My body hurt at the end of a day walking 40km, but my body hurt 10 times more the next day.

I managed to drag myself out of bed and quickly get going. After a week of smoking hot weather there had been a cool change overnight and the town of Navarette was covered in a thick mist.

There was not a person to be seen. I walked through the ghosty streets until I saw a figure standing mysteriously under a street lamp.

It had to be The Hunchback of Notre Dame…. Or just an early morning pilgrim dressed in very ‘vintage-style’ clothing, with a bowler hat and a thick coat hanging over his backpack giving him that notorious French character look about him.

In normal non-pilgrimage circumstances I may have been a bit wary of the figure, but assuming he was a fellow pilgrim I approached him.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

We started walking together and got chatting. I admitted to him my first impression.

“Many people say that”.

It’s not often you meet someone who regularly get’s mistaken to be the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

His name was Martin and he was from Munich. His clothing and the way he spoke made him seem as if he were from a completely different century.

“How long have you been walking for?”

“A couple of months…”

I had heard that there were many people who do much longer pilgrimages than the common 780km walk from France but this was my first encounter with such a long-distance pilgrim.

“I started in Holland.”

He explained to me how he had just finished his training as a violin maker and it was a tradition in Bavaria that once you have finished your training you travel across Europe in search of ‘masters of your trade’, in order to learn skills from other lands. I was extremely impressed at the dignity that seemed to accompany this tradition.

Martin was not the kind of person I would usually have the pleasure of encountering and he was not the first ‘eccentric’ person that I had been given the absolute pleasure of having some time to really get to know and compare lives with along the Camino. I was starting to realise that the greatest thing about the Camino de Santiago was the ease of which you can talk to anyone and everyone. And not just small talk. I had all the time in the world to hear people’s stories and I realised that I was starting to learn the value of ‘listening’.

Martin had been walking for a long time and eventually I could no longer keep up with his pace. We said farewell and I hoped that I would get the pleasure of his company again on my pilgrimage.

(I managed to get a photo of Martin under a different street light before me parted ways)
For the first time on my pilgrimage I had to head inside to warm up a little bit. It had been drizzling all morning and I was in need of a warm coffee and omelette to get my energy levels up again. I chatted with a lovely young American girl and eventually we both faced the drizzly weather and walked together for a while.

We were now walking through the beautiful wine region of La Rioja and passing beautiful fields of plump grapes that took all my willpower not to snack on.

Eventually my own pace made my say farewell to my new friend from the USA. A couple of hours later I met an Australian Dutch couple who had met on the first few days of the Camino and were now embarking on a pilgrim romance. It reminded me of my own current Dutch love that I had met traveling (Under very different circumstances) and even though the two were older than me I somehow was able to reflect my own memories of travel romance through their company.

Eventually I stopped third wheeling and spent the rest of the grey day in my own company, enjoying the cool weather after so many hot afternoons.

The afternoon featured quite a steep hill that seemed to climb on for hours but eventually I reached the peak and entered the ghost town that is Ciruena.

This town was super weird. There was not another soul to be seen. Rows of houses were completely empty and the local swimming pool was deserted. The town did have a sign leading to an Albergue and I was so exhausted I hardly took much notice of how weird the town was at the time.

I entered the small house marked ‘Albergue’.

“Hello…”

It seemed completely empty. The only sound was the voices of Spanish Simpsons characters coming from the TV in the lounge room. I peeked my head in and saw a big Spanish man enjoying the show.

“Do you have any beds?”

He nodded at me and then turned back to his show.

I sat down in the hall and took my shoes off… There was a particular scene in the movie ‘The Way’ that was coming to mind of a creepy empty albergue with slightly insane owner… I started to wonder if it was based on any true places…

Eventually there was an add break and he led me into the lounge room to write down my name and stamp my pilgrim passport.

He told me the price for the room and dinner (because there was really no other options for dining in this small town).

It was really just a small house and he led me upstairs where thankfully a couple of other pilgrims could be found. He told me that I must have a shower before I could enter the other parts of the house so I quickly washed up and was permitted to sit on the couch where I made friends with his dogs.

As the afternoon went on more people started to arrive and it looked as though it was going to be a very full house… So full in fact that someone was sleeping on the sofa in the crowded room I was in.

I was joined by my friend from the USA from earlier in the day and a young man that she was friends with from Alaska. We watched as our host yelled at ‘dirty’ people for trying to enter the ‘clean’ area of the house and giggled as he played loud opera music and sang loudly as he cooked.

Hey, at least he was entertaining….

The man from Alaska leant in at one point and quietly asked “does this remind you from a certain scene from ‘The Way’?”

Eventually the tables had been set up with wooden bowls and the smell from the open kitchen area was luring people closer

“LA CENA!!!!” our host yelled through the house at the top of his lungs….

There was no mistaking that it was dinner time.

At random we all took places at his dinner table which he was not impressed with. Our host spent about 10 minutes swapping our bowls around based on our size and gender. My big bowl was switched with the Alaskan mans smaller bowl and we desperately tried to keep straight faces as we watched our host complete his serious task.

Eventually the wine and bread was on the table and he began to serve his meal. The delicious slop was a combination of rice, lentils and vegetables (with added chorizo for the carnivores). As there were quite a few people to serve two rowdy men from New Zealand who had already finished off a few glasses of wine began to help serve… And mixed up the bowls. Our host was beyond unimpressed.

I am not joking, he actually threw one of the bowls (full of delicious slop) at one of the men…

We were definitely collecting some great material for a sequel of ‘The Way’

Everyone behaved themselves as we ate our meals and like good little pilgrims we all went to bed anxious to wake up and rejoin civilisation on other parts of the Camino de Santiago.