The Big Walk

Chicken Run – Day 9

We too have now decided to wake before dawn to try to cover today’s distance before the afternoon heat. Not that we were asleep – we might have had the kitchen to ourselves, but the cows just outside the window moo loudly through the night, the bass sound seeming to shake the floor. We set off down the road in the dark, reaching Portomarin in time to for first light and some breakfast. The deep valley here was flooded in the 1960s by a huge reservoir, and the whole village was moved up the hillside. The church, built in the twelfth century by the Knights Templar, a chivalric order that protected pilgrims on the camino, was moved from the valley floor stone by stone. It stands in the centre of the new village, square and fortified like a small castle keep– a refuge against bandits and Moors in this remote spot.

Across the dam, a stiff, misty climb up the far side of the valley led to a barer, upland region of tiny hamlets. The tightly clustered houses each have square, hipped roofs, tiled in gigantic slates, cut roughly into semi-circles. The topmost slates have slots cut into them, interlinking and overlapping with those on the other side – something I’ve never seen before. The fields are full of rough grasses and meadow flowers, and are enclosed by thin slabs of stone embedded into the ground on end, broken only by the occasional hoary old oak.

The mist remains as we enter Sarria – the largest town since Santiago and hopefully a good place to recharge our batteries for a day. We head down the old, steep main street of crumbling houses and bars, where an old lady in a straw hat asks if we are looking for a room. One quick nod and we are whisked away down a tiny alleyway, up two flights of stairs and into a dusty attic. It’s full of odds and ends, cobwebs and discarded furniture. In a corner is an ancient bed, broken in the middle so badly that our heads and feet will be in the air whilst our backsides will almost touch the floor. We ask how much it is for two nights, and the lady counts her daily charge per pilgrim up and down on her fingers, but still fails to multiply seven by four without help. Later, I ask where we I can wash our clothes, and she leads me out into a tiny yard full of clucking hens and an old bath tub and cold tap. She stays to watch for a few minutes before leaving me to it. By the time I’ve finished a chicken has escaped and has to be chased round in the lane until I finally shoo it back into the yard. Lying in the ridiculously broken bed I feel a lot less like a tourist – we’re having a real travellers experience at last.