A Pilgrims Progress

I woke up almost every hour before my alarm went off at 6.30, panicking that I had overslept. By 7 o'clock I was packed, with only one minor hiccup in that I had been trying to open my camelback by turning it clockwise, but Pedro, the brains of the operation, turned it anticlockwise and that worked a treat. I looked out the window and could see nothing. It was still pitch black. Slightly bewildered I decided to sit for another half an hour and forced myself to eat, even though I was feeling sick with nerves, until it got lighter. Navigation my way out of Vigo was not the nightmare I had envisaged. I walked straight up out of the town and it was relatively quite. I continued to walk up and up, through a village and wooded area until I came upon a sign which said 'Monte Faquina'. It was very pleasing that all that gradient had concluded in a mountain and I positively skipped through the Industrial park which populated the peak. I descended the mountain, through the many 'sleepy' villages, where I saw almost no one apart from women emptying their bins and dogs. There were vines growing in every garden, supported by the same sort of fences which surrounded the industrial park buildings, angled at the top with barbed wire so as to prevent intruders. Economic; yes, beautiful; no. At last I reached the bottom, where a small town clustered around a main road. Here I ate an orange and put on sun cream as the sun was high in the sky, quite the opposite from what I had prepared for; wet and grey Gallicia. I followed the main road towards a roundabout where I found my mapping app view ranger directing my to walk along the hard shoulder of a flyover. This made me feel quite sick, even though for the most part it was single lane traffic, as I had fantasised mountain tracks not tarmaced roads. I came to the small town of Dormelas which was shaded and beautiful, and I sat in the plaza whilst I charged my iPhone and ate a sandwich. This was more like it. Mothers and daughters openly arguing in the street, old men sat on benches together smoking....... I walked out of the town and once again found myself at the mercy of the hard shoulder. Three lanes worth of traffic rushed passed me, honking occasionally, and I began to climb my second mountain of the day, but I felt no relief at reaching the summit. Ponteareas still looked very far away and my bag felt very heavy. Where was this 'spiritual path' I was meant to be taking? It certainly wasn't on the hard shoulder. The road seemed to go on and on as I descended into Ponteareas, with endless scrubby looking suburbs and coca-cola signs in road bars telling me to stop and drink. I began to get angry with people who weren't even there, everyone who hadn't listened to me or given me false hope about things totally unrelated, they were the ones to blame. I could feel the sun in my head and my eyes were hot by the time I reached central Ponteareas. I still had not heard from Bruno, my next couch surfing host, Pedro's ex-girlfriends-best friend's-ex boyfriend. Galicia, the land of healthy break ups it would seem. I sat in the doorway of an apartment block, texting and trying to preserve my cellular data whilst desperately trying to get hold of Bruno. It was mid-afternoon and the thought of trying to find a room and communicating in Spanish was more than I could bear. At last I got a message on What's App from Bruno, apologising that he had not heard his phone. I texted him the street I was on and within ten minutes he arrived in a car driven by his friend. He dropped me at his apartment, which was literally a side street off of the road I had been waiting on for the past hour. Bruno gave me a set of keys, a towel and apologised prefusly for the lack of wifi and lights in his apartment, told me to make myself at home and that he would be back in the evening. I was so relieved that I didn't have to talk to anyone and I just sort of lay in the middle of the floor for half an hour, drinking out of the camelback which lay next to me and feeling the sun escaping my head. I had a long shower and then went down the road to buy sandwiches and oranges for the next day. It's funny but my appetite has actually diminished on this trip, I don't know wether it's stress or what, but I don't really get hungry. Cocacola on the other hand, just seems like the best idea. When I got back to the house I had a large glass and took one of Dora's Taiwan painkillers and got into bed to have a tiger sized cat nap. At 9 o'clock Bruno returned with a Spanish omelette and noodle soup from his parents house and we sat down together to watch the discovery channel, because it was the only English programme which wasn't dubbed. The tense music and the narrators dramatic detailing of the horrific solar storms and temperatures on the various stars didn't do much for my nerves so I asked Bruno about himself. He had been a mechanic for Citroen, but quit a few years ago to pursue his dream of running a indoor go-karting rink. Unfortunately, with the current economy, he had to close it down last year and so went travelling in Australia for 3 months. Pedro similarly was a trained pilot, but companies were taking advantage of the 50% unemployment of Spanish pilots, and charging extortionate prices for the pilots to get trained for particular planes. These were hard times for dreamers. 

I was in bed by midnight, shaking at the thought that I was going to have a similairly long walk the next day, but this time only on the main road.