WHEN WALKING

Home to Santiago – Day 56

Güemes to Santander – 19km

At breakfast, Ilke shouts across the table, “Hey, how much did you make last night?”

It’s raining a little as I leave, but just before the cliff route, as it eases off, I decide to take off my coat. Not the waterproof trousers, because one thing you don’t want to risk is water onfiltrating your shoes via your socks.

So I walk across the beautiful cliffs towards Santander, soaking wet for the top half, bone dry below, as the skies open once more. Everything is obscured by a haze of water on my glasses, which may be why, for the first time in my whole walking career, I am caught in the act of a technical stop.

I shout out, “¡Perdón!”, to which the ponchoed figure shouts out in reply, “Don’t worry, I do not watch.” Luckily, they’re walking fast, so I don’t think I’ll catch up with them again until the next boat, at least.

Cliffs with rocks and raging sea give way to beaches. The tide is out. As I negotiate my way around the bays and the peninsulas of Santander, I end up walking on the hard wet sand, where the waves are lapping. And this means that, according to my app, I’m currently walking on water.

I pass crowds of surfers. They are a funny lot . When I first saw them in the sea off California, I thought they were sealions in their little black wetsuits, bobbing up and down. They are strangely uniform. And then, if you walk through any nearby town, they transform, pulling off their wetsuit skins, human only from the waist up.

Catching the ferry is exciting as always. But this one particularly exciting, as when I get on, I hear, “Rachel!” “Mr Lee!” I shout back, and that’s the end of everything we have to say to each other.

I arrive precisely as the albergue opens, and the old lady who runs it and lives there shows me to a room where I get a perfect bottom bunk, although not for long, as it turns out.

After the usual necessities, I set off for a goodbye lunch with Alberto, Iván, Nives, and another Slovenian, whom she has miraculously managed to find en route. As she said, the number of Slovenians walking the Camino has just gone up 100%.

It’s a good meal, although the portions are not large enough for Nives’ Slovenian friend, who goes to have a top-up meal at Burger King, while the rest of us, having said goodbye to Alberto, go and do some culture.

There’s a Frida Kahlo exhibition at the brand-new Santander Faro gallery, as well as a lot of other interesting stuff: the sketchbooks of Leonora Carrington, done during her Santander sanatorium days; a collection of works from the bankers’ vault, one from each Grand Master, it seems.

But the strangest thing of all is that the museum starts with a virtual reality tour of what the building used to be like when it was a the Santander bank HQ. And so we wander around a workplace, an office, a boardroom—the strangest thing to be doing when you’re on a Camino.

But I do enjoy walking through the boardroom table and watching heads apparently being dragged along the ground as the assistants take the headsets back to the VR room entrance..

After the gallery, the cathedral. After the cathedral, the gift shop for the stamp.

It’s all getting a bit too sociable for me. And I’m quite relieved when, as it’s getting late, only Nives is still on for following Alberto’s recommendation and visiting the peninsula of Magdalena.

“They have penguins and sealions!”

We jump on a bus and walk around a truly spectacular island, with waves crashing up half the height of the hill. We search around for the elusive sea creatures and eventually, in one tiny little cave, hidden away, we see what Nieves describes as “two-thirds of a penguin”.

This we will photograph and send as proof.

It’s nice to spend a bit of time alone with Nives. I’ve only seen her in snippets, always glad to see her, but never much beyond that. We get to chat a little. She’s brilliant at laughing in all the right places. I’m never any good at laughing, apart from very much in the wrong places, when I know I shouldn’t. But some things we cannot change.

There is a message from Iván to go and meet the rest of them in the market for something to drink or eat.

At first I’m slightly overwhelmed, but then Javier comes over, saviour of the day once more. I see Uruguay Laura, who tells me eventually, with much gesticulation and a tiny bit of Google Translate, that someone has come and taken my bed, and I’ve been moved onto the very awkwardly placed corner top bunk.

There is Ilke, concerned that she is becoming the personification of all my evil thoughts in the blog. I tell her she hasn’t, but the idea is not a bad one.

And then, like all good pilgrims, we must leave before the doors are closed at ten.