What a glorious day! I walked along a country lane between dry stone walls, with sheep and cattle grazing among the oaks in the meadows on either side, past an orchard with fruit trees not yet green, and then on to open moors dotted with large clumps of broom. Eventually, I descended into fields of wheat and open pasture ablaze with daisies.
Yesterday my pack was heavy on my back, weighing me down; today, it floated above my shoulders. I was striding along, arms swinging wildly, when I suddenly realized that I was unencumbered by my hiking poles. I had left them behind at the Hotel Moyà and I wasn't going to walk back four kilometres to retrieve them. It was meant to be. The only time I missed them was when fording a stream, as I balanced precariously on a wobbling rock.
My Garmin Forerunner 25 sports watch has given up the ghost, and if the shop where I bought it does not give me my money back, it will join a certain food store on my list of boycotted and maligned businesses that do not understand the importance of satisfied customers.
I walked for a while with Silver and Terje, an Estonian couple. He reminds me that his name is appropriate for the Via de la Plata; she pronounces hers with the stress on the last syllable, and demonstrates this by throwing out her right arm, high and wide. I think they resented a little my rather predictable Westerner's question, did they feel threatened at all by the Russians? No, was their response. Indeed, they were happier under the Soviet system when people had more fun together. Now, everyone was for himself.
There is much competition for the pilgrim trade. Two cars approached me as I neared the town, handing out leaflets advertising their accommodation. I am staying at El Zaguan de la Plata, a suite of double rooms not to be missed, part of an amazing complex that includes a rooftop patio, swimming pool, a garden and a magnificent museum.
This was the best kind of Camino: a winding road with a new vista, a surprise, around every turn, quite the opposite to the straight highways of our previous days' walking. It was an old road, little used today. One tractor passed me, and the two cars that were enticing pilgrims pilgrims to their hostels.
I surmised that I was walking on a very old road that had linked these towns since the very first habitation, and millennia before Christians began following it to Santiago. But why did it wind? Modern roads are engineered, but the old roads amble because they follow the old paths. True, they follow the contours in general, but otherwise they wind and wander because they follow tracks where people have walked from the very beginning. And people don't walk in straight lines when they make their own paths. We see the same thing happening today in a municipal park. The council will lay down a concrete walkway, but people will often make their own path across the grass, and it won't be in a straight line.
And while we walk, we think, and try to understand ourselves, and the world we live in, and whatever lies beyond.
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