Day 4 – Campiello – Berducedo – 30km

 

First of all let me apologise for the lack of blog yesterday weirdly the Spanish have not prioritized fibre internet in the mountains and WiFi is circa 2002 style.

So the albergue last night did a perigrino menu for 10 euro normally a delight or options and you pick what you want. This albergue did it differently, we starting with empananda’s a sort of tuna filling pastry, followed by some noodle soup all ok to this point then there was more soup this time a beef lentil broth that looked a bit weird but tasted ok then all of a sudden there was another two bowls of a broth that had chroizo veg and some sort of prawns and God knows what else but after 3 bowls of soup we thought we were in trouble and it was a soup’ocolyose and that was all that was coming.

Jessica the bonkers German was laughing lots as you can see above.

It’s fun eating with people from different places to see the reaction to the food.

Thankfully the pork and chips came next and all was well in the world followed by some cold sweet rice pudding.

So back to the day at hand so to explain today is the toughest day on any Camino, so the guidebooks say anyway as the hospital route as it’s called is a steep ascent up a 1250m mountain with basically 27k of no services at all so no bars, no toilets, no shops and no water.

So we stocked up in the market and once again joined by Dominique aimed to get up to be on the Camino for 7 so we could do the 3k to be at the foot of the mountain and give it the beans once daylight broke. The alarms go off and me and Karen go about our now well drilled routine and set our bags down the other end of the albergue and sat down on a sofa pretty much ready to go and we got to watch Dominique clatter and clang everything in site with her headtorch lighting up the whole end of the room. We had to hold back laughing and went outside to finish putting the food in the bags and extra water. Dominique then came out and went back in leaving the door to slam. I think we will have to improve her Camino etiquette.

As expected in the mountains we got off to a misty start so headtorches, single track and spiders webs. We made good progress to the last village before the climb and ate some cake in preparation for the climb. It was a slog of course stopping every few hundred metres to catch your breathe on shale rock paths at a steep ascent seemingly going on forever as the mist wouldn’t let you see much up front. Then it would go flat and all you could see was the waymarkers. Then rise again and again and again. Only after a few breaks and some food did we make it to the top. Only for the mist to clear for a bit.

The path continued and dropped a little but very slowly we kept taking breaks and slogging on as the sun came out. We went through a nice Forrest and eventually reached our goal. We were pretty slow and when we got to the albergue the beds were all gone so we got a private room for 30 euro so not bad it was a little old school and we had a nice pilgrim menu. Dominique is now part of the team for sure and we have started our own Camino family seeing familiar faces over the days and the same faces at night. Was a tiring day but we are definitely getting more in the swing of things now.

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