Day 32: Borres to Berducedo (26,5k, but OVER A MOUNTAIN)
- Frida Stavenow
- Oct 8, 2022
- 4 min read
Day 32 is beautiful, enchanted, hard. We decide to go via Hospitales, so all books and apps tell us to load up on supplies and stick together. Hence, somewhat idealistically, me and Waffles leave Borres together and start making our way up the mountain. The fog is total and complete. White, everywhere.
It gets hard fast. But also magical. Within an hour, my penchant for stopping every few steps to photograph spiderwebs proves difficult to combine with Waffles’ penchant for charging up hills like the young bull he is. So we separate, and I slow down significantly, spending the next several hours walking so quietly my feet barely seem to touch the ground.
I walk through misty pine forests, lush green plains of black trees twisted by winds and years. I can’t see more than ten metres ahead or back, meaning that even if I’m not actually alone I feel it.
The hills are relentless. I’m wearing my mother’s long-sleeved top of wool and silk beneath my brother-in-law’s snowboarding fleece, and despite the cold I’m boiling. Dripping with sweat.
Around eleven I sit down beneath a tree to eat some chocolate, and within seconds, I’m freezing. I consider changing my top, but can’t even imagine taking off a layer in the wet, cold air. So I keep on my sweat-soaked clothes as I get back up, and after not even a minute of walking I’m warmed up again.
After a while, the sun starts breaking through the mist, and magically, a world around me is revealed. Endless fields on both sides filled with purple heather, yellow broom, bright lilac mountain flowers I don’t know the name of. Slowly, some mountaintops become discernible above the mist. And cows. So many cows. Were they here the whole time?
I am careful not to drink too much water, but the closer I get to 18k, the more I indulge. I also don’t eat, thinking I’ll wait until I’m by the water fountain so I can drink up and then refill before moving on.
When I finally walk into the tiny mountain village of Montefurado, consisting of five ancient stone buildings that used to be the pilgrim’s hospital, I’m both starving and parched. With the climb and the mist and the cows and the thoughts I feel like I’ve been through another world, and the sight of the water fountain is an almost surreal relief.
I walk over and unscrew the cork from my bottle, when a roar is heard from within the nearest house.
“Camino allá!” comes out of the roar.
I turn around to see a rabid, grey-haired man slam open his doors. The expression on his face reminds me of how Joyce Maynard described the look on JD Salinger’s face when she first contradicted him: “like someone who’d bitten into an apple and found it full of maggots.”
“No aquí. Allá!” He points with his whole arm to the path a few meters away.
The Camino. There. Not here.
“This is private property!” he barks. He really looks very angry.
“And the water?” I ask.
“For us!” he shouts. “Not you!”
“Could I please just refill my water bottle?”
“No! Leave now!”
Well, nothing doing there. He slams the doors shut again and disappears back into his house. I look at the tap. At my almost-empty water bottle. In the end, I’m too terrified of what Mountain Troll Man might do to me if I steal his water, so I walk on without it, stopping only once I’m a safe distance away for a dry lunch on a green hillside.
The sun has come out fully now, and I lie down in the grass for a while after eating, watching as everyone I passed the previous half hour passes me again. Then I get back up and overtake them all again (hola, Buen Camino) until I reach a church with – praise the lords – a public water fountain outside it.
Everyone’s here. It’s like the watering hole of the savannah in Lion King.
And everyone’s freaking out about accommodation. Just like I promised I wouldn’t. Berducedo is fully booked! La Mesa is fully booked! People have been phoning three places, four places. Nothing! It’s all fully booked!
When the bookers hear I don’t have a reservation, they all get on their apps, pull out their guidebooks. They’ll find me something. But I tell them not to worry, that I’m aiming for the muni in Berducedes that doesn’t take bookings, that I’m sure I’ll be fine.
I am not sure I’ll be fine, so once I manage to convince everyone else that I will be, I go into top gear. For the third time that day, I pass about twenty pilgrims until I finally arrive, aching and steaming, at the Berducedo muni around three in the afternoon.
Waffles is coolly waiting in the common room. There’s tons of beds. The place is beautiful. The place is €6 a night. Really, I need to chill out.
I make my bed, nap, try to get my blog unlocked. Then we buy some food and cook an ambitious blue cheese pasta with the finest canned goods that Spanish convenience stores can offer (peas, peppers, mushrooms). We share our food with a kindly Greek man who’s hiking in jeans and a Lithuanian farmer with a braid in his beard who tells us about meeting a magic weed-smoking Spaniard in the woods at five thirty that morning. The farmer ends up giving us some weed and Waffles ends up giving the Greek his spare hiking trousers. Oh, how I love the Camino economy. Waffles, Beard Braid and I get significantly high in the garden, and I fall asleep after watching the first nine minutes of the movie adaptation of “Wild.” What a perfect day.
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