Back on the road. Lands End to Fisterra.

The first blog is always the hardest. The easy thing is to not write it at all. Writing is like a muscle, exercise and it works better. Let’s test the theory…

The Grey Ferry. Llanes and other Spanish adventures.

The huge Pont Aven ferry leaves Plymouth 15 minutes late. 

The team is stressed, it has been loading for a couple of hours and it’s full full full. 

They’re not tolerating idiots this afternoon. Thankfully idiots were few and we weren’t put to the test. 

We’re pulled forward over some yellow hatching at an exit to make room for one more van. 

No one is left behind. 

We’re bound for Santander. It’s a 20 hour crossing. As close to a cruise as I’m likely to get.

Grey. 

There must be a retiree restriction on this boat. It seems that Minty might be the only passenger under 60. 

There’s little to distinguish one grey from another, they all blend into one even though I’m part of the club. 

Except those two. 

Those two with the immaculate luggage, blow dried hair, gold buttons on their tailored shorts. 

I hope they’re the couple in the shiny 1980s Mercedes SL. 

Taxi tired. 

I needn’t have worried what I was going to do for the 20 hours on board. 

I’m taxi tired. 

A few 16 hour driving shifts leaves you a special tired that allows you to function until you don’t need to, and then slides you into a near coma until you’re rested. 

Thirteen hours sleep on the ferry without stirring and there’s plenty yet to come. 

Before I fully emerge I’ve had three consecutive twelve plus hour sleeps interspersed with extra hours here and there. I’m struggling to work out the sleep to wake ratio, but I know it’s heavily tilted towards sleep. 

Llanes. 

The sleep need is nothing new, but this is the first time we’ve reacted appropriately. Usually we forge on through and it takes most of a trip to recover from what went before. Instead we settle at Llanes, 90 minutes along the coast from Santander. 

Hours slide by to the soundtrack of crashing waves. 

The tail of last week’s hurricane brought huge seas to Sennen. Biscay threw up an impressive swell. And here the waves crash relentless against the jagged limestone cliffs. 

In school geography we were taught about blow holes and on field trips we traipsed along the cliffs near Pothtowan in the hope of seeing the sea explode through apparently solid rock. It didn’t. 

Here at high tide every wave forces a three meter spume through hidden tunnels to emerge as fine as smoke from the cliffs. 

We may have peaked early. Llanes (pronounced something like Janis) is near perfect. It has the Picos de Europa as its backdrop. The wild Atlantic as its foreground. Two of the pretty beaches that are used in adverts for the region. And a smart historic town that includes ancient walls, the port, and important civic buildings.

We’re camped between those pretty beaches, a ten minute stroll from town.

Buildings in the town go high and the glazing is both interesting and extensive. These places must get seriously hot in summer. 

It’s a tourist town, but on Friday night the swell of people on the streets is mainly local, everyone greeting friends along the way. 

Fiesta.

Tomorrow they’ll celebrate some Virgin’s day with parades, children on donkeys, men on horseback and everywhere traditional costume. 

There will be cider. Lots and lots of cider. And the Virgin will look down on the revellers and smile, safe in the knowledge that her condition remains unique. 

The Sicilian Connection. 

That green van over there. The German guy with the dreads. They followed us around Sicily in May. 

We didn’t speak, just nodded in acknowledgement of a connection not quite forged. 

And these two English fellows. Travelling in a 1920s Austin. Safari tent for two, big enough for a troop of scouts. That’s style. Demonstrating the overlap between bravery and madness. 

After the party.

They partied all night. Even the Virgin had a headache. On Monday morning the streets are clean already. 

The festival music finished at 2am. Not with a drum and bass finale but with a bagpipe band. Who knows if the band stayed sober for their big moment? I hope not. I can’t imagine any listener would have noticed. 

Raindrops keep falling. 

I didn’t know about the pipe band because we were there. We were half a mile away, tucked up in bed, but nervously listening for rain. 

On our last adventure to Polperro (gorgeous Cornish fishing village. The Blue Peter pub. The climb back up to the campsite), we were rained on in bed. 

Inspection revealed that the roof has rusted through. On an expensive ten year old Volkswagen. That’s shameful. But not unusual. 

For this trip we duct taped every crack. On our return we’ve arranged for Terry (Carn Bosavern Garage) to do a serious fibreglass repair. 

We didn’t even worry when the rain started. But soon, despite our efforts, it was coming in. Soaking the clothes bins. Tea towels and bowls were stuffed in place. Dripping here, dripping over there. Catch what we can. 

Grrrrr!

On Sunday morning we parked the van super close to a wall that enabled us to work on the roof from above. 

The tape was reapplied. Extra carefully. Extra neat. 

Still the rain came in. But only a little. 

More work to be done this morning. 

And then we’ll try to dodge the rain. 

In Northern Spain. 

At the end of summer. 

Where often the storms are the worst we experience anywhere – wish us luck!

Vega. 

The big sleep knocked me out for three nights. The rain kept us at Llanes for another. 

Four nights. That’s the longest we have stayed anywhere in years. It was calming to be still for so long, wandering down to the town at will, hypnotised  by the waves.

On Monday we moved on. 

Not far though. 

Vega is only 25 miles along the coast. 

A mere blip across the empty motorway. 

Camping Vega. Our new home in the trees. 

It feels so quiet here after Llanes, the exposed site we left this morning. 

Most of the vans are German. Youngish German sport billys. Cycling in the morning. Surfing in the afternoon. Running between every other activity. Exhausting to watch. 

There’s a woodland walk by a stream that takes you to a vast beach where the wind is still gusting across the roaring Atlantic. 

Kite surfers fly. So exciting. I wish I’d tried kite surfing in my thirties. If I tried now I fear I’d break.

Exercise at last. 

All those stretching Germans influenced me. 

A quick, but hard walk up a hill. Glimpses of the coast open between the eucalyptus plantations and convince me that northern Spain will always be a good idea. 

The limestone coast weathers  differently to ours. Deep jagged coves, occasional wide beaches. So much sand. So much sea. 

The gradient is steep. An hour up. Three quarters of an hour down. My first real movement since home and it felt good. 

The eucalyptus smells amazing in the early evening, but it’s not a good tree out of its native environment. Its fast growth demands vast amounts of water in an area that’s already running low. That appetite also depletes the soil. Worse is how its high oil content gives it a tendency to catch fire.  

Yet due to some unfortunate policy decisions over past decades much of the otherwise wild countryside is covered in these giants.

There is next to no wildlife in its sparse understory. I see a single green woodpecker and a single carrion crow in 90 minutes of walking. 

West to lunch. 

Cudillero is often written up as Asturias’s most pretty village. It would be rude to past it by. 

Our overgrown path down the hill from Camping Amuravela wasn’t conventional, I suspect it’s a river bed in wetter times, but it popped us out of the woods just where we wanted to be. 

We’ve visited many seaside towns built into the cliffs. Minty’s own Robin Hood’s Bay for example. But few are as extreme as Cudillero. Almost all progress involves steps. Steep, steep steps. Colourful former fishermen’s cottages line the footpaths. And there are visitors everywhere. 

Down in the main square every restaurant has a queue. After 30 minutes we’re called forward. 

We’re in good hands. Fabio recommends a wine, supports some of our choices, offers alternatives to others. On the way to the table an obvious bon viveur suggests the sardines. We took it all on board and while our four plate order was modest compared to most we ate fantastically. It’s now seven hours since we left our table and I still couldn’t contemplate more food. 

How do the Spanish function after the banquets they consume? Do they eat again later in the day? No wonder they stay up so late in the evening. 

Camino Hostel.

Three consecutive camp sites?

We’re getting soft. 

Too accustomed to warm showers. Flush toilets. Water on tap. 

I wanted to be somewhere wild for my birthday on Friday, and where was likely to be more wild than Fisterra?

The Spanish Land’s End. 

For thousands of years this place was believed to be the end of the world. The resting place of the sun. The Ara Solis (alter to the sun). A place of pilgrimage before Christianity had been invented. 

Decision made. 

But we had to get there. 

The drive across the middle of Galicia wasn’t the most exciting. Pilgrims are all very well, and they come here in their thousands. But they’re on a spiritual journey not a consumerist one. Most places have closed their doors. 

There are many concrete towns as grey in Spain as in any place. Built after the civil war. Cut off after the EU funded motorways sped everyone on a super fast journey west (or east). Largely abandoned after the big credit crunch. 

All closed up. 

Albergue a Lagoa.

Fortunately my able research assistant had been hard at work and she’d found Albergue a Lagoa deep in the countryside west of Lugo. This is where the flies go for September. Where the cats roam and breed, where the mice are scared. 

It’s a cafe. Bar. Restaurant. Supermarket. Bunk house. Pilgrim stop.  Launderette. It’s everything in a place with little else. 

But most of all it’s where grumpy old men go to smoke their way through a lunchtime bottle of rough red. 

A more friendly codger orders by the glass to keep the tapas coming. Tapas he then passes to the teenage girls who’d just arrived off the Camino. Suitably fed the girls seemed happy to be interrogated by the old boy and his recently arrived mate. 

Minty ordered ham and eggs. A huge plate of eggs scrambled with chunks of bacon, two kinds of tomato, thick toast, cheese. Her plate fed us both. For less than our cheapest dish anywhere so far. 

The supermarket is a small room rammed to the ceiling with every conceivable product. Fresh stuff from the garden, pasta, dried beans, tinned beans, jars of beans (the Spanish eat a lot of beans), bleach (nothing is clean in Spain until you can smell the bleach at twenty meters), every cured sausage imaginable, fizzy drinks you’ve never heard of, a gallon of booze worryingly labelled as Generic Toasted Liquor in an otherwise undecorated black box. Tinned fish. Many many different varieties of tinned fish. Toothpaste. Aluminium foil, who buys that much aluminium foil?

Arrangements are loose here. Xavier shows you around then leaves you to it. There are showers in the bunk house. Come for dinner, come for a drink. Don’t come at all. 

Walkers are sleeping off their morning exertions in bed, in hammocks, in chairs. 

It’s a scruffy place that you might think twice about stopping at, but if you did you’d be glad. 

We share a dinner (thankfully). Hearty fare. Cabbage and bean soup. Chips with spicy pork chunks scattered over. Santiago cake drowned in a sweet fortified wine. Three courses. €14. 

Sleeping in the bunk house €16. Sleeping in the garden €0. 

All done on trust. 

And the cheap red keeps flowing. 

It’s different here. I walk into the bar area with a cheerful “hola” to all and not one of the old fucks looks up let alone respond. It doesn’t feel unfriendly, it’s just that they’re not interested. The resorts felt similar. Furious chatter between groups, but disinterest towards the unknown. 

The end of ends. 

Later the boring concrete towns faded and mixed forests took their place. Diesel fumes were replaced by the resinous scent of hot pines. Hills started rolling up in front of us. I remembered our excitement waiting to crown the hill that would reveal the Atlantic on our 2003 journey down this very road. 

Fisterra. Finisterre. Lands End. 

Spain. Brittany. Home. 

All three are granite. 

All three face the relentless thrashing of the Atlantic. 

The Spanish is possibly the least wild. 

There’s a decent sized town. Restaurants. Tat shops. Real shops. The scallop shell Camino sign is everywhere and every shop sells shell souvenirs. 

From the town it’s a couple of kms to the end of everything. 

Fisterra has become the modern end to the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage. Most walkers hack the extra 90kms just to get as far west as they can. Today it was benign, but I can imagine it shrouded in fog for a week. Or with a howling gale. All the weather that makes our Lands End the place it is. But here in Spain. 

In town walkers everywhere. If you’ve never spent time on the Cornish coast, or perhaps in the Lake District, seeing so many walkers at once must be overwhelming. Most are tired. Some tearful. Some euphoric. The goal of a lifetime achieved. The waiting abyss of “What next?”. 

A few chance meetings with the same neighbours led to a party invite. After a fabulous birthday dinner in the van we joined the Germans and the parking spot owners at the reception area for an impromptu feast and drinking session. 

This happens on the road. 

One minute you’re introducing yourselves. Next minute you’re sitting down to drinks and dinner (second dinner of the evening). 

An elderly couple at the party have been on this site for six years, arriving just before the lockdowns and never leaving. Their massive old converted army truck may never move again. It’s packed with everything they once used but have since abandoned yet can’t bare to part with. 

They’re an interesting study on how the size of our world can diminish with age. They once travelled Europe in their truck. Even arriving here they walked to every accessible place. Now the chemist at the top of the hill is about as far as they get. But they’re happy with their memories. And their view. 

Minty bonds with the lady. They sit sharing a blanket, holding hands. No shared language. Just a bond. 

Birthday dinner. 

Minty cooked a Spanish inspired orzo risotto. Red peppers, chorizo, garlic, onions, red wine. So good I ate for three. 

Then razor clams at the party. Generally these appear in English on menus as “knives” thanks to literal online translation. Rubbery fellows. Tastier than knives. 

Stefan and Falke who initiated the car park party will take on one of the Camino albergues in the winter. Hopefully we’ll visit them next year. 

The order of things matters less to us, so we’ll visit Santiago next, where I’ll realise that the number of walkers I’d seen before was just a Sunday School sponsored walk compared to the big event, the Camino finishing point in cathedral square, Praza de Obradorio. 

I have to stop and press publish now as the rain is falling on my laptop and soon the touch pad won’t work! Until next week…