Camino de Santiago Day Fifteen: Monreal to Puente la Reina: Goodbye, Aragones

We left Monreal chirpy and well rested. It's our final day on the Camino Aragones before we join the pilgrim river at Puente La Reina. Up to now the road has been wonderfully quiet, serene and remote in large parts. It'll be a new, rather more social experience from tomorrow, and we'll just go with the flow.

We'd not had a particularly early start and soon the sun was burning down on us from a cloudless sky. In one village we walked through a digital sign laconically announced that we're walking in 31 degree heat. Our hydration packs worked overtime. Long stretches of the farm roads we we're on were shadeless. It was taxing.

At one point we were glad to see the pillared hulk of the must-see Eunate church appear ahead of us, with the promise of its dark, cool inside to rest in and escape the sun.

Except that it was Monday, and we found the church locked and deserted. (Note to Spanish authorities, Pilgrims want to see churches on Mondays too, you know). So we were left to huddle for a few minutes under a sparse olive tree before continuing our hot trek to Puenta La Reina.

Along a particularly long and scorching stretch close to Puenta La Reina we were surrounded by bare, ploughed fields both sides of the dusty track we were on. 'What we need right now,' I said to Adeline between wiping beads of sweat from my face, 'Is someone to turn a watering hose on us to cool down.' Suddenly, out of the blue, the irrigating system start shooting long arms of water into the air on the field next to us. We didn't need an invitation - we both ran onto the field like kids and within two minutes we were soaked to the skin. I'm not making this up. This is the stuff that happens on the Camino.

I'd be lying if I said entering Puenta La Reina after a long trek of 35 kilometers wasn't somewhat of a shock. Every second building seems to be an albergue, with socks, towels and garments dangling from window sills. Petite pilgrim girls in sarongs, their pristine feet removed from their leather sandals daintily sat on the lawns, nibbling on goat's cheese and bread while reading well-thumbed copies of Brierleys. Almost everone we saw was a pilgrim. Moreover, they all looked fresh-faced and pink-cheeked. Our sun-burnt, sweat-stained and dusty demeanours stood out. We'd been on the road more than twice as long as most, and judging by the stares it must've showed.

I'm glad we'd opted to start in Lourdes and complete the Aragones route before tackling the long, well-trodden path to Santiago de Compostela. It had given us the chance to get a head start and savour the culture and history of the old pilgrim routes while being gently introduced into the mores, ethics and quirks of daily life as modern pilgrims.

Later we settled at a bar on one of Puenta La Reina's lively streets and drank a toast to the Camino Aragones. It had been tough going, but very, very rewarding. We felt ready for the next chapter. It's on we go.

POSTSCRIPT

We carried on yes, right through to Santiago. And even by bus to Kilometer Zero, Finisterre. But I stopped blogging once we got to Puente la Reina. I wanted to just take in the rest of the road without having to think about writing. I made some notes from which a story or two may still flow, but this is it for now. Now, get online and book an air ticket, go walk the Camino. Now.

Camino de Santiago Day Fourteen: Sanguesa to Monreal: We Get A Raw Deal

After last night's ten-in-a-room albergue accommodation complete with dysfunctional shower and dodgy kitchen we were in the mood for something a little more comfortable, so before we left Sanguesa in the morning we went past the friendly tourism office and booked ourselves a room at a casa rural in our next stopover, Monreal. Accommodation on the Camino is generally a gamble so we wanted to make sure we are assured of a good night's sleep. Little did we know about the added benefits we were tying down, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

 

We started the day's walk by going over the bridge crossing the Aragon river and pausing on the opposite side to look for the Roman funerary stone built into the bridge pillar. And sure enough, there it was, a weather-worn, grey square of granite with the inscription: 'Carolina built this tomb for herself and her two sons, Felix and Firma'. It always sends me on an imaginary journey when I see things like this. Two thousand years, not close from here, a woman named Carolina went into a stonemason's workshop and ordered a gravestone that is now cemented into a bridge pillar, where it will probably remain for another two thousand years. Isn't that an amazing thought?

On the theme of things Roman, the first village we passed through, the scenic Rocaforte, was founded by the Romans during their reign here. I could see why - location, location, location. Rocaforte is set high against the ridge of a prominent hill with a view over the valley to die for. Well, it had a great view back then, but now most of the snazzily rebuilt village faced the smoking chimneys of the smelly paper factory on the outskirts of Sanguesa. What would the Roman aristocrats saybout that?

Then it was a long stretch of walking through the countryside with two or three quiet villages serving as distance markers and water replenishing points. All was going swimmingly when I suddenly had my rainbow-coloured Camino bubble popped.

We were a kilometer or two out of the vollage of Ibargoiti when we saw a pop-up cafe next to the path - two of three umbrellas with chairs and tables, and a guy in a mobile kiosk selling everything from blister plasters to fizzy drinks and cigarettes.

 

Though we're not due for a stop, I'm thinking, we should support the local struggling Spanish economy, it's just the right Camino thing to do. So I go through the complex ritual of removing my backpack, fish out a five Euro note, walk over to the kiosk and order two tiny paper cups of orange juice. And I mean t.i.n.y. He takes the fiver, pops it into a box, hands me two cups, and turns his attention to the next customer. I meekly make a gesture showing I'm waiting for my change, but he off-handedly points to an equally tiny sign saying I've just paid five Euros for two sips of juice. He then shoots me a cocky 'do your worst amigo' look and that was that.

I'd just been handed a raw deal on the Camino.

I let it go. I believe in karma. You lose some, you win some. We won in Jaca, where we were blessed with nice, free croissants at that cute little coffee shop. Anyway, word will soon get out on social media about this smooth operator, and then he'll be torn to bits by the cyber-wolves and left wondering why no-one is ordering orange juice anymore. Facebook and Twitter can be horribly wrathful.

Soon after continuing we bumped into the two pilgrims we met at Ruesta. They're phenomenal walkers and set a blistering pace, and with the wheels oiled by with the stimulating conversation time flew by and we arrived in Monreal earlier than we anticipated.

Our bed for the night turned out to be a chic little place in the middle of town, decorated straight from a country living magazine. The owner is clearly a cultured city boy made good, living his dream in this corner of rural Spain.

Which made us happy too, especially during dinner. Imagine a three star Michelin chef preparing that old Camino favourite, the peregrino menu. We started with the smoothest leek and potato soup I had ever tasted, followed by the most delicious tofu in tomato for me, and Adeline had an equally tasty black squid. Then followed something truly remarkable: Chocolate tart with complementing anice seed tea. I stood up from dinner, went back to our room and wrote the most glowing culinary review Tripadvisor has ever seen. I hope every foodie pilgrim that passes through Monreal stays at Etxartenea. The place is a pilgrimage in itself.

 

 

Camino de Santiago Day Thirteen: Ruesta to Sanguesa: We Are Tempted

Today we submitted to sin.

We stole. Well, that's what my mother would say. But it was just a little steal, and we couldn't resist.

We'd left Ruesta quite early via a pretty forest path that first became a very steep pine plantation road, and then finally led onto open grassland. After two hours or so we started down an old Roman road descending steeply downhill just outside Undues de Lerda, lined on both sides by small orchards. At one such orchard that included a few scrawny almond trees we noticed among the newly formed spring leaves a few clutches of dry almonds from the previous season.

Next moment I was feverishly smashing almond husks with a moss-covered rock until we held about twelve lovely silky brown almonds in the palms of our hands. We skulked away from the scene of the crime, chewing and savouring fresh nuts that tasted as delicious as only illicitly picked almonds can.

There, I've confessed. I know, if every pilgrim pinched a handful of almonds or other produce the poor farmers would be left destitute. But not having tasted the buttery, aromatic taste of freshly picked almonds since I was about seven it was just to much of a temptation to resist. I'm sorry. I promise to go on pilgrimage in penance.

Once in Undues de Lerda we rested our feet under a clutch of trees after the stiff climb and quenched our thirsts with beers from the only bar in town. In the end we spent the best part of an hour watching life in the sleepy village go by - it seems everyone knew everyone else, as they all stopped and chatted when passing each other. We speculated on what they talked about. With only about fifty or so people living in here, news must be fairly limited. Perhaps they discuss the pilgrims passing through, comment on their huge backpacks, all the paraphenalia they were carrying, or their spending habits. Before we took off the bar owner asked us how many pilgrims had stayed in Ruesta the previous night. When we replied four, she looked dejected. Business will be slow today. I felt sorry we weren't staying over in this quaint town, even just for the sake of boosting the economy.

In sharp contrast to the last few picturesque villages we've walked through, Sanguesa, our target for the day is a very unassuming town on the face of it, even though it was a significant pilgrim town back in the day. We looked up the four major churches in town, all of them sadly in rather delapidated state. Many of the town's stately homes lining the main street were, it seemed, beyond repair and will probably be demolished soon. Perhaps there's a mayor or other bigwig that needs to be fired here...

At the church of Santiago we waited for mass to finish before slipping inside, but could only spend about thirty seconds there before the church caretaker started jingling her keys and switching off the lights. I felt deprived.

Feeling a bit dejected (or rather, ejected) we took our Carrefour gaspacchio and natillas and parked on a bench close to the church for dinner. It hadn't been a particularly rich day culturally speaking, but we had lots of fun being scoundrels on the way. After all, what's being on The Way without fun?

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.