WHEN WALKING

Home to Santiago – Day 66

Avilés to Muros de Nalón: 31km

I do a bad thing this morning. I lose track of time, and so at 8:45, when I try to leave by the main gate, and I can’t get out. I presume I’ve been locked in. I go to the other exit, which is most definitely locked, and in the room next door to it is the other remaining pilgrim, a Japanese guy who has been shushing everyone all morning when they try to chat at breakfast.

He tells me I need to use the other door. I tell him, mistakenly, as it turns out, the other door is locked. Locked? he exclaims, and I leave him in consternation. I go back to the other door, it’s not locked at all. It’s just a sliding door I’d been trying to push. I go out into the street.

The bad thing is not giving the wrong information to the Japanese man. The bad thing is I felt a little bit happy about it.

What guilt I have, I manage to forget by breakfast. I wander into Avilés; at this time of the morning it’s bustling. It’s nice to leave a town while it’s awake and no other pilgrims are in sight.

I seat myself in the square for some churros con chocolate. Or is it chocolate con churros? I always get it wrong. But the decision was a good one, for the mind, at least.

I then make the happy decision to take the alternative route to Salinas, and then to take my own route from there. One reason for visiting Salinas is I like to go to places that have their names repeated in California. The other reason I’m happy about this choice is because I see a nice local-looking café on a roundabout, which lives up to all my hopes: a dog that sits at my feet, an owner who gauges my level of Spanish and then speaks to me appropriately, a particularly large slice of second breakfast tortilla. My planned coastal route, I am assured, will be no problem.

As instructed, I’m walking on the road directly to the beach. A man with his dog catches up with me and gives me instructions: “straight on!”, he says. “You can hear the sea”. I thank him.

When I get to the lookout point, the man with the dog is somehow there ahead of me and tells me I should come back in winter when the sea is even wilder. I agree, but stand my ground.

A cyclist joins us. He is doing a massive tour of the north of Spain. The man asks him if he’d like his photo taken. He says no, no, no. I say yes, please, and because I’ve said yes, the cyclist changes his mind, and waits patiently for his turn

The coast around Salinas has partly been given to industry. But what can you do in a place like Asturias? When all of your land is between stunning mountains and stunning coastline, you have to put the factories somewhere. And the grandeur of industry, I think, especially the decaying grandeur of industry, can look rather fine against the dramatic backdrop of the sea.

So the path continues, one beachside shandy stop, then view after view, leading up to the headland and the massive cliffs and the island beyond. I spend some time trying to work out if a boat could land and then start to feel queasy imagining myself in a boat, by those rocks with those waves.

Shortly after, the path, which until this point has been as easy as the café owner promised, just stops, the official trail down to the easy walk across a long beach is almost vertical, with a rope to help you down the most crumbly perpendicular parts. After a few steps I realise this could well be the end of the Camino, if I carry on. I throw my rucksack back up to the top of the path and start to retrace my steps to the nearest road. My hopes of getting to my lovely hostel for five o’clock are dashed.

I try to find another route that won’t break my neck. The map wants to send me around the far side of Asturias Airport. That will be three hours. I find another route that may allow me to get to the beach. I can cross it and maybe just be one hour late.

I try to hurry, but a couple in their garden stop me to chat and ask me where I’m from. They follow up by asking how I like Asturias.

“The most beautiful place on earth!”

“That is the right answer”, the man replies. I thought it might be.

The lady then looks thoughtful and adds “but England is beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes, it’s very beautiful”, I say, then trying to justify my first answer, “but here you have everything in such a small area”.

“It’s true”, the man says. “You can go to the beach in the morning and ski in the afternoon”.

This feels like a good place to end the discussion. Then he carries on. “But you’ll find that in Galicia too”.

I’m finding it difficult to further defend my already-acknowledged-as-perfect answer. But luckily, by this point, sweat is running in my eyes and I’m starting to blink and gurn quite off-puttingly. This seems to do the trick. They wish me a “Buen Camino” and let me go.

I work my way back down to the beach, along the road this time. It is a glorious beach. People just visible through the sea haze. The waves rushing towards the shore, the tide coming in.

I realise, as I make my way down the beach, that with the delays, the tide has now come in too far for me to walk all the way around the headland. So I have to find another path up the steep hills behind the beach.

I find a path, not as terrible as I’d thought it might be, that winds up from the beach into the forests above. Planes from the airport, no longer drowned out by the sound of the sea, take off overhead.

Next my app tells me I can simply zigzag down the hill to the road that goes to my destination. The zigzag is not as simple as I’d hoped it would be. Eucalyptus forests, trees cut down, brambles, rocks underfoot. I struggle not to slip. I cut myself on brambles, but I make it down, slowly, very slowly.

I look at the time. If I rush, if I miss the beautiful (not to be missed) castle on the headland and follow the main road over the bridge, then I know I can still make it in time for dinner.

As I set off on the main road, it starts to pour with rain. “Of course it does”, I think to myself, as I put on my waterproofs and trudge up the last hill.

But when I get to Muros de Nalón, the hospitaleros welcome me, and good faces are there.

Stefan, who I’ve only ever met halfway up hills, Nevis, Iván and Jaco, two brilliant Australian women, Bridie and Jazz, Danielle from Quebec,, and the Japanese man from this morning, who now is being quite nice. He runs a guesthouse near Hiroshima. I need to befriend him now.

The dinner is huge and jolly, and there at the table is Aya, the surfing Korean, met for one night, not seen for two weeks and never thought to be seen again. I remember her name, and I am so pleased with myself, I congratulate myself out loud. And she remembers me, even though, as she says, “you know, I find it hard to remember all these white women, but I remember Rachel. She walks everywhere from home”.

I don’t want to correct her. She’s imagined me far better than I ever could.