The albergue last night was a big disappointment. It's a private albergue, one of the ones called a red albergue which supposedly have to be up to a certain standard set by the group which is trying to establish their albergues as something just a bit better. In many cases they are really nice - clean, airy and roomy. But this one was none of the above. They do have a certain level of cleanliness for sure- for example they change the sheet and pillowcase that you put your sleeping bag on every day. There are a lot of albergues that don't appear to do that for weeks. But we were so crowded - 7 people in a room that had two bunk beds across with about 30 inches in between them and two beds end to end with about 3 or 4 feet in between them. The bathroom with toilet, shower and sink was at one end with bubbly glass doors you could see through between them. Four heads, including mine were right up against the bathroom wall. And since bathroom ventilation is relatively unknown in Spain the bedroom is constantly humid and there's black mold on the ceiling and some walls. Nice- not!
We woke up to mist that was so thick it dripped and it stayed that way until well after lunch when we were much lower so we didn't see anything of the wonderful views that this day usually brings. We made our way two or three hundred meters up a rocky path to O'Cebreiro where we had breakfast but saw nothing of this picturesque little Galician community. Ten years ago when I was first up here it was a quiet little spot that always had Celtic fiddle music playing in the bars. Essentially all of the houses were made of slate and had either slate or the more traditional (at that time) thatched roofs. Many of the houses were round. They have tried to preserve the old look but it's hard to tell how successful they were since we still couldn't see anything in the mist. But breakfast was good and we headed on up and down and up and down and up again until we finally reached the highest point at Alto do Poio (note the do instead of de - Galicia is where the language starts changing and Gallego forms are often used. In this case it's similar to Portuguese). It was only about 70 meters higher than O'Cebreiro but we climbed that height at least a half dozen times before we actually reached it and by that time we needed coffee to fortify us.
We saw a poster for an albergue just 3 or 4 kilometers outside of our next town of any size - Triacastela - so we made a reservation. We curled down, down and up and down with, finally, beautiful views for another 8 kilometers to stop walking somewhere between 18 and 20 kilometers.
Our albergue tonight is clean, spacious and quiet. We should have a great sleep if we don't drink any more caffeine today.
We passed the large stone marker into Galicia today and along with that come the cement 'countdown' markers which are currently saying we have something less than 135 kilometers to go. Almost time to go home- HOORAY!
No comments:
Post a Comment