Day 28 & 29

Somehow I took a bus to Burgos and not Bilbao. I am not sure why but it felt like the right thing to do. At the same time I was pretty sure it would have been the right thing if I had been on a bus to Bilbao. I arrived in the late afternoon and took some time to explore the city without the intention to stay there. It was hot, this was Castilla y León, a landlocked region and the largest autonomous community in Spain, sparsely populated however. A large part of its interior consists of a plateau, the Meseta Central.
There were no pilgrims on the road when I walked out of the city, it doesn’t fit their schedule to walk late in the day, only the ones who do 40 plus kilometres a day are sometimes still walking when the rest is already installed for the night, showered, their clothes washed, enjoying a cold drink on a terrace.
At dusk I arrived in Tardejos, the streets were empty apart from a big group of neighbours playing cards outside. I greeted them, walked on, crossed the village square, it felt like a good place to wake up in. There was an Albergue somewhere, I passed the card players again, found the Albergue closed, decided to continue walking but before I knew it the whole village was mobilised to find the caretaker. Somebody called him, then called his neighbour, then somebody drove off to check if he was in the restaurant, somebody else pointed at a nearby house and said: “I live there, if we don’t find him you can stay with me”. It turned out he had left at 9 when no bed had been taken and was indeed in the restaurant. He let me in, I had the whole place to myself and next morning before sunrise he brought me breakfast. I was supposed to leave before 8 but because he was pacing up and down outside, clearly waiting for me to go on my way, I speeded up and was out and about at 7.30, like a proper pilgrim.
In the next village I tried to have a little break on a bench next to a church but not even a minute after I seated myself a nun walked up to me and invited me to come in. When I did she turned on some music, Pavarotti singing Ave Maria and while I was hiding away on one of the church benches, listening to 2 more versions of the Ave Maria, I heard her talking incessantly to everybody who came in. She handed out little plastic medallions with religious symbols and since she was talking to three young, clearly quite uncomfortable, Italian men, asking them the names of their mothers and telling them Mary would guide them on their walk, I thought I could sneak out but she didn’t let anybody escape without her blessing. She pinched my cheek as if I was a little child, put the Virgin Mary around my neck, started talking about me to the nervous Italians who were still waiting for the stamp in their pilgrim passport and when she lost her focus for one second because a new person was about to enter I quickly walked out. When I turned around I saw the Italians still listening to her with a dead gaze, realising it is the price you have to pay for collecting stamps.
“Are you lost? The right way is over there.” I had entered the next village and was walking around, exploring the place and also looking for a bar that was off the beaten track to quietly enjoy a coffee or talk a bit with the local people. “No, I am right here” I answered, “I only feel lost sometimes when I am on The Camino.” It wasn’t the first time somebody thought I took a wrong turn and tried to convince me to walk into the other direction, “the right way”. When it doesn’t matter what road you follow and you don’t have a specific place to be at a certain time, you are never lost.
Walking the Meseta was different from any landscape I walked through so far, the barren fields stretching out as far as the eye reached, the main elevations in the landscape consisting of little hills of piled up rocks that had been removed from the land to use it as arable soil. The road was dusty and almost white, bleached by the sun, sturdy plants growing on both sides looked as if they were artificial, covered by layer after layer of fine dust. Apart from the occasional sunflower field there were no bright colours, only different shades of murky green and every nuance of brown you can think of. Even the sky wasn’t the colour you expect on a sunny and cloudless day but something inbetween grey and light blue. It was the first time in almost 30 days I felt my mind wandering while I just followed the endless road.
There was going to be a village at some point, Hontanas, but space and time seemed to stretch out and reorganise itself in a way that was beyond the human way of measuring it. Just when I started to wonder if I would walk here forever, the landscape changed and a new horizon appeared, the endless road still in sight but also revealing a small valley and a cluster of stone houses. It was a charming place, clearly thriving on pilgrim tourism, not too crowded though. Walk on or stay? Sometimes decisions are easily made. “Can I buy you a beer?” It was the man who thought I was lost.