Day 27: Oviedo to Grado (30,1k)

Oh god what even happens on day 27? I start the real Camino Primitivo, and find it a lot more populated than the weird inbetweeny bit from Norte. I rub up against some more Datura. Find a sweet sign.

I walk hella kilometers. I find Waffles in a donativo in Grados. Fake Vegan has trudged on ahead to find his more primitive side. From 5pm on a Sunday Waffles and I try to find something to eat but this turns out to be harder than scoring weed while looking like a primary school teacher so in the end we have to wait until 8pm to eat the most disgusting series of fried foods you can imagine at a basic street cafe which ends up charging us €23 a head. No bueno. But drinking wine is fun and we make a new French friend. There’s a baby at the albergue. We meet a crazy Dutchman who’s doing the Camino with a carriage (that he pulls) and a car. This does not strike me as weird until the next day, when we have some yogurt and set off for Salas. But that’s a whole different post.

#shortposts #Datura #CaminodelNorte #travel #Asturias #hiking #CaminodeSantiago

Day 26: Pola de Siero to Oviedo (18,3k)

On Day 26, I dust myself off and get back on it. Skies are blue inside and out as I leave Pola de Siero, not axe-murdered and feeling pretty good about it, too.

I know I only have 15k to walk today, so already in the first town I stop for a cup of coffee. I open a new notebook and it pours out of me like Niagara Falls. I create plot beat tables, character portraits, graphs for emotional arcs. The bar plays Never Gonna Give You Up, Heaven Is a Place on Earth and A Little Respect. I order another coffee and look for jobs in the psychedelic industry in Europe. Most are in The Netherlands, which I’ve always thought of as too dark and cold. But maybe that’s just where it’s at? I remember a Dutch woman from my Medicine Wheel group who was giving mushroom ceremonies in Amsterdam. Maybe I could ask her about the climate? And then I remember – she just moved to Ibiza.

Ibiza!

Why haven’t I thought of Ibiza? Hippie, medicine-loving, gorgeous, hedonist Ibiza? Dutch Medicine Woman moved there to give her own mushroom ceremonies. It was always on the itinerary for the ayahuasca and peyote shamans I used to hang out with in London. There are mountains. Beaches. It’s Spanish-speaking, but not quite Spain. Doesn’t feel as tightly held in the oppressive claws of the Catholic Church as the mainland, which, despite my recent flirtation with the their teachings, is something I appreciate. I bet there’s even horses, probably living as wild and free as the ageing hippie population that I’m sure remains on the island since its 70’s heyday. How could I forget Ibiza?

When I finally walk out of El Berrón, I continue listening to 80’s New Wave and feel like my heart is about to explode. I probably can’t get a job as a mushroom translator (aka svamptolk, God it sounds better in Swedish) immediately and I doubt living in Ibiza is very easy if you can’t drive, but there are lots of English-teaching jobs, and driving schools. Teaching isn’t my end-game but it is something I can do in my sleep, know how to make money from and won’t have to turn a half-blind eye to values-wise. Like I would with, say, advertising, or really most full-time writing jobs. Then I can write my novel in the mornings, help in mushroom ceremonies at the weekends, spend my money on learning to drive and probably find a stable that needs their horses exercised, too. Why not just do that?

Why not just be happy?

Walking along a beautiful little stream while listening to The Cure and seeing the novel take shape like a developing photograph in my brain I feel like this will be enough. Even if I never get a novel published, how can I stop writing when it makes me feel like I’ve got pure MDMA coursing through my system? Clearly, for all my desire to be published and recognised and become worthy of love, writing is also, for me, its own reward. Something that I enjoy and that makes me feel good. Like other people go sailing, or play squash, or binge-watch Game of Thrones. A hobby.

Seen like that, publication doesn’t matter. I write because I like it. Which is enough to keep doing it, for ever.

So On Day 26 I decide to move to Ibiza to teach English and eat mushrooms and swim in turquoise seas and write failing novels until I die. I know on Day 23 or something I decided to move to Mexico and be a svamptolk but this is clearly much better! Ibiza is in Europe! Okay an island so I’d still have to fly but less climate guilt than Mexico still! And I have the right to work! And healthcare! And it’s so close to my family it barely even counts as running away!

Which all begs the question: how is there a thriving antidepressants industry, when you can just get another cup of coffee!?

#mania #caffeinemakestheworldgoround

The rest of the walk is peaceful and sunny. More donkeys. Rivers. Bridges. More cute houses on stilts. Right before Oviedo things get industrial but I break it up by stopping at a cafe for a beer and a tuna sandwich. €3,60.

In Oviedo awaits a great surprise – Waffles and Fake Vegan have taken a rest day, and are still there! I will not have to spend the rest of my life Camino in solitude! I have a shower and we put on some laundry to celebrate our reunion. Fake Vegan, who contrary to me is all socialled-out, goes to eat some solitary chorizo in the cathedral while Waffles and I go to a bar where we drink beer (me) and red wine (him) and talk about stream-of-consciousness writing versus outlines.

And then, even though we have to be back at the asylum-looking albergue just forty-five minutes later, we decide to get stoned. I haven’t smoked since Gertrude and I had Mexican food which feels like ages ago, and though I’m a little apprehensive to do it with someone I barely know, my gut says Waffles is a good smoking partner. And he is. We talk about tree spirits and what’s a spirit and do we actually see these things or are they projections and can you ever, then, really learn anything or is magic real? Stoner stuff. We go back to the albergue and eat an epic tomato, mozzarella, avocado and pesto sandwich and then I go back to my Girl, Interrupted bedroom and finally watch the Michael Pollan episode about LSD.

I think magic is real.

#writing #caffeinemakestheworldgoround #soulsearching #ceremony #teaching #storystructure #CaminodelNorte #ayahuasca #magicmushrooms #travel #MichaelPollan #mania #horses #Ibiza #HowtoChangeYourMind #magic #Asturias #plantmedicine #hiking #CaminodeSantiago #SantaMaria

Day 25: Villaviciosa to Pola de Siero (29,1k)

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:

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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?

#soulsearching #selfflagellation #trauma #CaminodelNorte #travel #anxiety #hiking #CaminodeSantiago #artanxiety