People did the walk of St James (the Way of Santiago) for various reasons. My friends and I did 'only' the minimum requirement to get the certificate. We walked for 100km from Sarria to Santiago for 5 days. Along the way, we met some people who walked for various reasons. Well, we didn't meet anyone who did the walk to lose weight like in the movie "The Way", but we met some other people who for some reasons felt that it's time to think more about their life and decided to walk this path.
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| Can you see how hot was the first day?? |
We delivered our second luggage (all necessities for Madrid & Rome trip) from Sarria to Santiago. It took a little bit more time so we only officially started walking around 10.30 am 'only' with our necessities for 5 days. We aimed not to stop for any lunch. However, around 2pm we were only halfway so our guide suspected that we would reach Portomarin (our first stop) quite late. We decided to have lunch and it was the best lunch during our 5-day-walk!
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| At the beginning of the walk, so excited to see an albergue called "Don Alvaro Albergue" |
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| Romanic style of church |
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| 110 km away from Santiago. How to read this sign: we knew that on the first day, the distance was around 23km. Our end point (Portomarin) was at km89. It means we had 21km more to go when we saw this sign. |
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| free view without skyscrapers, cool! |
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| dying sunflowers. Better than nothing! We thought we couldn't find sunflowers because we only started our journey at Sarria |
The first day walk was quite hot. We were enthusiastic in taking many
photos (= walked slower) but the heat made me doubt whether I could
continue walking even though it was only my second hour of walking. I
was really happy when we decided to stop and have lunch. It was where I
got my first stamp too.
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| Interior of the restaurant where we had our lunch. 10 Euro for first course + second course + water/wine + dessert. The portion was too big for one person so I shared with someone else. |
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| Bird nest! I've never seen bird nest this close (oops!) |
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| Hydrangea, everywhere at street side! (usually I only saw it sold at florist with an expensive price >.<) |
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When we reached the km 91.5, (it means around 4km before we reached
Portomarin), we stopped just to get a stamp. It was drizzling already at
that time. That suddenly the rain was getting heavier!!! I was with
three other girls and we decided to wait there. The rest of the group
arrived quite some time afterwards and they were all drenched. We were
singing a bit while waiting for the rain to get 'calmer' (--> back to
drizzle again) and decided to walk after quite some time.
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| Welcome to Portomarin!! The village was moved from here to the current town because they built a dam that would flood the whole village |
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| Ooops. Some more stairs to climb before reaching Albergue |
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| The Church of San Juan at Portomarin. It was moved brick by brick from the village and marked (each person was paid according to the number of bricks they moved up) |
We finally saw the bridge which indicated that we finally reached Portomarin, it was already around 7pm!!! Our guide said that we broke her record (as the slowest group so far; hahaha).
When we reached our hostel, it was better than we expected. It was clean and there were not too many people in a room like in the movie "The Way". We also spent time to dry our shoes by putting newspapers in our shoes and kept changing them until our shoes were a bit dry.
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| The Albergue where we stayed. Nice owner let us used the laundry free of charge! |
Remember our luggage that we sent to Santiago? The van would pass our
albergue too, so we had our last chance to dump more unnecessary things from our current 5-day-backpack. The result was a heavy black rubbish bag filled with all our stuff (from 10 of us). That's how much 'unnecessary things' we brought along with us on the first day. =P
More stories coming soon...
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