Day 5 Morga to Bilbao

Day 5 was another long day. According to our book it should have been a day and a half walk, but we opted to walk the 31.7km (19.9mi, 52.8Vtn) in one day so that we could stop in Bilboa, the largest and most industrialized city of the Basque Country.

(NB: Apologies for this poorly written post, I have been rather busy with the move and starting school)

Highlights of the day include loosing my group because I decided to start walking with the slower group, but after an hour I realized it hurt me more to walk slower than to speed up. When I sped to catch the other group, I would occasionally ask passer-byers if they had seen a group of about 5 pilgrims. For quite some time (around 2 hours) I was told consistently that they were about half an hour ahead of me. I tried to peek into any places of business so as to not pass them. After a while, people stopped telling me that they were a half-hour ahead, but instead that I was the first pilgrim they had seen that day. Nonetheless, I decided to continue at my fast pace in hopes of catching up with the others, because I did not have their phone numbers and did not know how to meet up with them otherwise. After crossing on an overpass over the national highway, I wound my way up and down a hill. As I began my descent (yes, I had to look up how to spell that word in English) I was again told that there was a group about a half hour ahead of me, but that they only had 4 people, not 5 as I had asked. So, to see if maybe it was just part of my group, I began to describe the 2 girls and 2 or 3 guys walking together. The gentleman told me that there was only one girl in the group, but when I said it must not be the group I´m looking for he insisted it was. He was very adamant that it was my group. Eventually, though he admitted that he had not seen them, only heard their voices.

In the end, I did not find the group, but I did find a WiFi Zone and I e-mailed them my phone number, and they called and we met up the following day. I took the city bus to the hostel, because I had no idea how to get there on foot, and I was later joined by a swedish couple (who did acupuncture while we waited for the hospitalero), Lourdes, Becky and her new friend Asia (pronounces ah-shah)

I spent about 2 hours waiting for the hospitalero, the first half of which I was by myself, so I tried to call home and give my mom instructions for calling me via skype, but unfortunately that did not work.

When we met the hospitalero, he was very nice and hospitable, playing music for us, offering us food and giving us advice for the evening. Later, Becky Asia and I went into the city to check out the Plaza Mayor (first picture), Guggenheim (below) and to get kebabs! All in all, not a terrible day.

Day 4 Markina to Morga

We knew day 4 would be a long day because we stopped early the day before, and we had made a reservation at a private albergue 7km beyond the suggested destination. So even though we were set to walk 31km (20 miles, 51 Vaticans) we did not have to rush, because we had beds waiting for us at the destination.

The first leg of the day was cloudy, not well marked and mostly up a gradual hill through small towns on a national road (similar to US-20 or US-7). One interesting thing about the hill was that it took us through the small town of Bolivar, where the grandparents of Simón Bolivar were from. At the top of the hill we found goats and the beautiful monastery where some of my friends had spent the previous night. On the way back down, we got a break from walking on pavement and got to walk down a trail for a while. After I fell on some wet rocks, my friend Javi lent me one of his walking sticks, which was very helpful. When we got to the bottom of the hill it was raining enough that many of us decided to stop to change socks and take a short break. During the break a fellow traveller gave me a friends towel that was left in the hostel the night before, we shared information about our various blisters and other minor injuries and continued walking.

The next stop of the day was in the town of Gernika (Basque spelling, when the spelling of a proper noun changes I will try to use the name used in the local language, not in Castillian Spanish or English), which has been an import city for the Basque people for centuries. For many years Gernika was the home of their Casa de las Juntas, a precursor for today´s parliament in the Basque Country. Representatives from all over the region would meet at the tree (below) to discuss the issues and come to agreements on how to deal with problems of the area. By the 20th Century, Gernika became less important politically as other cities grew larger, but remained the symbolic center of the Basque region. During the Spanish Civil War, the people of Gernika were supporters of the Republic (anti-Franco). Franco feared an uprising from the Basques and so he asked his ally Hitler (who had new bombs he wanted to test out) to bomb Gernika. Hitler was instructed not to focus on the military headquarters, but instead to focus on communal buildings. It is often said that he specifically target mothers and children. Well more than half of the cities buildings were destroyed over the span of the one attack.

Today, Gernika is famous because of the painting of the same name made by Pablo Picasso depicting the effects of war on the people of his country (despite what many people have told me, Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Riuz y Picasso (his full name). The Gernika painting can be found in Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. A replica can be found in a plaza in Gernika, along with many student-made posters promoting peace, as Gernika is now known as the Ciudad de la Paz (City of Peace).

Because of Gernika´s importance, I decided that when many of my friends continued walking, I would stay back in Gernika and take myself on a tour after having a Menú del Día (3 course meal with beverages for 10€, approx $13US) with my friends as they walked on ahead to Morga. While on my tour, I ran into the same group of pilgrims walking without backpacks (sin mochilleros) that we saw the night before. I asked were they were headed, because we were hoping to not be staying in the same hostel as them and thus racing for beds the next day. They told me they would be walking to Bilbao, another 30+ kms away. It was at this point that I realized that they were not walking the whole way either. It was very hard for me and my friends to not judge them, but by the end of the Camino, we all realized that we all are doing what our bodies and our calendars allow, we cannot do more, and we should assume the same of everyone else. With that in mind I would like to send a belated apology towards the sin mochilleros of the Camino.

(Oak tree where meetings were traditionally held)

(Casa de Las Juntas)

Around 5 o´clock I started to walk towards Morga with my friend Lourdes as a few of our friends who were fighting particularly nasty blisters rested in Gernika in hopes of recovering and catching up with us later. Lourdes and I bought cookies and bread for the walk. It did not take long for Lourdes to insist that I walk at my own pace and leave her behind. I tried insisting that I walk with her, but I can only say no to a spanish woman (and a friend) so many times before I give in. So I left Lourdes behind for a few hours.

At the top of a hill, I had not seen any other pilgrims for some time, so I asked a woman in her garden how far to Morga. She insisted that at most I had 2kms left. This motivated me and I started to walk a little bit faster. Shortly after, the arrow pointed left at a fork in the road, so I turned to be greeted by a barbed wire fence that I had to go under. I was tempted to limbo under, because the only line of barbs was about 1 meter off the ground. Instead, I decided to side crawl underneath. Shortly after the barbed wire, I was confronted by 3 camino dogs who were not on leashes, and decided to block my path. Earlier that day I had been talking to my friend Barbara about what to do in such events. So, I mentally cursed the owners who refused to leash or fence their dogs despite knowing that thirty or so people pass by there on foot EVERY DAY and continued walking without making eye-contact with the dogs. At the bottom of another hill I went through a tunnel beneath a highway which lead me to another house with a garden and a couple in their field. I also found arrows pointing in two different directions and asked them if they knew which way to the albergue. They informed me that there were two. One, apparently was very close, and the other they said that if I wanted to go there I would die because it was so far away. They offered to call the number I had to see which one had my reservation. Luckily for me, it was the nearer one, so I turned left and walked up the next hill. On the hill a few of the signs for the albergue were mislabeled, so I had to resort to pulling over 2 bikers, 3 cars (one told me the albergue I was looking for was at least 20kms/12 miles away) and 2 women walking with their children. I got lost for at least half an hour (apparently on the correct path the entire time) and was tempted to just lay down and sleep on the side of the road in the woods, but eventually after about 2 hours I saw a sign that said "Albergue 250m" on the road. It wound up being closer to 1km and 10 minutes, but I made it to the albergue. Ten minutes later, I got the first of two phone calls from Lourdes insisting she was lost. Luckily, I knew where she was and gave her instructions, and eventually put on my sandals and walked back to her. Once we were both in the albergue and showered, we sat down for the dinner provided for us by the hospitaleros (the couple running the albergue) as the blind man and his wife arrived, finally we were all there.

During dinner we were graced with a song by a swiss friend of ours as his form of a fair well, as he was going to abandonar the Camino due to his injuries and return home.

After dinner, there was nothing left but to get some well deserved sleep.