Day 34: Castro to Fonsagrada (22,3k)

On Day 33, I walk into Galicia and make a beautiful connection with a girl I’ve clocked a few days previous, in Tineo, a loud and pretty surf chick whom I’d immediately categorized as too cool for me. But like so many times before, the Camino helps you peel off the layers of social posturing that in normal life keep us separate, and after only a half hour of walking together I can tell that this girl is fam, tribe, cut from the same cloth as everyone I love. My type: slightly messed up, but passionate, and ceaselessly exploring. She has travelled around Baja California Sur in an RV, spent three months living with a Shuar family in the Ecuadorian jungle while doing research for her dissertation on white people’s impact on ayahuasca-using cultures, lives between Buenos Aires, London and Miami, and talks at a thousand miles per hour about all these adventures and more. She’s basically more me than me.

It’s really nice to connect so strongly with a female energy on the Camino, and the two hours we walk together pass very quickly as we talk about our relationship patterns, the differences between gut feeling and social conditioning, attachment styles, disconnecting self-worth from our work, Mexico, self-defense breakups, stress, how grandmother ayahuasca has shown us that healing doesn’t have to be painful, and so on and so forth. Interestingly, she has just come from Ibiza, and fully supports my plan of moving there to eat mushrooms, swim in turquoise waters and write failing novels until I die.

Also, she takes a suitably dramatic photo of me as I ceremoniously enter this fourth and final part of my journey.

It’s a long but easy walk. Pretty views. Strong winds. It feels appropriate to enter the final province. Time to tie up the threads, assimilate the learnings, integrate the parts.

Yet again, that word. Synthesis.

Hills like blue elephants, venga

#synthesis #faith #Galicia #CaminodelNorte #ayahuasca #travel #wilderness #sisterhood #CaminodeSantiago