Day 15

My feet were up for it, C. was ready. I made herbal tea yesterday and left it in the fridge. I developed some new strategies in the last weeks to deal with the poor water quality. Here in the mountains the water from the tap is pretty ok but in a lot of places it smells and tastes horrible and on hot days the fountains give lukewarm water. I only buy water in bottles if there is really no other option, I have a water bottle with a filter that makes it possible to drink polluted water even,  although I haven’t been in a situation here where I had to do that. If I have the opportunity to boil water I make tea and carry it with me, I buy a lemon from time to time to flavour the water and I am not perfect so simetimes I buy a cold drink on a terrace with lots of ice and after I finish my drink, the ice cubes go in the water bottle.
 
I had decided to leave the Camino and walk a different trail because it was less steep, still there was an elevation of 250 metres in the first 5 kilometre and again it was a gravel road. It wasn’t as hot as it was before but still somewhere around 30 degrees. There has not been a day when the thought to give up didn’t cross my mind, but also there hasn’t been a day when there was no moment of extreme beauty and wonder, sometimes in encounters with people, sometimes in passing through an extraordinary landscape, sometimes in just waking up after a difficult night in the forest and getting back on the road again.

I saw the site long before I arrived there, three buildings on a plateau, one of them a huge tower. Getting closer I saw that only one wall of the tower was still standing. The first building was the Ermita de San Miguel, an open structure closed off with a fence to prevent people from damaging the inside. The tower was the only part left of the Castillo de Marcuello, and the Iglesia de Nuestra  Señora de Marcuella was in pretty good shape. The altitude was just over 1000 metres and there were steep rocks going down on all sides. The views were amazing and over my head vultures were circling around, using their broad long wings to glide through the air. I must have stayed for an hour, I even considered spending the night there since I found a little cave under an overhanging rock that would make the perfect shelter but it was still early in the day and the wind was violent at times, and would probably be even stronger at night. The walk got easier afterwards, less steep, rather tricky when the path narrowed and went down, a decline of 600 metres I saw afterwards. The landscape got only more impressive, almost vertical mountain walls and the strangely shaped Mallos de Riglos, a set of conclomerate rock formations. I now understood why in the little village of Bolea, in the building where I stayed in the Pilgrim Hostel, there was a climbing wall. This was climbers paradise.
Riglos was a sleepy little town, nestled at the foot of the Mallos. There was a big hostel but I didn’t feel like sleeping inside so I continued, down again, passing the train station where I wanted to take a train to Jaca, but upon approaching it I already saw that no train had passed there for a long time, the tracks were overgrown and the building looked abandoned. A notice said that there was a replacement bus, leaving fro the village, a “microbus” without space for bikes and pets. Would C. be allowed in? I would try tomorrow, first sleep. This was too good a place not to spend a night out in the open.
I found the perfect spot, a field a bit higher up, away from the road, a spot protected by some trees. The last time I thought I found the perfect spot I was disturbed all night by wild boar though, so again I turned C. into a little defense wall and complemented it with some big branches. Temperatures dropped to pleasantly cool, the sky was filled with stars, the Mallos were keeping an eye on me and I slept like a baby.