagining the lives of these unknown artists who painstakingly mixed pigments with which to decorate the walls of churches that are now in danger of disappearing altogether. This is after all what the Camino is about for me. Remembrance.

 

Camino de Santiago Day Eight: Biescas to Sabinanigo: Nope, We're Not Black

Determined to stop our bad habit of late morning starts and to stretch our sightseeing time on the road we started out of Biescas at the crack of dawn. Well, almost, it was around eight or so. The night time drizzle had subsided, so we could set off sans our signature red ponchos that make us look like two drops of tomato sauce waddling along the road.

We followed a neat jogging path for about a kilometer along the river before joining a paved, local farm road. The snowy peaks have now subsided into low hills as we gradually bid the Pyrenees goodbye. It's a fresh, crisp morning, perfect for Camino walking.

We continue our daily habit of nosing around every village church and trying the door to see if we can take a look inside. At each one I see and learn something new about Romanesque design and architecture, and Spanish and church history. For me, El Camino is a long journey back in time. A few times when we were around quiet ruins I'm sure I could hear the clank of a blacksmith hammer and the creaking of a passing wagon...

Lost in these sort of thoughts we stood at the small parish church in Oros Bajo, feeling sorry that, once again, the door is locked. Suddenly there's the sound of jingling keys behind us and an old Spanish gentleman comes down the church path at a trot, gardening gloves in one hand and a bunch of keys in the other. He babbles a few sentences in Spanish, unlocks the door and we look around while he provides commentary, mostly in a sort of impromptu sign language.

At one stage we realise he's asking where we're from.

South Africa.

He gives us an incredulous look, rubs his cheek.

No moreno?

No, we're not black.

We end up taking a group selfie with our helpful church key keeper, and then we're on our way. Someone in rural Spain has just learnt something new about the people of faraway South Africa.

I loved the route section that followed, before we got closer to Sabinanigo. We stopped by several very early Romanesque churches built in the 900s, simple yet storm-weathering structures that leave one in awe of the courage of the brave churchmen who in spite of primitive, dangerous conditions helped start the tradition that would become the Camino de Santiago.

Some reading I did before we embarked on the Camino told of the unique, 500 year-old bridge of Puente de las Pinas, so along the way we went on a small detour and solemnly walked across its wooden slats. Who-ever controlled the bridge way back then also collected the tolls paid by traffic passing over it (which included pilgrims on their way to Santiago) so it was fought over, destroyed and rebuilt many times during its existence. Fortunately now, in it's 'old age' it is well looked after, and in peaceful, park-like surroundings. Yet... Was that the ringing of clashing swords I just heard?

The road flattens out more and more as we approach Sabinanigo. It's not particularly interesting scenery and we up the pace a bit. At Aurin, just outside Sabinanigo we ford a shallow but ice cold river, boots in hand. This is probably how thousands of pilgrims crossed dozens of streams eight hundred years ago when few of the many, many bridges we've crossed so far existed. Brr!

Once inside the rather featureless, industrial town we find that our hotel only opens at 4pm - how weird, a hotel that honours the siesta system - so we while away the afternoon in a nice eatery with a bocadillo menu to die for.

With no obvious church or historic building in sight to examine we took a walk to a nearby park and sat down on a bench and watched life pass by - two very amorous lovers, a woman who talked incessantly on her mobile, and a nimble runner shadow boxing while jogging. Less than an hour later we were fast asleep in bed. It's been another long and active day.

Camino de Santiago Day Seven: Sallent de Gallego to Biescas

Our swish apartment was difficult to take leave of after the previous day's tough hike. We wandered around old Sallent, peeked into the local church and then set off on a quiet secondary asphalt road that runs around the local reservoir. We passed by Lanuza and Escarilla, two deserted tourist towns on the bank of the pale blue dam. The area is a repeating Rip van Winkel, only waking up in winter for the ski season. Right now it was fast asleep with not a soul in sight among the peaked-roof, Pyrenees-style apartment buildings.

Due to our late start it was already midday by now and we stopped for some not-too-bad pinchos and a decent coffee in El Pueyo de Jaca. Then the road - advertised in one roadside sign as a bicycle training route - started climbing dramatically for what was probably a few hundred meters upwards. I lost count of the number of switchbacks I sweated out but it felt like an eternity. In the past few days I've become fitter than I've ever been before with all the up-and-down walking. It's not widely advertised, but the Camino comes with a first class, money-back guaranteed get-fit-in-a-week program that really works.

At the top of the hill we paused at a spectacular viewpoint built out over a sheer cliff that drops straight down into the reservoir water far below. It's also one of very few places with a water fountain we've seen so far. They'll hopefull be more frequent now we're in Spain, so we can cut back on the bulky two liters we've been carrying every day.
At long last we reached sleepy Hoz-de-Jaca, quiet except for a bored canine half-heartedly barking at us from behind a rickety fence as we passed through the village. Just outside town we skipped an inviting-looking forested path leading off the road and on to Santa Elena hermitage, but rather stuck to the road, through a short tunnel and over the dam wall. Along the way we caught a glimpse of a small abandoned village, Polituara, that in it's heyday was a pilgrim stop-over. We were now way behind on our schedule and I really regret that we didn't have time to explore it, or the Santa Elena area a bit further on. (Note to self: Try and be on the road in the morning earlier than ten. A LOT earlier.)
At the Santa Elena turn-off we took a quick look at a dolmen (unimpressive, compared to others we've seen on different trips) and then a forest footpath for about 5km into Biescas.

It kept drizzling making the going very wet and muddy, although the path itself was interesting. We passed a strange, overgrown sort of 'highway' that was clearly someone's design folly, and quite a few left-over war hideouts, presumably from the civil war. Sometimes the scenery felt like a movie set - think jungle scenes from Apocalypse Now. A real shame we had to rush past it all.
We walked into a foggy Biescas and after dropping our bags found a decent pasta at a local pizza place. Adeline had ravioli in tomato sauce she loved and I a panzerotti that was a bit on the dry side. While we waited for our food we sat watching the local families - large, extended ones spanning three generations - enjoying their Saturday evening meals. They looked happy and contented, just like us.

Camino de Santiago Day Six: Gabas to Sallent de Gallego: We Cross The Pyrenees

We're standing outside the front door of Chez Vignau, in Gabas, ready to take off for the day. A blue Renault with two old (very old) black-capped Frenchmen pull up. They roll down the window.

'[French] [French][French] Santiago?'

We nod.

The driver's eyes widen and he puts his hand in front of his mouth.

They rattle out more French, we nod politely. When they finish, they both look superbly self-impressed. We gather they've told us their own we-crossed-the-Pyrenees-and-survived Camino story.

We start the day off by getting horribly lost when, shortly after leaving Gabas, we followed what seemed like a Camino sign leading off the road and into a forest. Well, not 'horribly', exactly. It was the most beautiful 5km detour I've ever taken, all fairyland forest, dripping ferns and babbling mountain streams. When I checked the GPS after a while, we were walking completely in the wrong direction. It put us two hours behind, and we have a mountain to cross.

 

Returning to the valley road leading to Portalet we followed various footpaths alongside the Ossau river, climbing higher and higher. The Ossau valley here is truly spectacularly beautiful. At one point we paused at the ruin of an ancient pilgrim's hospital built specially to house not only travelers but also soldiers for the protection of pilgrims against bandits. Fortunately now there were no thieves in sight, only a group of kayakers getting ready to brave the rivers's icy rapids.

It kept raining intermittently, so it was ponchos on, ponchos off the whole way. After about two hours we reached the point where a footpath branches off the road, climbing steeply to Col de Peyrelue, where we'll cross over into Spain. It was drizzling a thin layer of moist, and swirling mists kept the peaks we were heading for hidden.

We paused a few dozen metres up for the last of our bread and cheese, and with a car on the road below hooting encouragement we set off.

As we gained height rapidly our pace slowed quite a bit, and we soon started encountering large patches of snow obscuring the path. We slowly and gingerly crossed each one, us South Africans not being used to walking in snow at all. Fortunately I had a GPS map of the route we were following, because it was now too misty to see more than a few metres ahead.

As we reached the summit It looked and felt like heaven, almost totally white and perfectly quiet. Imagine, we walk the Camino and end up in such extraordinary natural wonder...

 

 

After about an hour we reached a dilapidated wooden signpost, halfway buried in snow, informing us that we're standing on the French-Spanish border. We felt like pioneering explorers!

From here it was a slip-sliding way down on a muddy sheep track that kept disappearing, our only guide being the GPS map. We weren't unhappy to see the deserted ski lift stations of Formigal, meaning we were back in civilisation!

It was a long walk along a busy stretch of tarred road before we stumbled into Sallent de Gallego. By now it was almost nine o'clock, and darkness was setting in. We'd been on the road for twelve hours, walked 34 kilometres over difficult terrain and gained 800m in altitude. No mean feat!

Walking into town, we booked into the first hotel we passed. It was a luxury place way above our budget but we didn't care. We deserved it.