It is fascinating that I have been inventing new words every day for 23 days now to express basically the same thing: we walked.
Well, today we walked again. We walked just a little more than 20 km today, but with 1200 m of elevation gain and 1300 m of elevation loss.
As a morning warmup, we climbed the closest mountain peak up to the altitude of some wind mills.
After that, the longest denscent of the Camino began. About 800 m straight downhill through very nice forest landscape and incredible views on the huge reservoir of Salime.
We settled down for breakfast on one of the nice schistose rocks with views over the lake and after half an hour, people began to pass us and Mitch and Ben arrived.
We still had to walk down to the altitude of the lake after this and walk around it in a big bow. Unfortunately the path joined a street down there and we had to walk on asphalt again. We crossed the retaining wall and started to ascend again on the other side, still walking along the road.
The road took us uphill for many kilometers and we crossed a little restaurant which was the first civilization in 12 km (and closed).
Eventually, a small path left the road and ascended in a steep zig-zag until it descended towards the village of Gradas de Salime. This would be the last village with a shop until tomorrow so we walked through it, looking for the shop when we came by the anthropological museum. The big food storage house we could see from the outside called our attention and we stepped in, curious to finally find out exactly what these houses are for. As today was Tuesday, the entrance was free and we visited the whole museum. It was like a complete little village like they had been some hundred years ago, with several buildings and lots of artifacts belonging to daily life and different professions of the era.
When we left the museum, we were happy to find the shop would still be open for half an hour and did our grocery shopping for lunch and breakfast.We found a nice little park with a playground nearby to enjoy our lunch and some play and were, again, not especially motivated to carry on afterwards.
We still had to climb a few hundred meters to reach Castro. Castro turned out to be a very small village with just a few houses and the albergue. The albergue, following our general experiences with albergues on the Primitivo, was excellent. 4-bed-rooms, nice showers, a bar with food and drinks, laundry lines and a huge garden in the sun.
We did some stretching and wine-drinking, changing between being cold in the wind and getting burned in the sun until dinner.
At 7 we gathered with the other guests, whom we all knew already from the last days of walking, in the dining room. There were several plates to choose from and everyone had something different. I had a turkey drumstick with yellow rice which tasted like cloves and cinnamon and was delicious enough to order another plate when I had finished the first one.
The evening was long and funny and deep and perfect. I love this so much and don’t ever want to leave this Camino world again.
