There are the good days, the normal days and then there are strange days like today. We left at 8, without breakfast, thinking we had a super short day of “only” 21 km and had lots of time. We had also reserved beds at our destination and felt very relaxed.
Minutes after getting out, it started raining and basically didn’t stop until the evening. With rain, wind and freezing cold temperature, we had our difficulties to stay strong and happy today. The path, however, was really beautiful today. It took us along the coast on small hiking paths through rocks and mud, the sea to our right, the high mountains somewhere in the fog to our left.
We had already seen many little caves in the rocks on the way but when we entered a forest, we saw a very large cave a little off the path and went closer to check it out. It was at least 4 meters high at the entrance and we could walk in for at least 10 meters.
We hadn’t thought about our path nor the weather when we had decided to have breakfast on the way and couldn’t find any place with a roof to stop. In the end, we reached a little village and the people from a bar let us sit on their terrace with a roof for a relatively dry breakfast and a hot drink. Frozen and tired, we stayed longer than planned and finally went on through more rain.
My shoes gave up and Gore-Tex stopped working little by little so that I had the continuous feeling of walking in a river for the rest of the day. We walked on, in silence and a pretty bad mood until we got to the “Bufones de Arenillas”. This is a formation of a little hole in the rocks that connects the sea with the land, which leads to high fountains of air and water with every wave and sounds like a breathing mountain.
Johanna stayed there a little longer but I kept walking because I was afraid to turn into a block of ice if I didn’t move all the time. We kept on walking in silence through wet eucalyptus forests until lunch. We saw a restaurant with a roof and asked if we could eat our food under the roof and drink something but we were denied our wish, so we sat down next to the restaurant at some kind of old laundry washing place on the cold stone floor and “enjoyed” our lunch. Food (as always) help us to regain a little bit of our strength and happiness. However, we were now completely frozen and wet and had to sit down inside for a while and have another hot drink, which is why we left much later than everyone else again.
After lunch, the path took us up a mountain on a broad stoney road with view on our destination town Llanes. As we walked, we started wondering why we were walking away from the village instead of descending towards it. Checking the map, we found out that we had taken the wrong way and were making a steep D-tour. When we finally descended, we found a little chapel with a roof and sat down once again.
When we finally arrived at Llanes at 5, we were completely confused and in an absolutely unfunctional state again. This is why doing the grocery shopping took us over an hour and two supermarkets, buying stuff we actually didn’t want to buy and just standing around staring at products. At least we knew we were not the only ones who passed through this state every afternoon; the Americans had told us a few days before that the exact same thing usually happens to them around 4.
We reached the albergue at 6 and were greeted by the English guy saying: “You walked very fast today!”. We replied that we didn’t like him anymore and proceeded to showering and washing and hanging wet stuff everywhere and finally cooking in the big community kitchen. People were already preparing lots of food and eating together and in the end we sat down with a large group of German girls and an older German man who gave us wine, locusts, parsley and chocolate. We ate too much and got hit by the post-food-coma pretty soon.
