After 6 hours of sleep – one hour too little – we took off as usual. The altitude profile of today’s stage hadn’t looked that bad yesterday but when I checked it again this morning, it still had 800 m of elevation gain and loss. We thought we were super tough now and we would do it without any problems because we had done so much more in the past days, but we didn’t foresee the extreme steepness of those hills nor the weather.
It got warm after the first 100 m of elevation and hotter after that. The sky was bright blue without any clouds, no wind, all the windmills standing still.
The “nicely wavy” profile, at a closer look, was more similar to the dental impression of a dinosaur. We started dying and swearing very early and very hard when we climbed the first high peak. On top of it, there were some stone houses, a chapel and a dolmen but we went straight on, desperate to sum up enough kilometres to justify breakfast. We came by several little villages and could see the typical Gallego housesade of slate rock and with rounded corners.
We found a little bar with tables when we had descended the mountain we had just climbed and settled down to eat.
The rest of the group came by much quicker than expected, some of them going straight on, some of them sitting down. Even the ones who had had breakfast and left with us, were ahead of us very soon and we were left with our burden to walk all the steep mountains alone without anyone distracting us. It got even worse than the morning had been and also hotter and sunnier.
Especially one steep mountain that just would not end ever again really got on our nerves and we sweated and swore a lot.
After some more steep mountains and even one “beautiful” passage along a big road in the burning sun without any shade, we finally saw the little village of O Cadavo before us.
Lukas had reserved beds for us when he had gotten here over an hour ago and we had a whole room for our group, which was already there (everyone but Ben who was missing and turned up half an hour later because he had gotten lost). We were happy to find out that everyone else had hated the mountains too, but still didn’t understand how they had walked so quickly. Even German 65-year-old Gisela had passed an hour ago and decided to walk another 10k further! It was not too sad though that she wouldn’t be around tonight commenting our every move like she had done the days before.
The albergue had a wonderful garden that invited to lay down between the wonderful plants and escape from the heat:
The showers were good, however, and the cloths dried in a few minutes, and we also had a great kitchen again. In the spare time between showering, washing and cooking, I walked through the entire burning hot village trying to get a gluten free beer, but without any success, which made me very pissed for a short while (Galicia is like being in Germany all over again…) but my mood was restored relatively fast.
Around 6, we all walked to the small supermarket and bought the ingredients for our dinner. It is amazing what kind of awesome food you can prepare for very very little money if you’re cooking for many people. For 3,50 € each, we cooked a huge pot of pasta with vegetables, nice cheese, tuna and chick peas. We had wine, beer, Coke, and yogurt with cinnamon and chocolate for dessert. We also tried chocolate with tuna and chocolate with cheese and strawberries with cheese (there was a bet involved in this). Once again, we almost exploded.
Johanna and I had a little walk after dinner, through the low light of a beautiful sundown, still in shorts and T-shirt and with a beer in my hand. We checked out the local swimming pool and were tempted to break in but too tired in the end.
We still sat in the common room with the other Germans for a while after that. I was extremely exhausted and tired tonight and could have perfectly fallen asleep immediately after dinner but the fear of missing something or not enjoying every single minute that is left of this trip made me stay awake until everyone went to bed around 11.
