Day 9: Bilbao – Ontón(22,6k)
- Frida Stavenow
- Sep 18, 2022
- 3 min read
Day 8 is a success. I give my feet a rest and stay in the hostel writing until late afternoon, when GIB joins me for a walk to the Guggenheim. Then we have drinks, food, fun. It’s really nice to talk to someone who’s as open as me, whether that’s a good thing or not. And Gertrude shows up!
The next day I wake up hungover and late. Gertrude is taking the metro to the end of town but GIB, who is now of enough importance to deserve his own name, that is to say, pseudonym, so let’s call him Ralph, wants to walk. I want to take the metro but I also want to chat to Ralph, so I silently talk myself into doing the same. Here to walk not ride etc. This does mean we’ll get to the Pobleño donativo very late though, and there are no cheap options around. But then, I remind myself – this is the pilgrim spirit. Trust that the Camino will provide.
My girl Louise came to hang
We start walking out of town. I am excited to walk with Ralph and continue the conversations we started yesterday, but my mind can’t let go of the accommodation problem. I am not present. I keep glancing at my phone to see if we – or I – could still take the metro. In the end, I decide that this is no way to live. As much as I want to continue our psychosexual bonding, I want to be there for it. And I’m not. So I stop us at a park and come up with a new plan: he walks so he won’t feel like a cheat, and I take my looser morals on a train to the edge of town and then walk the remaining 20k to Ontón, where two other friends have also booked in for the night. We have surfing plans!
I call up the albergue to check if they have beds, and the woman on the phone is so unbelievably nice that I instantly feel I’ve made the right choice. Ralph is disappointed but I reassure him we’ll have a much nicer time talking tomorrow along the beautiful coastline with no stress. We separate, he walks off, and I get on the metro where I put in my headphones for the first time since starting the Camino and leave the big city to the seductive soundtrack of Lana del Rey. It’s my farewell to urbanity for the foreseeable future, and I feel content, responsible and free.
Cut to: evening at the albergue
Oh man, writing is hard. Every time I sit down to do it, someone interesting comes up. Now I’m in Ontón, where I plonked myself down at a shaded table to write all about my day hiking past passion fruit bushes with my new cool girl gang (who, after getting up at six, caught me just as I was leaving Portugalete metro station, upon which they, fully justifiably, commented: “We are not talking to you for at least two hours.”) and then being caught up with by Ralph, but how can I do that when there are new faces around the table and they also turn out to pretty much belong to the Irish Illuminati? Well, I can’t, or I couldn’t, but now I’ve literally hid behind a corner to sit down and continue the backlog, as a whole day spent on blog maintenance yesterday only got me up to day one. Well at least I’ll have day nine done when it gets here. At least until dinner, which is in an hour and which looks set to be a sociable, vino-filled affair.
Today was great. I loved hiking with my new smart, funny and adventurous girl gang, and then Ralph and I got two hours to chat from the beach to the albergue, which we spent on male versus female prostitution, the birth of queer sexuality, gay versus straight sex parties, and that time I had to help a stray dog give birth in Extremadura. It was super fun and tomorrow it seems we are hiking to a campground by the beach where you can sleep outside. Oh, also today we said goodbye to Basque Country, and entered Cantabria – eskerrik asko, Euskadi!
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