This weekend my friend Miguelo has decided to come all the way from Pamplona to do a bit of exercise and accompany me on a couple of routes. We agreed to make Nájera our starting point and to walk from there to Santo Domingo de la Calzada today, so that tomorrow we could take the car to Belorado, which lies in Castile and León, and then take a taxi back to Santo Domingo de la Calzada with the idea of walking the 23 kilometres between the town in La Rioja and the one in Burgos. Despite having got up early, we were in no rush this morning. We had a big breakfast in a café opposite the Monastery of Santa María la Real, an important place of worship where the tombs of the Nájera-Pamplona Kings and Queens lie, which we visited afterwards.
We started our walk at around eleven in the morning, still without any sense of urgency, passing over some hills of a vibrant reddish brown colour from which you could make out Nájera. I decided to leave my rucksack in the hostel today as we had the room booked for another night, something which my back was infinitely grateful for.
Three or four kilometres later we stumbled upon a herd of sheep and a female pilgrim who was staring at the animals in amazement. The pilgrim in question, who confessed that it was the first time in her life that she had seen a herd of sheep, turned out to be a young Finnish girl who speaks Spanish quite well thanks to the Erasmus year she spent in Spain and the six months she spent working for an NGO in Ecuador. We walked together as far as Azofra, a town about six kilometres from Nájera, only to go our separate ways there as the Finn told us she had walked enough for today. She went in search of the local pilgrim hostel, or so she led us to believe, and Miguelo and I took shelter in a bar for lunch.
We wouldn’t even have walked four kilometres after leaving Azofra behind when, about 100 metres away, on a stretch of the Camino that runs parallel to the dual carriageway, I thought I could make out the silhouette of the Finnish girl who was supposedly stopping for the day in the last town. Miguelo told me that it couldn’t be her and that it would surely be someone else as what reason did she have to tell us she was staying in Azofra if it wasn’t the case. As Miguelo well knows, I lived in Sweden for a year and my experience tells me that there are some Scandinavians, not all of course, with real problems when it comes to social interaction. This, along with a pathological need to be politically correct which makes them avoid, at all cost, statements or situations that they feel could be in any way offensive to their neighbours, triggers the rest and causes situations that would have disheartened even Kafka. What for us would have been totally normal, such as the girl telling us “right boys, you stay there, I’m going on”, likely didn’t even cross her mind, scared that we would interpret it as a sign that she wasn’t enjoying our company, which could very well have been the case.
To show Miguelo that I’m basing my conclusions on hard evidence, I told him about the, possibly extreme, case of a Swedish guy who lived on the same floor as me at the student halls of residence in Stockholm, where I stayed for one year. So as not to have to speak to anyone in the kitchen, he would put water on to boil and come back in 10 minutes to add the pasta and then come into the kitchen one last time to plate up his spaghetti, which needless to say he ate in the privacy of his own room. He was so adverse to human interaction that once I organised a dinner which I cordially invited him to and as I opened the kitchen window to let some fresh air in, I watched in horror as the boy jumped into the abyss from his. Fortunately we were on the first floor which wasn’t very high and my halls buddy walked away without a scratch. Knowing what I knew of this character, there was no need to ask why he left the halls through the window and not through the door, like any normal person. I knew that the reason was to avoid having to say hello to my guests and explain why he wasn’t staying for dinner, which was apparently superior to his strength.
We unwittingly sped up our pace a little, intrigued by the identity of the female pilgrim ahead of us, and as we got closer, the silhouette of the Finnish girl became unmistakable. I’m not sure if on purpose or not, maybe she was worried we were catching up with her and would say something about her lies or, even worse, maybe she thought we were a couple of prowlers, but she turned around and recognised us and immediately stopped and sat down on a rock and started to take her shoes off. As we passed her she told us that she was stopping a moment to soak her feet, as she pointed out a small stream of rainwater full of crap from the carriageway. Before continuing on our way, I told the Finnish girl that I would stop to join her but unfortunately I hadn’t brought my water wings…
The following six or seven kilometres to Cirueña were incredible. The Camino finally veers off from the bloody dual carriageway and runs through cereal crop fields which were looking magnificent due to the rain the last few months. The sun was blazing down but a light breeze from the snowy Sierra de la Demanda mountains to our left made the temperature on this path very tolerable. The entrance into Cirueña was a little disappointing. The Camino was diverted here due to a golf course and a neighbourhood built in the time of “let’s-all-invest-in-bricks-and-mortar”, which now looks like a ghost town. In Ciriñuela, the neighbouring town, we made one last stop for provisions before facing the last six kilometres to Santo Domingo de la Calzada, where, when we realised how long the wait for the bus would be, we decided to hop into a taxi to head back to Nájera.
In the evening we went out to Logroño to have dinner with Nando, an ex-schoolmate who Miguelo is still friendly with and who I hadn’t seen for nineteen years. I had written 19 in numbers and then decided to write it in letters so that it seems like less. Bloody hell, time flies. It feels like I left school only yesterday. I remembered Nando as someone rather introverted who used to tap his fingertips against the space between the knuckles of his opposite hand when he was worried about something. He liked Mike Oldfield and so I, a little maliciously, christened his unique percussion instrument as the “tubular knuckles”.
The Nando I met today is a different
person. Married with two children, he’s really outgoing and has a refined sense
of humour. He’s related to an English woman so something must have stuck from
his visits to the Isles. I don’t think he remembered me too fondly as I was
even more of a piss-taker when I was a young boy than I am now, it has to be
said, and I hope his opinion of me has changed in some way after this dinner. We
had a pleasant evening reminiscing funny school stories and talking about
what’s happened in all these years since we last saw each other. This Camino is
allowing me to settle a few scores with the past and get my friendship with Miguelo
back on track as we had been a bit distant recently, and even if only for that,
it’s proving worth it…
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