So we escaped the hullabaloo of a collapsing government, an increasing volume of vociferous gammon, and an overexcitable media to head for the relative calm of the Galician coast. Fairly skipped out of the country, we did, in the hope for simple hiking adventures in the bright June sunshine of the Spanish countryside.
And it’s not like we didn’t have the odd warning on the way. Our first warning was a phone call next to the Ryanair gate at Stansted. I’d had an MRI scan a couple of weeks before, after going to my doctor and telling her that I was struggling to stand up if I’d sat down for any length of time. This phone call was from the triage doctor, following up on the scan, and asking if I’d had any further issues. Not really, I said, it’s just really painful and I look like I’m about ninety when I stand up. Incidentally, my mother, who has just actually turned 90, can easily beat me in the getting out of a chair without complaining stakes, particularly if it’s 6pm and time for a drink. Anyway, the lovely doctor said that he’d refer me to someone who could see me and the scan in the same place,, at the musculoskeletal (MSK) clinic and recommend some sort of intervention, which sounded ominous. Incidentally (again) – I saw my GP in May, had an MRI scan later that month, had this phone call mid June, and now have an appointment at the MSK clinic at the end of June. I absolutely bloody love the NHS. Anyway, at the end of the phone call, the lovely doctor told me that I’d better not do any walking between now and the MSK appointment. Ooops.
Second warning was the actual booking. We were due to walk the ‘Wild Atlantic Coast’. I didn’t really worry about what actually made it wild until we started. Maybe it was going to be the wild flowers, or the wild sense of abandon you felt as you skipped along it’s banks. Or maybe it was wild like a wilderness, a leafy green expanse of rolling green that we’d skip along as we held hands along manicured footpaths. Wild in a Kate Bush style, if you like. Well none of that. The Wild Atlantic Coast really should have the Wild Atlantic bit in bold. and underlined. When the Atlantic gets enthusiastic around these parts, it really makes itself known. Wild in more of a Keith Moon/Oliver Reed style then. We were walking the lighthouse way, from Laxe to Finisterre, and it’s known as that because you can’t walk for more than a couple of hours without tripping over yet another lighthouse. And you need them here because otherwise there’d be even more shipwrecks. Did I mention the shipwrecks? Well, one of the first things we did, when opening the map of the route, was to ask what Costa da Morte meant. Our Spanish isn’t that great, but our French is ok, and surely no-one would ever name a touristy destination the Coast Of Death. Well, they did, and it’s because there’s a long history of shipwrecks along the coast – galleons, fishing boats, german submarines, oil tankers – they’ve all misjudged the waves and the winds and the rocks and understood a bit too late what the Wild Atlantic is all about. We stayed in a hotel that showed all the shipwrecks on a series of maps along a corridor. They were very big maps, it was a long corridor, and the writing was very small – there have been over 600 shipwrecks since the 14th century, hence the need for lighthouses, although with that sort of record, you might want to have put a few slightly brighter bulbs in.
We set off from Santiago de Compostela, a beautiful city best known as the destination for the pilgrimage Camino walks that start all over southern France, Spain, and Portugal. Santiago is named for St James, whose relics are held underneath the cathedral, hence the pilgrimage destination, and there’s a long queue of pilgrims in the cathedral every day, queuing up to touch the shoulders of the statue of St James behind the altar, to mark the end of their journey, which may have been a six week hike. It’s quite emotional watching people get to the cathedral with their backpacks and walking poles, and quietly filing around the altar to get to this moment. We felt as if we’d be cheating if we joined in, so we went outside to the sunny square behind the cathedral, where pilgrims were arriving after their journeys, looking exhausted but elated, lying down on the cobbles, hugging each other, taking selfies and generally feeling very pleased with themselves. We spent half an hour here, soaking up the sun and atmosphere, and also managing to drop one of our passports on the floor, which we didn’t notice until a couple of hours and a 50km taxi ride later, when we tried to check in to our first hotel. Key travel tip – if you are going to lose your passport, make sure you do so in a crowded square full of elated and repentant Christian pilgrims, as they’re more than likely to hand it in to the police station. So, 100km of taxi rides later, we were back in Laxe, very relieved, and having a quick dip in the Atlantic before dinner and the start of the walk.
Laxe is a small fishing town and the start of the lighthouse walk which travels all the way around the Costa da Morte to Finisterre. Quite a few restaurants, all of which seemed very keen on local seafood, including pulpo feira, which is a kind of cold cake made of sliced octopus. Tastes a lot better than it sounds. Fortunately we both like seafood, as this was pretty much all we’d be eating for the next week. Started the walk the next morning, from Laxe to Arou. Quite a bit of up and down stuff, up to the top points to lookout to sea; down to the boardwalks and the beaches, with waters that looked fairly lively:
All was well and sunny, until it wasn’t, and when we hit a bit of rain, the walking suddenly got quite a bit harder. No slipping about on the rocks, thankfully, but the rain just kept coming, and managed to make its way inside our coats and boots so that when we finally arrived in Arou, we were fairly bedraggled. Whenever we do one of these walks, we tend to exhaust the conversations about the kids and politics fairly early on, so we’ll play games to keep our spirits up – the game today was alphabetically naming places we’d travelled to together; exclusions for Q, U, V, X and Z, with nominations for place we’d never return to (Sequoia, it’s a long story), and places we’d go back to like a shot (Kathmandu). Did our best to find places to dry boots and coats, then headed into town, trying to dodge the rain, Found the only restaurant in town, where Mrs E decided to indulge me by pretending to like beer (which she did, in a 1:10 mix with Sprite), and be interested in the football, although England’s uninspiring 1:0 win over Serbia really wasn’t a great introduction to the beautiful game.
We were hoping for better weather the next day, but we’d been warned about likely storms, which were confirmed in the morning. The advice was to skip the walking altogether, which, looking at the forecast, we agreed to, so we jumped in the taxi with our bags and headed to Camarinas. Part of both of us wanted to be walking, and the rain held off until about 10am, but after that it absolutely hammered down, so we made the best of things – me knocking out 5,000 words on the history of cigarette marketing, and Mrs E brushing up on her Galician history and language. As I mentioned, we can get by ok in French, but our Spanish is dreadful, and our Galician non-existent. They’re similar languages in many ways, but Galician has many more Xs, which are a bit confusing until you realise that they largely make a ‘sh’ sound, and lots of squiggly lines above the N letters. But the main challenge is in pronunciation. I’m all for rolling my Rs, but Galician takes it to a new level, so that any word beginning with an R starts off like a Formula One car, and there are plenty of other words that seem to involve coughing up about 10ml of mucus at the start of the word for the correct sound. And there’s a certain amount of pride in how fast you can talk as well, so we’re lost in a muddle of hawking and industrial purring and machine gun sentences before we ever get a chance to try to tune in to one word, just one word that we might be able to connect with. One of our sons is in Japan at the moment, where he’s gone to teach English, and assumed he could just wing it speaking Japanese with no prior knowledge. He’s taught himself a few useful phrases, including one that roughly translates as ‘oh really, how interesting’, which allows the conversation to rattle along while his brain shuts down. Incidentally, he also learnt the phrase ‘please, do sit down’, so that he could be polite to old people on buses and trains, before being told that his pronunciation was slightly off, and that what he was saying was ‘please, can you touch me?’. He also made the mistake of clinking glasses with someone in a bar and saying ‘chin chin’, which apparently translates in Japanese as the must depraved thing you can possibly say about a penis. More of this in a short while. Anyway, while writing my stuff (an absorbing project that I expect will have a voluntary readership of less than two people when it reaches a final draft next year), I found myself listening to the Galician equivalent of Smooth FM, which had a variety of show tunes and easy listening pieces on repeat. It was on the third rendition of My Way that I realised just what an appalling song it is. Actually, the third one wasn’t too bad in that respect, as it had a throaty saxophone over a lilting orchestra, but the previous versions were truly dreadful. And it wasn’t the versions themselves (one Tony Bennett soundalike, one slightly bossanova version with a impassioned Spanish tenor). It was the lyrics. And with that song, it’s all about the bloody lyrics. The version we all know was written by Paul Anka, whose pedigree ought to have put him above the tenuous rhymes that make their way onto My Way. It’s almost as if he came up with the title, then scuttled off to the rhyming dictionary and scribbled down the first things he found….highway/byway/shy way, then thought, crikey, I’m on a roll here, I’ll have a go at curtain/certain; mention/exemption; knew/chew; losing/amusing, and then I’ll plug them into a song about a self-entitled twit whose claim to fame appears to be that he’s rattled through a life where his top ten priorities are all about himself. And then, all being well, a whole load of people will line it up without any sense of irony to be played as their funeral anthem, Anyway, that’s what I thought when I was listening to it. And don’t get me started on Magic Moments..
Next day from Caramarinas to Cereixo, reasonably dry, and up and down again, onto tracks that looked as if they’d not been trodden for years, so that we dragged through soaking bracken and gorse to get to the top of some of the passes, then plunged down to beaches that looked like they were in the Seychelles.
Mrs E was very keen for a swim, and, having dramatically misread the map, I advised we’d be able to stop at a beach nearer the end, at which point we headed inland and it started to rain. We’d been walking for seven hours by the time we got to Ceriexo, where we were staying in a B&B out of town . Had a good meal there, with both cooking and entertaining from our genial Galician host, Julio, a man who by rights should have been sponsored by both the Galician tourist board and Grecian 2000. His after dinner presentation, which may well have been in either Spanish or Galician, was about the health benefits of a home distillery, At one point, with all parties being lost on where the conversation was going, we turned to the Galician to English setting on Google Translate. The very next sentence translated as ‘you will have no further fears for the mis-use of a penis’, which we all found a little baffling. But we stuck with the whole presentation and were rewarded by sampling his ‘digestifs’, one of which was fabulous (coffee) and the other one, which brought up memories of an unfortunate time when I tried to siphon petrol out of a mini clubman. Today’s walking game: alphabetic rounds of people we both knew, managed about six rounds of this with exclusions for X and Z, but the game fell into disarray when Mrs E denied ever meeting my last two Y’s.
And so to Muxia, another challenging one with wet footpaths getting much wetter as it tipped it down for the duration – when it wasn’t raining, we always seemed to be in the jungle-y bits of the route, so our feet got wetter and wetter, and on the few bits of tarmac we both made a squelchy sound as we walked. Some lovely beaches, but all a bit wet and windy for swimming, and we had an appointment to keep at the Paradores hotel. This was a bit beyond Muxia, but we’d been drawn to it because it looked like a really lovely place to stop mid-hike. It’s new, huge, very modern, and looks a bit like Tracey Island, cut into the side of the hill, and up a long track from a sandy beach.
And very lovely it was inside too, it was on five floors, which were connected by a cross between a lift and a funicular railway. I think it must also be a place to stay for a pampering sunny weekend as well, the other guests all looked a bit fed up with the weather, and we stood out like sore thumbs with our hiking boots and poles (although we did leave them in the room when we went to the bar). Anyway, we did manage a swim, in the ‘seasonal’ hotel pool, which was lovely, albeit under the disapproving gaze of everyone in the cafeteria, looking on in disbelief as we swam in the cold drizzle. Today’s walking game: name one hundred famous Scottish people: we managed this fairly comfortably, but I was denied both Rod Stewart and Alistair Campbell (on the no accent rule, which Mrs E introduced mid-game), although I did score extra points for BA Robertson, and we had a happy twenty minutes not being able to remember any of his ‘hits’. I’m just writing this up, and Mrs E has gone into a tragic fit, as she’s just remembered that neither of us included Jeanette Krankie.
Another diversion in the morning, as we’d had a warning about a loose and large dog that had bitten a walker a couple of weeks previously. So we hopped in a taxi with a very nice man from Luton, who dropped us off beyond the range of the Alsatian which was, apparently, as big as a pony. We started near the Monte de Buitra, which we walked around first to give us a bit more mileage. It was (of course) wet, and fairly desolate, and reminded both of us of Craggy Island. A couple of mysterious farm buildings, a lighthouse (of course) and we only came across one other road user, also striding purposefully along:
Then south through more rain, up a couple of challenging climbs, and down into Lires, a tiny village which fortunately had a fabulous restaurant where we ate cake when we arrived, dinner much later, and even bought our lunch from them the next morning – hands down the best food that we’d had all week. By now, there was no likelihood of drying out our wet socks or boots, so the socks headed straight for the washing bag, and the boots stayed outside the front door, thereby leaving an unpleasant smell at some distance. The views were amazing on the walk though, we saw hardly any other people this or on any of the previous days, and the footpaths, although marked with green dots, in the most green countryside we’d ever seen, were fairly easy to spot. There were some paths that were described as vertiginous, which were actually ok, and some that weren’t, which were fairly scary. There were definitely places that would have been described as dangerous at home, with sheer drops onto cliffs a hundred metres below, but we were ok sticking to the path, and of course hoping that nobody in their right mind would be walking towards us. Today’s walking game: Musicians as Animals. Mrs E’s winner – Llama del Ray. Mine – Elephants Gerald. Honestly, the miles flew past.
And then, the final leg, from Lires to Finisterre. We were told that we should allow ten hours to do this leg, which was fairly daunting, but in the end it took us just over eight. And probably the hardest walk in terms of climbing (some proper hands over your head stuff) and descending – the drop into Finisterre felt like it was near vertical, and looked like it facing back from the beach (it’s the worn bit in the centre of this this picture):
Finisterre means end of the earth, and it ought to be continental Europe’s most westerly point, given that it’s got the name and everything. But the cape at Touriñán, which we’d walked around the day before,, is further west, as is Cabo da Roca, in Portugal, but, as they say, why let the facts get in the way of a good story? What Finisterre has got, is the most western lighthouse, which pleasantly lit up our hotel room every 30 seconds or so, as we drifted off to sleep that night. Just beyond the lighthouse is a little strip of rock, where pilgrims complete the ‘extra bit’ after they reach Santiago de Compostela. They’re suppose to burn their capes and boots at this point, to formally end their pilgrimage, but apparently that’s now been outlawed – probably just as well, as flaming goretex wouldn’t be a good environmental look. Instead, they have photographs taken, which is better for everyone.
Headed across to the other side of Fisterra for the final night, where we at last managed a swim in the (according to Mrs E) warm Atlantic. Mrs E’s warm is anything over 8 degrees. Mine is above 65, and ideally in a sauna, so we are ill-matched on that front, but she tells me that cold water will be good for my back, and I believe her because she’s a nurse, and because believing her has served me very well for quite a long time now. And so when she says it’ll be a good idea to do one of the full camino pilgrimages next year, I’ll be there like a shot, even if I’m not allowed to burn my cape at the end.
The Emu 