Portomarín

Last night I wondered if I was making a fuss about nothing but this morning my ankle was still very sore. I felt really emotional. After Fiona had set off, I walked to the village church which is about a kilometre away to see how it would fare and was able to confirm to myself that it really hurt. I stayed a while in the church and felt how, in the end, despite the support of friends and family, we have to face life’s challenges, big and small, for ourselves and I wondered whether this sense of individual vulnerability is the source of faith. Then I walked against the flow of pilgrims back to our albergue and found myself wishing other people ‘Buen Camino’ in a strange role reversal after 5 weeks of walking the right way.
My taxi arrived reliably at 9am and I was driven to Portomarin.
I found the trip to the physiotherapist surprisingly painful. It occurred to me while Nurinha, my Spanish physio, was poking ruthlessly at the most tender points that, while I’ve financed many visits to physios (for my children), until now I have never attended one myself. When the pain seemed unreasonable I tried to gain perspective by thinking of Cromwell in the Tower facing the prospect of being burnt as a heretic or disembowelled as a traitor (I have at last reached this stage of The Mirror and the Light. And in case anyone is in doubt, in the end he was lucky enough to be beheaded, which was considered a mercy in those brutal days).
So, all things being relative, I coped with 45 minutes of physiotherapy and at the end of the session I was taped up quite extensively and sent on my way. Nurinha and I struggled to communicate, neither of us being linguists, but she seemed to think I should continue walking if the pain was 3 out of 10 and get a taxi if it rose beyond that level.
After a trip to the pharmacy, a coffee and a look at Portomarin’s Romanesque church, I decided to begin the walk to our destination. One curious fact about Portomarin is that the original village was deliberately flooded by the municipal authorities and its important buildings painstakingly reassembled at its current location, uphill from the original site, in 1962. This included a 12th century Romanesque church.
Fiona and Anna were close to Portomarin when I was ready to set out. Unlike me, they had passed the sign that told them there was only another 100kms to Santiago! I reckoned I would walk more slowly than they would, so decided I was better getting a head start.
The day was overcast and the walk nice but never amazing - for a lot of the way there was forest on one side and a road on the other. So, while it was easy walking and I was grateful for this, it was not spectacular.
When Fiona arrived at Gonzar, the little village where we are staying tonight, we went together to the Gonzar hostel and had a shared lunch of padron peppers, goats cheese salad and chips. And then, despite having only walked about 12 kms in total today, I napped for an hour.
After a shower we met Anna for dinner. It hardly seemed necessary to eat again but I managed nonetheless. Looking forward to doing a proper day’s walking!Läs mer