The Big Walk

The Frying Pan - Day 23

I’ve always wanted to watch the sun rise on midsummer’s day from somewhere special but a couple of miles outside Sahagún will have to do. We’ve watched so many sunrises lately. Luckily the countryside is a little less flat than yesterday and the winding route means you can’t see it for miles in advance. There’s a colourful profusion of wild flowers growing in the verges of the track which in turn have attracted hundreds of butterflies. They are everywhere; it’s almost like being in a tropical glasshouse. We manage fifteen miles before the heat strikes again, at the one bar village of Calzadilla de la Cueva. An old lady is sitting on a wooden chair outside her door watching passers by in the dusty, broken street. It seems crushingly poor here, and with no cars to drive past and the all the shutters tight against the windows, it feels like a ghost town. There’s a refugio in the old schoolhouse at the end of the village, and it’s so hot that our clothes are dry within a few minutes of us washing them.
It’s a long afternoon to kill in this god-forsaken place, playing dominoes and dreaming that we’re in the beautiful and verdant Pyrenees rather than the middle of this dust bowl, or at least reaching Pamplona which has become a major landmark in our mind. Pilgrims coming the other way (who seem much fitter hereabouts than those who were just walking the last few days to Santiago) have continued to shout and point ‘Santiago!’ at us. But recently the Spaniards amongst them have followed this with a pause, and then, with a look at the date on their watch, have exclaimed ‘San Fermin!’ This is the most famous fiesta in Spain, where the bulls run amongst the crowds in the streets, and we’re hoping to make it to Pamplona in time.