Walking The Lighthouse Way - Days 0.1 and 0.2

Ever since Peter went running with Nick in Galicia he has wanted to go back there. They turned a 9 day walk into a 5 day run, covering 115 miles, skipping 4 of the hotels and doing arduous long days in the early September heat. You can read all about it here.

Peter loved the landscape and he also liked the experience of staying in a new hotel every night - not quite like most of our holidays. Our usual MO has been either camping or staying in the cheapest accommodation we can find. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that time's arrow does indeed only go in one direction and that if you want to push the boat out it's best not to wait too long. That's a mess of metaphors isn't it? You wouldn't want to wait for time's arrow to push the boat out. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that Peter is just turning 60 and I've had a train wreck of a year physically, so we decided to just go for it. By going for it I mean the full 9 day walking holiday.

Somehow I had it in my head that it would be about 10 miles a day, and I've been walking a fair bit, usually in the region of 7 miles, so it didn't seem like that much of a jump up.  Actually the easy days were 10+ miles and the other days were further, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I somehow or other managed to turn my ankle 5 days before we were due to leave, putting a queasy question mark over the whole thing and making me feel like I must be cursed by evil entities. 

There were other annoyances before leaving, I won't bore you with all of them. Easyjet's hand luggage size limits were one thing and Spanish airport strikes planned for our day of travel were just some of them. We found we could get a fairly cheap direct flight the day before we had planned to travel, minimising our chances of getting stuck in Stansted airport for 3 days or arriving in Spain with no luggage, so we did that.

It meant we had an extra evening in Santiago de Campostela, and then a whole free day the next day in Malpica where the official walking started from.

So there are two Day 0s. I'm going to number the days because this is going to take a lot of blogging and you're going to love it so much you will want to be able to do it in chunks and come back and find where you'd got to.

So here we go;

Day 0.1

So the day before we had intended to fly out we got a leisurely afternoon flight which only took a little over 2 hours. The threat of strike action had made us nervous about booking a room in Santiago de Campostela until we were really sure we'd be flying, so I booked somewhere central with my phone once we were at our boarding gate. This turned out to be a fairly cute little hostel called Casa Douro. The friendly reception made up for the enormously hot, windowless room we slept in.

We dumped off our stuff at the hostel and then wandered around in the lowering light, getting lost, looking at buildings and getting something to eat.

We have recently been or nearly been vegan. There are lots of good reasons for not eating our friends the animals but the thing that had swung it was watching a couple of films on plant-based eating and why you would do it and the general message was you would do it because you'll feel much better and heal much more quickly. That's what sold it to me. 

Gong to Spain, though, you might as well hang your Vegan cape on the back of the door for the duration. I'd done some googling and saw many claims that this just wasn't true in Spain any more - but we found different. On Foot holidays had asked if we had any dietary restrictions, and we'd made it clear that really they were preferences not requirements. They said that wouldn't be any problem at all but there was only one hotel who even asked us about it - the reason being - we could have meat or fish, but she'd got the fish in specially because she heard we were vegetarians. The least meat you can have is just tuna in a simple salad. A mixed salad has all kinds of goodies - boiled eggs, tuna and ham. We were not going to spend the whole holiday having a problem with the way Spanish people eat, so we just relaxed. Our belts relaxed a notch or two as well. I don't usually drink much but, well you've guessed it - that relaxed as well.

So this first evening, after looking in the window of many restaurants and not being able to figure out just quite where we fit, we settled on one of these clean, well-lighted cafes. It was nearly full and there was one very busy, but friendly little old Spanish waitress. She put us in two of the places of a table for four, at which already sat a pensive looking student. We didn't mean to alienate the student and maybe we didn't, but we were more concerned about figuring out what to eat and getting some beers to help us with our culture shock. She picked at her food silently while staring at her phone and then paid and left having eaten nearly nothing. We, in the meantime, had got several beers and I was tucking into a big salmon and an enormous portion of chips. I can't remember what Peter had. When another woman came and sat where the student had sat, we paid her more attention - maybe out of guilt. She turned out to be a pilgrim. 

I knew that there was a big walk - The Camino de Santiago - which was a kind of a pilgrimage - but I didn't think our walk, the Lighthouse Way, making its way down the west coast of Spain, had anything to do with that. This lady, however, had recently come back from the Lighthouse Way which she had been doing as a pilgrimage. She said, cryptically, that she had had to approach the same lighthouse 3 times before she got an answer to her question.

Aha.

So you could ask questions. That was interesting.

On Foot Holidays had given us a physical agenda for our walk, but they had not given us a spiritual one.

After the food we thought a wee wine might be nice, so we went into a likely looking bar and asked for one. It was evident to me that we had said or done something wrong as the previously open visage of the bar-man immediately closed down into a scowl - but anyway he poured us a couple of glasses of red and we sat outside, in the now dark, marvelling at how it was still nice and warm. After this we made our way back to Casa Douro and slept surprisingly well in our hot, dark, windowless room.

Day 0.2

On our 2nd pre-walk day, we had to get to Malpica. Our virtual guide Aznar (we were in touch by Whatsapp, but never met him.) graciously rearranged the taxi that was originally meant to collect us from the airport to collect us from Santiago instead. The taxi driver, whose English was about igual que our Spanish, told us it was unseasonably warm and had quite recently been pissing down. Well words like that. Our pilgrim lady from the night before had also mentioned that she had had 3 days of hard rain. Neither of us were too taken with the idea of walking in a hard rain so we hoped our luck would hold, and it mostly did. If anything, it was a little too hot for the first couple of days - my phone said it was 29 degrees. When we got to Malpica our hotel room wasn't ready yet so we dumped off our big bag and went out to explore.

A LITTLE MORE MUCKING ABOUT IN SANTIAGO,

breakfast on the terrace at Casa Douro.

MALPICA

In Malpica we went out looking for lunch and beer, and then butterflies, and then more food. To Peter's intense delight we came upon a clouded yellow and a Swallowtail butterfly, both of which I think I failed to photograph. I was laughing at Peter for how little detail of he and Nick's holiday he could remember, but I am finding the same. I have like a big, collage of things that happened in my head, and most of them I'm not too sure just where they happened or when. We ate out on a near daily basis and that has taken up quite a lot of my head-space. I think it was in Malpica that lots of places were closed and Aznar had said there was a cafe that was cheap and cheerful but pretty good that was always open. This was Cafe Bar Ybarra. The waitress woman was super friendly and gave us some pies to eat with our beers while we were trying to make sense of the menu. I was speaking my smattering of Duolingo spanish, so came in for the most attention which got intense. We had kind of parsed out what things were and were ready to make a tentative order but the waitress wasn't satisfied with the degree of clarity we had about what we were getting so she enlisted other customers in the restaurant to come over to the table to tell us. Soon there was a conference of people with google translate on their phones all telling me what each of the dishes was.  Well it seemed like that. The irony is I can't remember what I had. Maybe it was the flaming mixed salad again. It was too much attention. I needed a drink. So I had one.