Day 25: Villaviciosa to Pola de Siero (29,1k)
- Frida Stavenow
- Oct 3, 2022
- 5 min read
After Villaviciosa, the Camino splits. I can choose to continue the Norte along the coast, or I can take the Camino Primitivo into the mountains. All I know is that the Primitivo is “beautiful, but very hard,” and yet I have felt since day one that this is the path I’m going to choose.
So I do. And up we go. Not even an hour in, I can tell the Primitivo will be a whole different beast to Norte. No more sweeping sandy beaches. No more bars every ten kilometers, no more chill flat strolls, no more new friendships shuffle. In three hours of walking, I do not see a soul. Nor water fountain. Forget about bar. My guidebook had said there was a bar at 13k, by a monastery, but when I get there the monastery is being repaired and the bar looks like a graveyard.
I’m so hungry. I’m so tired. The rains have actually passed and the sun comes out around ten, but inside, storms are still raging. After yesterday’s rejection my mind is a witch’s cauldron of what’s popularly referred to as “negative self-talk,” but which, when it comes, just feels like truth.
All I can do is keep walking. Hope that it will wash out.
The weather remains stable. Instead, I feel that the metaphors on the Primitivo will come from the mountains. What goes up must come down, and every time the trail slopes even gently downwards I am very aware also if it’s counterpart: what goes down must, inevitably, go back up. Specifically, this fucking path. Downhill walking is procrastinated work at best, but more often than not, simply work undone.
By eleven I’ve pretty much decided to do this for two days only and then take the option to return from Oviedo to chicken-shit Norte. Screw walking across endless hills with no friends.
But then I get over the crest, and am immediately rewarded with Evian bottle views. There’s a spiritual metaphor in there somewhere, but I’m too tired to find it. Instead, I focus on the green hills around me, the apples, walnuts, donkeys and valleys. At the top of a hill, I find this guy, chilling hard with his view:
Walking on a flat road feels almost like flying, the way your arms would seem to magically lift after you stepped out of the doorway where you’d been pressing them against the frame as a kid. No? Just me?
Anyway, the towns are incredibly cute. I see about thirty cats, and a bunch of baby goats. I’m starving, but luckily you can eat most of Asturias itself and so get by on picking walnuts, figs, blackberries, apples and fennel. Actually, the fennel tastes like poison. Maybe you’re not meant to eat only fronds.
After about one billion kilometres, I finally get to an open bar in a tiny town called Cárcava. It’s one o’clock by now but I still order my breakfast combo of tortilla and cafe con leche. At €2,80, it’s cheap, warming and filling.
But the bar has a super strange vibe. I’m the only female in there and also the only human under fifty. Most of the men are in worker clothes and boots. All of them are drunk and smoking. Suddenly, the area doesn’t seem so idyllic.
I reach Vega, my halfway point, at two. Everything hurts, and my mind is not being kind to me. On the one hand, I wanted this: to walk until I’d thought all the usual thoughts, so I could get to the supposed “truth” underneath. On the other, the road today feels interminable and several times I’m so depressed I feel like lying down in a ditch and never getting up again. So I crack. I put on a podcast.
My choice is another consequence of Instagram’s algorithm, as yesterday it showed me this clip:
I didn’t even recognise Arya Stark. I didn’t even have the sound on. I could just see that this girl was crying for real and it intrigued me, so now I am listening to Maisie Williams talking about her traumatic childhood, anxiety and self-hate. Yay, soul twins! No but for real, listening to a superstar saying she feels lots of the same things I feel does help. Life is fucking hard. Struggling is a thing even if you’re hugely successful.
It’s half five when I finally get to La Pola Siero. I haven’t seen a pilgrim all day and while part of me welcomes this new solitary vibe, another definitely wonders if choosing Primitivo was a terrible mistake. All my friends are now on another route, or way ahead. Will I walk the rest of my Camino alone?
But then, this is part of it. Meet people and let them go. It’s a part I like, I remind myself. Because new people always come. Who knows who I’ll meet in the albergue?
Cut to: albergue. Not only is it entirely abandoned; it’s locked. Not even a hospitalero. I walk around the back. Also locked. All curtains drawn. I call the number on the front door. A man shouts about a key and a postbox, I think. I do not understand him. He starts shouting in German instead. It doesn’t help.
Finally, I figure out where the key is and enter the opening scene of The Shining II. I am ALONE at the albergue. It is huge. There are creepy statues and a bunch of locked doors. Will the hospitalero come? Will someone else come? Should I lock the door? What does it feel like to get axe-murdered?
Thankfully, I don’t have to find out the answers to these questions as, after a half hour, I am joined by a couple from Barcelona and then a couple from Madrid. Around eight thirty, the hospitalero also shows up to give the Madridians, who’ve been waiting since six, their beds. They also can’t understand him, which makes me feel better about my previous phone fail. But eventually, we all get used to each other’s voices and he shows us around the space we’ve been in for the last three hours.
“The lights are all digital,” he says and pauses, very pleased with himself, for effect. He wiggles his hand. “With the finger.”
Hilarious, Roberto.
When I finally go to bed I check the blog. Still down. Still no email from tumblr. I mean really, tumblr? Is raincoat and hot pants that offensive? Raincoat and no pants I’d get. That’s a felony waiting to happen. But raincoat and hot pants is basically just an Amsterdam hipster’s outfit?
Oh well. Maybe it’s all part of the lesson in letting go of results. I am now literally writing into a void. Will I continue?
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