Tag Archives: Hiking

Camino Day 6 – Estella to Los Arcos, plus a few random thoughts

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Monday 21 August 2023 – Well, here it is, 3.15pm, we have arrived, showered, stretched and rested and I would appear to have some time to write up the day.  As a day, it shared many features with yesterday – an early start after a limited breakfast, much walking through Big Scenery,

feeling the heat increase to quite oppressive levels after midday, and arriving some six hours after departure, significantly sweaty.

A pattern in the days is that towards the end, particularly in the heat, progress seems to slow as we get nearer our destination.  Some of the Camino signposts have the distance to the next town on them, but it increasingly feels like Spanish kilometres are longer than anyone else’s. Jane says they must have expanded in the heat…

You can see the pictures and route via Relive, as usual.

The stats: distance – 21.6km, bringing us to a total of 136.1km (84.5m); and we went up 423m and down 393. There were a couple of steepish gradients, but nothing to write home about, which is why I’m not writing about them.

So, what stood out about the day?

The schedule

The hotel served breakfast from 0700, and were point-blank resistant to the idea of preparing a takeaway snack for us in advance (basically the only minus point). So we thought we might have a very quick cuppa and bite of something as early as possible before moving on, thinking perhaps they might start the breakfast informally a little early.

They didn’t.

So at 0650, we decided just to Get On With It, as the forecast for the day was scorchio.

Other pilgrims

We followed, for a short while, a matched pair.

These two constitute the first couple I have seen so far who are kitted out identically from the waist up.  This is not normal, and was somewhat charming to see.  It put me in mind of another pilgrim fashion statement I wanted to cover, which is the power of branding. We saw this with another pilgrim as we departed Zubiri for Pamplona

Check out those socks!

Seeing that photo reminds me of another general point I wanted to make concerning solo pilgrims, I have been surprised by the number of pilgrims travelling alone who are female. I make no point from it; it’s just something that interests me.

The socks also remind me of another thing I have pondered as I make my way, which is the yellow painted arrows that, alongside the formal posts displaying the cockle shell, you can find making it very difficult to miss your way, The Camino (in fact all the Camino routes) is (are) a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so I wonder:

  • Is the yellow colour a standard across the Camino routes?
  • What’s its pantone number?
  • Is there a single approved supplier of the right shade of paint?
  • If, so, how did he land the gig?

Anyhoo…back to today

The Wine Fountain

Yes, there’s a place (Bodega Irache) where you can bowl up with your bottle and fill it with their wine, free of charge,

Neither Jane nor I drink wine these days, and in any case it was 0730 at this point, and we didn’t have any receptacles handy. But we had a quick slurp, and it was not too bad. Tradition dictates that you should use, as your “glass”, the cockleshell that you can get anywhere to wear attached to your backpack to show you’re a sucker pilgrim.

I couldn’t be arsed to detach mine, so a cupped hand had to do.

The Blacksmith

Just before we got to the wine fountain, we passed a very engaging scene – a real, working (and open) ironworking forge.

The smith was charming, and stamped our Credentiales del Peregrino – the fanfold document which you use to collect evidence of where you’ve been and when – essential to get the all-important Compostela certificate at the end.

 

As I say, there wasn’t much else to mark the day out from others – nice and cool to start, horrible and hot by the end, when we made it to Los Arcos, a small town in Navarra that simply couldn’t be more different from Les Arcs, the French skiing resort, if it tried.  We are staying at the Casa de la Abuela and Jose, the manager was very helpful as we arrived – taking our bags upstairs, arranging for us to join a pilgrim’s dinner at the hotel later today and – this will be important, I think – telling us that breakfast starts at 0500. Given that tomorrow could well be hotter than today, I think a very early start could well be on the cards.

The hotel is an albergue, a simple hotel, but we have private facilities – not all of the other residents do.  It shares one characteristic of every hotel we’ve stayed in so far – you only get one (long, thin, bolster-type) pillow. It seems to be A Thing.  All the other hotels share another characteristic in that Jane has so far found the beds to be uncomfortable, which is tiresome for her. We’ll see about this one, but I’m not, frankly, sanguine.

One other thing that has interested me is the language. We are in the Basque region, and I had mistakenly thought that the language would be a mixture of French and Spanish.

Nope.

This is a roadworks sign I saw in Pamplona.

I think this gives a clear idea of how much Basque has in common with the romance languages that we western Europeans are familiar with. The language is known as “Euskara” in its own tongue, it is an ancient language that predates the arrival of Indo-European languages in western Europe. Its roots are somewhat mysterious, and the language’s origins remain the subject of ongoing research and speculation.

So I’ve learned something today, and so have you. Who knows what further insights you may get by staying in touch with these pages, eh?

It’s Day 5. What have we learned so far?

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Sunday 20 August 2023 – One thing has become abundantly clear over the last few days: it’s just as well I previously set your expectations here, because there is no way that I could seriously contemplate creating an entry in these pages for each day of our peregrination. That’s not to say that there isn’t a story for each day; there is. But attempting to write up a Camino faces two serious hurdles: lack of time; and lack of energy.

Lack of time. We have walked in excess of 20km each day so far. Day 1 (25.3km) was particuarly brutal and I have regaled you with its story already. On each of the following days until today we haven’t arrived at our destination before about 3pm, and in some cases much later than that. Once stretched, showered, changed, rested and got back after finding something to eat, it has simply been time to get to bed in order to have enough sleep.  What I have been able to do is to use the Relive application to give an overview of each day, together with some of the photos I took:

That’s a smidge over 71 miles in Imperial money, by the way.

Lack of energy. Basically, by the time we arrive at our destination, we are knackered. Day 1 was particularly tough, but each day has had its challenges.  Day 2 involved a really tedious and lengthy descent on a horrid rocky 3km stretch; Days 3 – 5, whilst not being as challenging as Day 1 (there may be one other day on the Camino that’s that tough, or maybe even not), have been completed in stinging heat – temperatures of 35°C and higher. Whilst I have been pleasantly surprised at my ability to keep going – even uphill! – at these temperatures, that doesn’t mean it didn’t take a lot out of me.  So, frankly, seeking refreshment and rest were about all I could cope with. Much as I enjoy writing these pages, there are limits, you understand.

What my editor wife and I have decided to do is to use these pages to present the sidelights and items that have interested us or struck us as being noteworthy as we go along.  Every day brings greater understanding of the subtleties and patterns of existence that Doing The Camino involves.

The main settling-in to the rhythms of the Camino has been trying to work out a routine and a schedule that allows for enough to eat, the right things to carry with us, time to get to the destination and – particularly relevant from day 3 onwards – how to deal with the heat, which becomes punishing after about midday,

I have weather envy.

It is traditional for people on holiday to have better weather than people at home.  For us,

it’s rather the other way around.

Our starts have been getting earlier and earlier as the full horror of dealing with the heat is borne in on us. It is traditional, when we’re away from home, to reflect ruefully that we only get up early when we’re travelling; but here, we’ve had 0530 alarms to get us up and out of the hotel by 0700 to give us a chance of getting most of the walk done before the cooling breezes become hot blasts, typically some time between midday and 1pm.  Hence, this morning, we had a typical scenario as the sun cleared the horizon behind us.

Food. Another challenge is simply eating.  I admit that we have a slightly unusual dining schedule, if we have our druthers: we like a late breakfast – like, perhaps, midday – and a (very) late lunch as our two meals of the day. We also like to eat a lot of vegetables because when you get to our age you need ’em.

This pattern is a bit tricky to engineer anywhere in Spain, where lunch is served until 2pm and dinner doesn’t start until 7 or 7.30pm; it is an utter impossibility on the Camino. I really don’t want to eat dinner at 7.30pm when I ought to be in bed and asleep by 9.30pm. At the other end of the day, when we want to be on the road before 7, many of the hotels don’t start serving breakfast until 7.30.  A couple of kind hotel managers have prepared us a takeaway grab bag – yoghurt, fruit, maybe a sandwich – which has been very kind of them, but we haven’t had a cup of Twining’s finest Earl Grey for days now!

There is a way round the evening meal – tapas, or, as it’s called in Basque country, pintxos. One can get delicous tortillas, creations around chorizo sausage, croquettes of all sorts and many other tasty morsels. We got some lovey examples at this slightly mad bar in Pamplona (I mean – look at that celiling!).

The downside of this approach is that, dietetically speaking, it’s a disaster area, particularly if it’s something that is going to carry on for a month and a half. We haven’t quite cracked this aspect of the Camino yet, but we’re working on it. We thought we might have a decent chance of a more balanced meal here in Estella; a friend recommended a place called Namaste, which serves salads and that. It closed just as we arrived, still hot, sweaty and in need of a shower, so we’ll have to look for something else. The hotel we’re in, the luxurious (air-conditioned!) Hospederia Chapitel, features a bar which is open all the time, so we have an emergency plan right there.

Health is an obvious concern, particularly of the feet; but other bits of the body have their say, as well.  At the end of day 1 I reported that my knees were not up to the task of allowing me painlessly to take suitcases up two flights of stairs. I’m glad to report that that problem appears for the moment to have gone away, despite the poor things having to deal with 90 more km of slogging up and down Spanish hills. I’ve had a couple of other niggles but nothing too serious, and Jane’s been fine.

The feet, though. We’re both now in a situation where part of the morning routine is the ritual Binding Of The Feet. The brutal descent into Zubiri has inflicted damage to a couple of Jane’s toes, so she is wearing (please forgive her) sandals with socks.  I am also trying to wear sandals (Tevas, proper walking sandals), but needed to take a bit more care than I already have, so need to attach bits of microporous tape to stop things getting worse.  I might also have to wear socks, though if I do, I’ll pair them with walking shoes. There are limits, you know.

Another of the challenges that come with the Camino is that of sightseeing. It seems senseless to visit all the various places we pass through without going and having a look around. (The exception was Zubiri, which is basically an industrial town where we decided not to even consider walking round, but instead cosumed nuts and raisins in our hotel room and a state of exhaustion.

However, one simply shouldn’t visit Pamplona, billed as the most beautiful city in Navarra, without taking a look around; and there are a few Things That Must Be Gawped At, so we made a bit of an effort (eased by being in a comfortable hotel, with air con). And it is a fine place.

Our hotel was near the main square, which has cloisters round each side

and is, of course, home to the famous Cafe Iruña, where Ernest Hemingway used to spend time,

We looked inside.  Google described it as “not too busy”. You decide….


The cathedral is of simply staggering size and sumptuous appointment;

the Town Hall has a wonderful façade

and, of course, there is the bull ring

and a statue dedicated to what Pamplona is probably most famous for – the Running of the Bulls.

It’s not the only place they do this, by the way.  Puente la Reina also hosts this somewhat bizarre ritual; you can tell by the way that they can block off streets with gates so that the bulls stay on the main drag where they, erm, belong.

We wandered around Puente La Reina, and it’s a very charming place, with a sumptous cathedral,

and a striking Roman bridge

which was being used as the backdrop for a jazz festival

which we completely failed to visit because we wanted to get up early the next day. The bridge offers a striking overview of the town.

But it has to be said that sightseeing is a challenge to fit in with the rhythms of the Camino, the weather, the need for sustenance and our energy levels.

There have been several nice little vignettes:

  • Outside Espinal, a chap was doing some exercises beside a tree and hailing all passers-by who looked a little pilgrimish, asking them where they came from and so forth. He was actually the cook at the second coffee bar along the route and wanted to make sure that we knew where to go, even showing us the landmarks on the iPad that he magicked up from somewhere.
  • Arrival at our hotel in Pamplona, the Sercotel Europa, was great for several reasons. Firstly, it was air-conditioned. Secondly, the room had a kettle and a fridge. The receptionist, Jusone, was wonderful, fixing up a jug of milk so we could have tea and also fixing up a take-away breakfast so we could leave early.
  • As we walked through Pamplona’s outskirts, a lot of folk (normal local residents) wished us “buen Camino”, showing that they welcomed the throughput of tired, largely foreign, visitors.
  • Our reception at our hotel, El Cerco, in Puente la Reina, was lovely. The manager saw what state we were in and immediately went off into his kitchen to come back with two glasses of lovely cool, fresh lemonade.
  • We hardly see swallows as we go about in England, so it’s a delight to find a profusion of them here, such as around the eaves of the church in Lorca.
  • The hotel we stayed at in Zubiri was 2-star, but very well organised, and we had a comfortable night. We had read reviews (and overheard a couple of comments) which complained about the loud church bells interfering with sleep, but were clearly so knackered that we didn’t hear a thing.
  • The breakfast room in Zubiri had some interesting puppets hanging from the ceiling.
  • We left Zubiri and walked through woodland, which was quite dark, as we were early. It seemed a little spooky, and, at the far end, we saw that early Christians in the area had decided that the women who lived in the woods and helped with healing people’s ills were witches, and erected a cross to ward off their evil. Idiots.

Zubiri is indeed an industrial town, with its landscape (and presumably economy_ dominated by a company, Magna, who process and deal in manganese.  It gave an opportunity to support a philosophical point made recently in Amateur Photographer Magazine, that much of landscape photography is fundamentally dishonest. I took a photo of a village as we left Zubiri.

It looks pleasant enough. But – here’s the full landscape.

That vilage is, we think, a special construction for workers at Magna’s plant, and is a tiny part of a landscape which includes slag heaps and some kind of fluid reservoir.

Views. We have had some wonderful scenery (once the fog had lifted); lovely to look at, but not necessarily photogenic. For example.

However, there have been some spectacular views, too. Particularly impressive, for me, was the view from the top of Alto del Perdón, as we headed down to Puente La Reina. I published a photo on various social media sites:

but the whole view was simply stupendous.

There have been some annoyances, principally noise pollution in the form of a couple of Americans who believe that your idea of a good time consists of listening to them rhapsodise about how fantastic they are – loudly and with a complete lack of concern for the people around them.  One of them even carries a loudspeaker with him which he used to regale us with 100dB of fucking Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer at about 0830 on a Sunday morning whilst all surrounding him were quietly trying to make their way down a tricky bit of slope. I have nothing against Bon Jovi, but there’s a time and a place, and This Wasn’t It. The lack of self-awareness or cultural sensitivity is enraging. I also got somewhat exercised on day 3 with a couple from, I think, Korea, who seemed to be unable to go more than 100 metres without taking a selfie, That’s a personal niggle – they weren’t upsetting anyone else and we haven’t seen them since, anyway.

Generally speaking, it seems that by and large we prefer our own quiet company, rather than seeking to engage overmuch with the other peregrinos.  We’ve had some pleasant encounters and helped people a couple of times, but I think being a couple insulates us somewhat from the social vibe. It’ll be interesting to see the extent to which that changes in the next six weeks or so.

Anyhoo…

One final Thing I Have Learned.  I know that what we’re walking is The Way of St. James. I know it ends in Santiago de Compostela. And I know about the shell, the traditional emblem of St James, that is used as the Camino symbol. The shell is that of the scallop, or coquille st jacques. Jacques is the french equivalent of James, and Jacob is another equivalent, and a further equivalent of Jacob is Iago. Hence Santiago. Sorry if you thought this is obvious, but it’s taken me a while to connect these various dots.

I think this brings you up to date with the highlights so far – five days in to a 40-day hike over 45 days.

I’m looking forward to our rest day in Logroño (about 4 days away). The hotel has a laundry. The forecast temperature is 41°C.

Stay in touch with these pages and I’ll try to show you the other interesting bits beyond the photos on each day’s walk.

Rocky Mountain, Hi!

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Sunday 4 September 2022 – While we have made it a rule almost everywhere we’ve visited to go for an unstructured wander to explore (sorry, Kamloops – apparently you’re quite interesting after all), today was different in that the wandering would be structured – we were Going Hiking.  With A Guide.

Of course, he wanted to make an early start, so once again we had to tear ourselves from the arms of Morpheus slightly earlier than we might have liked; however, since the day was forecast to be a fairly hot one, an early start was probably best.  We met our guide, Geoff, in the hotel lobby and headed out to find the rest of the group he was leading on the hike. There were supposed to be five others; in the end, there were only four because he actually refused to take one lady on – she was, in his view, totally unprepared – wrong shoes, no backpack, no water. If it was the lady I thought I saw him talking to, he might also have assessed her as being physically the wrong shape to be taking on the hike.

Whatever, the group ended up as being just the six of us – Jane and me and two couples from Boulder, Colorado; Andrea and Dave, Susan and Scott.  Geoff took us about half an hour out of Banff to the trailhead of the Stanley Glacier Trail in East Kootenay, dispensing some wisdom, safety guidelines and information about what we’d let ourselves in for.  He described it as an eight km hike (four out and four back) of moderate toughness, which didn’t sound too daunting; but all the same he spent time making sure we had at least a litre of water each, and provided us with lunch packs.  The schedule for the hike seemed very leisurely – starting before 9am and expecting to be done by about 2 or 2.30pm.

We started up the trail

which shows, in the distance the Stanley Head Wall, a face of Mount Stanley (yes, the same Stanley that the Vancouver Park is named for).  The views as we went along were quite striking

but very hazy in places.  Much of the haze is due to wildfire smoke, as wildfires are an important part of the cycle of nature in the Banff national Park as in other parks.  The haze lightened as the day went on but it was, photographically speaking, a challenging day; allow me a geeky photo-type digression, here.

— START OF DIGRESSION: I SHAN’T BE OFFENDED IF YOU SKIP IT —

While modern cameras do a good job of extracting pleasing images from their sensors and presenting them to be viewed on a computer screen, they have to make editorial decisions about the data from the sensor in order to create such an image – so, for example, the .jpg file you see on your mobile phone screen has been extensively edited by the phone.  When I take my Big Camera (Nikon Z6) with me to Take Serious Photos, I decline to have the camera make these decisions for me, as I want a greater degree of control, so I shoot in a format called RAW, which creates an image not immediately readable by a computer without specialist software (DxO Photolab is my go-to) but which has very much more data from the sensor available for the photographer to play with in creating a final image. (In the good old days, one played with bits of cardboard and an enlarger projection on to paper; digital life is much easier.)

The practical upshot is that in challenging conditions such as today, the camera will suggest this as an image with a lot of haze in the background:

 

whereas I know (because I was there) that there’s much more to the scene than this image shows.  Once I’ve finished tinkering with the RAW file, the image looks like this:

Actually, the processed image is a little clearer than the reality as seen by the human eye; but I’m OK with this – what I’m after is not necessarily a recreation of that reality, but something that  may be more striking.

The net of this rambling is to let you know that I have tinkered with virtually all of the images from the hike to bring out specific elements of the image that I consider important; they are not necessarily a representation of what I saw, but I hope that they go towards telling the story of the hike.

— END OF DIGRESSION —

Geoff

is a very experienced guide, as well as a writer and scientist, and has a wide and detailed knowledge of matters to do with the National Parks of North America;  Yellowstone was the first to be established and Banff was the second. He said that the theme of the hike was “Wildfires and the Forest”, and it was very interesting to hear his perspective on forests, wilderness and managed ecologies.  His philosophy is well expressed by work published in 1995 by one William Cronon called “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Cronon said that it was time to rethink wilderness: that the the idea of wilderness as being a place that stands apart from humanity is wrong; and that wilderness – as an area that has no humans in it – is quite profoundly a human creation.

Geoff made a striking assertion: “The forest is doomed”.  A forest is not a permanent entity; bits of it will die from logging, fire or disease.  The cutting back or burning of forests saves the trees from dying of diseases caused by overcrowding and allows the forest to support a wider range of life.  The indigenous peoples that have been in the area for tens of thousands of years knew this, and effectively managed the forests to improve their lives – a greater selection of wildlife which is easier to hunt.  Fire was an important part of this management.

When Europeans came to the area and forced the indigenous peoples out, they lost sight of this; wildfires were regarded as something to be avoided or restricted – absence of wildfires was seen as a success. The result has been overcrowded, diseased forests with a paucity of wildlife, and only now has this realisation sunk in to the extent that proper action is being taken – or, at least, would be, were political will up to the task, which often it isn’t.  A very interesting and counter-intuitive philosophy.

Anyhoo…

We passed some nice scenes of forest and creek

with plentiful evidence of previous forest fires.

Above, you can see the red colours of the fireweed that is first to grow back after a fire.

We met a grouse, unconcernedly pecking away at the path

until disturbed by some people who passed us with a couple of noisy dogs, when it flew up into a nearby tree and posed for us again.

We passed buffalo berry plants

which are prime fodder for grizzly bears.  (Their other mainstay apparently is dandelions – dandelions – not much meat or fish in these here parts). The berries are, apparently, oily but I’m still astonished that berries can sustain an animal as big as a grizzly.  Another name for the berries is soap berries, and if you taste one – carefully, just a little of the juice rather than a whole berry – you can understand why; they have overtones of bitter grapefruit juice and detergent.

After a while, the path got steeper

and we ended up, some 1,000 feet higher than the start, at our lunch spot.  We were first there, but this trail is a popular one and so we were soon joined by others.

This is a big landscape.

In the distance, at the foot of the vertical bit of the Stanley Head Wall, were some climbers.

You can just make out some dots of colour near the white boulder at the bottom of the picture, with two red dots also visible some feet up the wall.  I tried to give some idea of just how big this landscape is.

The distances are deceptive.  For example, the patch of greenery towards the bottom of the picture above doesn’t look that far away,

but, on closer examination, actually has people in it

which are difficult to pick out with the naked eye (well, with my naked eye, anyway).

I tried taking photos of the glacier

and the waterfall caused by its melting

but, as I burbled about above, the light is extremely challenging, and it has taken quite a bit of fiddling to get images that I’m happy with.  I just want you to know that I suffer for my art.

After an hour resting at the top, we retraced our footsteps down the trail.  At the bottom, a stream we had crossed at the start of the trail was showing some lovely glacial blue colour in the water.

And that was it for the hike, which had been a really nice morning – an agreeable temperature, slightly demanding without being ridiculous and giving an opportunity to listen to Geoff’s wisdom about wildlife, ecology and forests.

My Garmin thingy told me, on returning to the hotel and a source of internettery, that we’d expended some 1,300 calories in the course of the hike, which is quite a lot, and could be interpreted as justification for taking it easy for the rest of the day.

So we went for a walk. Obviously.

Geoff had mentioned an area called Bow Falls, which is about half an hour’s walk from downtown Banff.  We needed something to eat anyway, so we headed the 15 minutes to downtown, ate a decent, cheerfully served, early dinner at The Keg, and then headed out along the path towards the falls.

Downtown Banff was busy, probably more than usual because we were here over a Labor Day weekend

but the lower part of the main street has a pedestrian area and is attractive, particularly with the mountains as backdrop.

The path to the falls is a riverside walk, and one has to decide which side of the Bow River to walk on; there’s a pedestrian bridge to help when you’ve made the decision.

We went along the north shore towards the Surprise Corner viewpoint, passing some lovely bits of real estate

almost certainly worth a fortune. At the falls, one gets a pretty spectacular view

part of which is the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel.

Given that we’ve stayed in Fairmonts in most other places, I assume that this one was full because of the holiday weekend.  Anyway, the sight of the hotel we didn’t stay in complements the splendid view rather well.

We retraced our steps to our hotel.  Along the path is a variety of artworks

including one which is some glass bats in a tree, which is a rather fetching idea.

Banff town itself is quite an attractive place, in a sort of American take on Swiss skiing town way.

And so ended a very pleasant, sunny day, with quite a few miles under our boot vibram and shoe leather.  All that remained was an evening of wedded domestic bliss – me writing the blog and Jane doing the laundry, because These Things Are Important, You Know.

The morrow brings the promise of a ride up the Banff gondola and it will be interesting to see how the logistics of that works – it’s a holiday weekend, so it’ll likely be crowded.  I’ll report back, of course, and I hope you’ll come back to see how it all went.