Today was a happy day and a sad day. Also a typical tourist day.

Sad because we said goodbye to a few of our camino friends. Tom and Eileen from USA are not having rest days so they carried on and will be one day ahead of us to Leon then two days ahead. Tom and Margaret from Ireland finish today and go home. Kevin, Stuart, Rose, Lynn and Eileen from northern England also finish today and got the bus to Balboa. These guys have been such good fun and we had many laughs together.

We met Victoria and Craig in the street which was great because we hadn’t seen them for a couple of days and wondered how they were getting on. Just on lunchtime we saw Carolyn and John and we decided to have some lunch together. In the cafe was Helen, who we have seen and walked with often, so it was a nice catch up. Ensalada mixta, which are large yummy salads with lettuce, tomato, olives, carrot, tuna, egg, onion, corn, asparagus.

This morning we spent 2 hours in the Museo de la Evolucion Humana, a wonderful new award winning museum. The museum has two parts starting with the history of the prehistoric caves at Sierra de Atapuerca, which we walked through yesterday, and contains over 200 fossils of Homo antecessor some up to a million years old. The remainder of the museum is devoted to the theory of evolution, human evolution, why we have a very special brain, the first tools, fire, Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, prehistoric art, symbolism and the complexity of the human mind. In the museum we met a couple from Wellington!  We didn’t recognise them as kiwis as their accents sounded so posh.

After the museum we went to the Catedral de Santa Maria. One of the most beautiful of Spain’s many cathedrals and the second largest. It is basically 13th century gothic but as it was enlarged, reshaped, and adorned over the next 500 years, it also has Plateresque, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo art. It has a magnificent inspirational exterior with a profusion of highly decorated pinnacles and spires. Inside, the enormous space is a treasure trove of artefacts and art works. We each had an audio commentary and there was so much history and detail it became overwhelming and we had to escape and get some lunch.

In the evening we went up to the castle which is not that impressive and wasn’t open but from the hill there is a great view over the city. Also saw the statue of the warrior El Cid on his steed Babieca. Spain’s most famous medieval warlord has a cape that floats in the wind so the locals have a nickname for the monument: el murcielago (the bat). For my generation El Cid will always be Charlton Heston (with the incomparable Spohia Loren) in the 1961 epic historical movie.

Burgos (population ~ 200,000) is the capital of the province of Burgos and the historic capital of Castille. It contains a staggering wealth of art, churches, monasteries, convents, museums, monuments and it’s jewel the cathedral.

We enjoyed today, it was nice to be an ordinary tourist. We are about one third of the way to Santiago and walked the last nine days in a row so we probably needed a day off just to freshen up for the nine days ahead. Can’t wait to get on the road again.

Today was one climb of 150m in height but otherwise a long downhill to the city of Burgos. We are at an altitude of 1000m and it is common to get mist in the morning. This is exactly what we got as we headed off after our gourmet picnic breakfast. Cool and crisp in pine trees and scrubland before coming out on to open pasture.

Lots of wild flowers again, orchids, daffodils, buttercups and many we didn’t recognise. Also for the first time saw a flock of sheep out in a paddock. They were skinny with black and white faces, sort of elongated panda faces. And they wore tinkley bells.

We stopped for a coffee and chocolate croissant before tackling the final steep part of the climb. The coolness had evaporated, we were above the mist and the sun was beating down as we passed a large wooden cross on the top of the Atapuerca Massif.

In one of the caves that riddle the massif archaeologists found the oldest human remains in Europe. The fossils, discovered in 1994, are of early humans dating from 127,000 to 1,000,000 years ago. Some of the bones seem to come from a previously unknown subspecies of hominid, Homo antecessor, who may be the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.

From the summit we could see the city of Burgos, far off and blurry in a brown smog. The traditional route skirts around the right hand side of the airport and goes through about 10km of noisy and dirty light industrial and commercial suburbs. A new alternative route has been developed on the left hand side of the airport and then following the River Arlanzon through parkland right into the heart of the city.

We decided on the latter but fuelled up with bananas, strawberries and muffins before heading off. It was now about midday and we expected a very hot three hours. However St James was looking after us and a nice cooling summer breeze followed us all the way. For two hours we walked along the security fence of the airport. So tedious! We saw the control tower, terminal, hangers, planes on the ground, but in two hours not one single plane landed or took off. What’s with that? Maybe the airport has an early siesta.

The walk along the River was great. Under the trees all the way, at first on clay but then on a wide, sealed walking /cycleway.

I should have mentioned in yesterday’s post that Barbara saw a snake on the path. We see lots of skinks and geckos but this was the first snake. It was mottled green, about 500mm long, as thick as two fingers and had a lump about halfway along it as if it had swallowed a mouse. It was too fast and I was too slow to get a photo. It was probably a grass snake. The snake story was repeated several times at dinner last night over a couple of glasses of wine. By lunch time today the snake was now 2metres long, as thick as your arm, had eaten a rat and was one of Spain’s deadly venomous vipers.

Such is the way that legends are born on the Camino.

Ipod theme tune for today: Summer Breeze by Crosby Stills and Nash

Summer breeze makes me feel fine,
Blowing through the jasmine in my mind.

Two updates to yesterday’s post.

First. We learnt from our friends Carolyn and John that the singing Spaniards were a walking group. Each Sunday they go out by bus and get dropped off to do a section of the Camino. At the end of the day they get picked up and go home. No wonder they had so much energy.

Second. The military re-enactment might have related to the Spanish Civil War. Although the Pact of Silence or Forgetting, el pacto de olvido, attempts to suppress the painful memories of the war and the Franco dictatorship when bloody atrocities were carried out by both sides.

Today, deep in a forest of oaks, we came to Monumento de Los Caidos, a concrete obelisk that marks the spot of the shallow grave of some of those who had been summarily executed in the war. The grave was only found in 2011 when some upgrading work was being done on the Camino track. Prior to that the victims were just “missing”.

This morning as we left Belorado over yet another multi-arched bridge it was crisp and cool. The conditions we love the most. The track was was wide, flat, smooth, in the open countryside and followed the same main road as yesterday. Today the road was busy and there seemed to be a large truck about every twenty seconds. At the small village of Villafranca Montes de Orca (pop 200) we had to walk on the narrow shoulder. When you have been walking for many days the speed of the traffic is terrifying. Atypically the road goes through the village – there is a truck stop at the entry. I don’t know how the speeding trucks get through the narrow street without hitting something, or each other.

From the village we left the road, thank goodness, and had a steep, hot 400m vertical climb through an oak forest. This was lovely as we hadn’t walked in forest for ages. At the summit it changed to a pine forest with an edge of heather and broom . We could have had a pleasant walk through more forest, but we didn’t. For three hours we trudged across a plateau on a wide clay forestry road out in the open. A broad swathe of trees had been felled on both sides of the trail, so no shade. On the plateau we again came across a line of wind turbines. Spain has the third highest number of wind turbines in the world, after the USA and China. Not bad for a country with a much smaller population.

A quick descent into a tranquil, remote valley far from the road. San Juan de Ortega has a population of 20 and is probably too small to be called a village. There is a church, a large monastery, 1 hotel, 1 hostel and 1 cafe. All owned by 1 person. There is a large tower crane adjacent the monastery which indicates some restoration work is going on.

The path we walked was the Montes de Oca. Montes indicates a hilly, desolate, scrubby wasteland. In medieval times this was a dangerous place for pilgrims with bandits, wild animals and no distinguishing geographical features to show the way. San Juan was a disciple of Santo Domingo (see previous post) and chose the dangerous wastes of Montes de Orca as his mission. He built a road, bridges, a church and monastery. He took the name Ortega from the Latin word for thistle.

114 miracles attributed to San Juan are recorded in the monastery, including:

Irish pilgrims were praying for their dead 7 year old child and laid some apples on the tomb. The child asked for one.

A french pilgrim whose twisted feet could barely drag him along, and whose arms were so deformed he could not feed himself, was cured here.

A deformed pilgrim entered on crutches and vowed not to leave until he was well. His friends could hear the sound his nerves made stretching.

At the cafe we had a very convivial meal tonight. Thirteen of us were in a small room all best friends after walking together for 10 days. 1 from Ireland, 2 from USA, 2 from NZ, 3 from Australia and 5 from northern England. Some were finishing in Burgos tomorrow and much vino flowed and a good time was had by all.

The hotel does not serve breakfast so the hotel owner has an arrangement with himself as the cafe owner to provide a picnic breakfast for the guests. In a shopping bag we each got a bottle of juice, a bottle of water, a croissant, a ham and cheese sandwich, an apple and an orange. There was the temptation to eat this for supper but we resisted and waited until morning and had it wit Nescafe coffee from a machine. Thank you George Clooney.

We thought today may have been a bit of a lacklustre day as it was 24km basically parallel to a 4 lane road. However it turned out to be quite interesting.

Each morning at breakfast we are really keen to get moving. Once on the road we still wonder what on earth are we doing. All these people, spread out for miles along the path, seeking what? It is very bizarre. We are earning and living the experience not just observing it.

Early in the day we walked with Graham and Ann, Australians, although Graham was originally from Auckland. This is their second camino and this time they started walking several weeks ago in France. They are both writers and are writing a novel based on the Camino. They are writing alternate chapters from a male and female perspective.  It has a title: Left and Right, and is due for publication next year. They have a publisher, a contract and an advance, and they are claiming the cost of the Camino as a business expense. Graham is also writing a screen play and hopes to sell the film rites if the novel is successful.

At one stage two cyclists stopped and asked us to take a photo of them. Turns out they were from Patagonia. I spent some time trying to explain to them I had kayaked to the glaciers, it was very beautiful but cold. Not sure whether they understood or not.

This weekend is a holiday weekend in this region (and maybe all of Spain) and there seem to be more Spanish walkers. We, who started in St Jean Pied de Port,  walk slowly and have developed a sort of camino shuffle. A group of about twenty in matching tee shirts, speaking Spanish, motored past us, all enthusiastic and excited and singing as they went. We guessed they might just be walking part of the camino over the long weekend. A number of them had umbrellas strapped to their packs. At any point of interest there were lots of group photos to be taken.

Today we moved from La Rioja, one of the smaller autonomous regions, into the largest, Castilla Y Leon. The latter had the largest possible signboard to announce the fact. We will be in this region for a couple of weeks. The vineyards and olive groves have been left far behind and after some potato fields and peas this morning, it is all wheat, wheat, wheat. There are no animals out grazing but we pass huge barns that stink to high heaven and we hear cows or sheep as we pass. Factory farming!

A long flat, straight path today with an excellent walking and cycling surface. Being Sunday the road we paralled was quiet with no trucks. There were four evenly spaced villages which are always interesting in themselves but also mean coffee, food and water – and a loo stop . It is generally no problem getting water as there are plenty of fuente, public drinking fountains. Every village has several and they are out in the countryside as well. Some have a sign “Aqua no potable, prohibido beber” so you have to be careful. The fountain water tastes fresh and pure and is cold. So we often empty the luke warm water from our bottles and refill.

We arrived in Belorado a little early to check into the hotel so went to fill in some time in the main square. It was a bit strange, lots of people and groups of soldiers in WW2 uniforms and period army jeeps and trucks.  While looking at these a procession arrived with a band and about two dozen senoritas in traditional costumes. They formed up and gave a dazzling performance of dancing complete with castanets.

Everyone was then moved to the perimeter of the square and I think Spanish, French, America and English forces attacked the central band rotunda which was defended by the Germans. They started with the whistling of Colonel Bogey’s march (from Bridge over the River Kwai fame),  Scotland the Brave on bagpipes and then battle. The vehicles raced into the square from a side street, there were sort of stun grenades, all the guns fired blanks, lots of smoke and noise. Frightened screaming small children were taken away by their parents. It was amazing and very realistic, just no blood. After about ten minutes all the Germans were dead and a flag raised on the rotunda. Then everyone retired to the bars. I guess to discuss the tactics and admire the senoritas.

Ipod theme tune for today from OMC

Brother Pele’s in the back , sweet Seena’s in the front
Cruising down the highway in the hot, hot sun.. . . . .
How bizarre
How bizarre, how bizarre