Day Fifty Two: O Pedrouzo to Santiago de Compostella: The Festival of Friends

May 18, 2017

Smiles and laughter and pleasant times
There's love in the world but it's hard to find
I'm so glad I found you -- I'd just like to extend
An invitation to the festival of friends.
Bruce Cockburn

This was our day to join many hundreds of pilgrims, converging on Santiago de Compostella. We began by hitting the road at 6. Our idea was to get to Santiago early enough to get our certificates of completion (compostellas), attend the pilgrim mass, look at the souvenir shops, the whole deal. That's because the super room we had found was only available for one night. Whatever we would do next - go to Portugal, go to Finisterre, beat it back to France, stike out on the Camino del Norte, it looked like it would directly happen the next day.

We are following the roads, which is usually more difficult than taking the very well marked walkers' way. But Dodie happened to notice how the walkers should go just as some walkers lost the way. It was easy to lose the way, since it was still pretty much dark. (We were running with full lights and flashers.)

The 15 km in to the outskirts of Santiago was fairly uneventful, even though it included some fairly extended hills. We were not only fresh from a night's sleep, but also pumped to be finally arriving.

Lavacolla, a suburb, is the spot where traditionally pilgrims cleaned up before entering the cathedral precinct. But nowadays, unfortunately, Lavacolla itself is pretty grotty. In our efforts to stick to road and not bug walkers we got a little off track. One of the advantages was that instead of the famous blocked view of the cathedral from Monte de Gozo we got a great view, from ... somewhere.

We crossed the actual sign that said Santiago also in the middle of who knows where. This did not dampen, though, arms raised in triumph.

We did manage a distant view of the cathedral

From there on in was a bit of a downer. The outskirts of every city that has a wonderful old town always are disappointing, because you just can't beat those old city centers. Still, Santiago gave me the impression of a modern city with a huge attraction at its core that, in its size and modernity, had forgotten about it.

Whereas towns along the "Camino" were uniformly emblazoned with the great Camino logos and signs, filled with Camino oriented albergues and restaurants, and clearly filled wth walkers, Santiago itself showed barely any sign of this. It felt strange.

The town was strangely lacking in Camino signage. Only this guy seemed to greet and direct us

Streets were generally broad, busy, and both bicycle and pedestrian unfriendly

When, by guessing and by asking directions we did roll up in front of the cathedral, the large square was all but deserted. (Ok, it was a little early, but early hours had not deterred pilgrims in the previous 900 km!).

The quite empty square on the front side of the cathedral

We were lucky to find a person, who took our photo, for the record.

The next "trick" about the cathedral is that the "front" is under renovation and anyway does not have an entrance that is in use. Looking to do our next big thing, the verification of our distance and securing the completion certificate, we proceeded out from the front. That turned out to be the correct move as we came to the pilgrim office fairly easily. We were pleased that a guard ushered us through a door and showed us a place to put the bikes in an inner courtyard. Often on the Camino and in Spain generally we have felt ignored as cyclists.

The well known lineup of pilgrims did not "disappoint" and was suitably long (though I had occasion to return later in the day and found it twice as long). A TV screen announced which of 14 possible wickets the next pilgrim should present themselves to.

When our number came up, we found that our documents got a careful and sympathetic review. We were proud to show our stamp from Notre Dame de Paris, and to have our distance assessed as 2200 km!

This line got longer and denser as the day went on

We added our names to the thousands before us

Oh my, all those Galician shells are from China

Leaving the office, our next thing was to find the hotel we had booked. We generally assumed we would spot the street in the region in front of the cathedral. Not so. In fact, all the "action" is behind the cathedral. In front the old town quickly thins out and disappears. And since there are lots of hills around (hills!) streets end in stairs. I got to carry the loaded bikes up several sets of stairs before we wound our way through tangled streets to find the hotel. Dodie actually said we should abandon our booking and find something closer to the cathedral. But when we did get to the place we found the tangled streets had lead us back practically to the cathedral door!

The hills around the cathedral made for lots of steps. Here a nice man gives Dodie a hand.

Again, we were pleased to have the hotel staff direct our bikes through the lobby and into a storage area. And our bags went into another baggage room (still too early for our actual room to be ready). With everyhing stashed, we set off to the pilgrim's mass.

Business at the Catholic Church has of course been weak for a long time, such that we found many churches locked or at least unstaffed. But at Santiago it's a much different story. The cathedral was packed, and that was despite an announcement asking non-pilgrims to leave for the period of the mass. In terms of staff, there were at least 20 white clad priests and two nuns running the service. There was also security in the crowd, trying to enforce a no photos policy.

Three aspects of the service were noteworthy. One of the nuns played a major role, singing some lovely melodies. The organ added to the musical enjoyment. Finally, though most of the service was in Spanish, a lineup of priests approached the mike and did prayers in a variety of languages.

During part of the Spanish service also, it was clear that the priest was welcoming pilgrims from countries that he was naming. I am not sure if this was a generic list of places or whether it came from current information. The latter would have been possible, since at the compostella centre we were asked to add our names to a sheet that collected country of origin, gender, age, city, and reason for pilgrimage. I took a photo of our page, and actually could tabulate the results from just that small sample. I can at least say on the one page the countries of Spain, Holland, Italy, Germany, England, Austria, USA, Australia, and ...Canada are represented. This is part of the reason that I am calling this gathering a festival of friends.

Another part of the service that I liked may well be a part of every service for all I know, but at some point everyone in the congregation turned and greeted their neighbours. A man, probably from Korea, crossed an aisle to shake my hand. I liked that a lot.

With the service over we were able to wander around the cathedral and take photos to add to the surreptitious ones from during the service! Actually what we did was to join first one line to descend beneath the altar and view the reliquary of St James. The second line ascended behind the altar, where pilgrims gave a hug to the reachable one of the three representations of St James that make up the display.

I must say that it puzzles me how people seem so affected by these things, to see people fervently praying in the crypt. I know if they had to rely on prayer to make, for example, their iPhones maybe work once per century, they would be livid and no doubt also switch to Samsung. But here, they are just fine with it all?

One of the things we wanted to be sure to photograph was the Botafumeiro, which is a famous swinging metal container, or "incensory". The name "Botafumeiro" means "smoke expeller" in Galician. They only swing this on special occasions (like appaently, yesterday) and otherwise will only do it on payment of 300 euros.

all through the service and all day long, pilgrims ascend behind St James' statue and give it a hug

In this part of the cathedral, all the angels were wielding these microphones?

For 300 euros, they will fire this up for you, says Rick Steves

Finally, one of my favourite parts, we exited to the streets to look at souvenirs and find lunch. Of course we already have enough souvenirs, but I did get a couple more. I am partial to anythng blue and yellow and showing a bicycle and/or the cockle shell. Hundreds of items here fit that bill.

Souvenirs available outside - but there were dozens of quite high quality shops on the back streets

One shop specialized in "bicigrino" stuff

I also like the pilgrim combination plates, typically shown in photos at the front of restaurants. My favs are grilled pork or chicken, with salad, and there are always fries. Dodie says she is really sick of fries. Weird.

One other thing often on offer is pulpe .. octopus

An octopus restaurant - not for this pilgrim.

With all these chores accomplished, it was time to turn our attention to get outta here, and what's more, where to go.

We stopped in to the Portugese tourist office and asked about cycling to Porto. We got a jumbled answer that mixed up routes on road, for mountain bike, and for walking, and generally could get nothing at all that referred to cycling to or in Porto. Despite some trusted Crazyguy journals describing just this, we decided we were not prepared to just dive in.

Next with Dodie's knee really acting up, I was discouraging heading out to Finisterre. She really wanted to go, but I questioned the logic of searching out more hills.

That's how I ended up going to search out the train company (RENFE) offie, while leaving Dodie to rest her knee. I took suitable precautions, setting off with a map, GPS, and even spare battery. It was not really that crazy, because though I did find the place I needed, it turned out to be totally unmarked. And getting back was an entertaining memory test. I think I did as well as maybe an average rat.

There is a strong clue (plenty for most Spaniards?) clue here that this is a post office, train office, and bus office.

But for a Canadian, this is just a blank street!

What I learned was that we could go to San Sebastian (but not France) by train, but that (a) the bikes would need to be bagged and no bags were available and (b) the train was fully booked. Else we could go by bus, with bikes bagged but they sell bags. The bus trip is 12 hours! The train is not much faster, 10 1/2 hours.

Tomorrow we will cycle out (way out) to the bus station and see what we can arrange. If it's a go, it goes at 6 p.m. That will at least land us in the strange city of San Sebastion in (early morning) daylight. When we some time ago gave up on our ambition of cycling the "Norte" we mailed home our maps. So now technically we do not know how to get out of San Sebastian. That makes it an adventure, right?

Today's ride: 20 km (12 miles)
Total: 2,284 km (1,418 miles)

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