Camino Primitivo part 4: Borres to Berducedo

Liz was awake at 6, she said, listening to the wind. The rest of us got up around 8 and got everything ready. The wind had died down a little bit but Enrique (one half of the Valencian couple, the other being Encarna) said it was still raining. I dithered between umbrella and waterproofs, eventually opting for waterproof trousers and umbrella combo which would avoid overheating. I had a new umbrella for walking, a huge aluminium thing, light but sturdy enough to cope with the wind.

It bucketed down.

We walked to a village called La Mortera, where there was, surprisingly, a bar (you may be getting an idea of what kind of pilgrimage this is by now… it’s a pub crawl… a very loooong pub crawl). It was another bar-tienda (the combination of bar and village shop with all the stock on shelves, they sold everything from soap to slippers, blankets to tins of peaches. The bar owner seemed happy to have so many customers and busied herself making coffee. Enrique suggested a chupito, so we had an orujo that the landlady said was made by one of the local chaps, yes, moonshine. She stamped our credentials and we waited to see if the rain would let up.

No.

So it was off again, this time to Pola de Allande, another bigish town (for very small, Asturian values of big). We arrived at lunchtime and had a big blowout meal. The rain let up a little bit and the sun came out for all of five minutes. While we were inside.



Full, we decided to do the next part. A climb up to Puerto del Palo (puerto means pass in the mountains), which had a reputation of being a bit tough for pilgrims. Julio suggested that we stop at an albergue after a couple of km, but we were thinking of how we were getting home, one bus a day, and we thought we should press on. We stopped in a bar after a few more kilometres. Here in the deeps of Asturias the bars are full of pictures of hunters on the walls, proudly posing above boar corpses. The bar was full of hunters complaining about the weather and worryingly combining drinking with walking around with shotguns. There were a few raised eyebrows when we said where we were going.

We trudged through the rain up the road for a couple of hours, and then took the path as it left the road to head straight up while the road did a few hairpins which would have added another 4km to the route. The path was basically a stream, which made it easy to follow at least.


We got to the top in the murk, fog, twilight, wind… it was very Yorkshire. The light was going and there was another 8km to the albergue. We passed a tiny slate chapel and a hamlet of three housed, pointed in the right direction by an umbrella wielding farmer (if you take a wrong turn doing the camino, local people notice and soon set you straight, although on this day, a couple of people I asked were in the middle of slaughtering pigs, elbow deep in offal, which made pointing a challenge).We couldn’t see very much, so we just walked on. 8km, two hours, a village with a bar in 4km, but would it be open… I put my mp3 player on and listened to Melvyn Bragg on Sparta and the discovery of radiation while we walked, it was hard to chat with the drumming of the rain on the umbrella, yes, it was still raining.


We got to the tiny village of Lago and had a coffee at the bar, 4km left to the albergue. Pitch black now, so head torches out and single file to present a smaller target to the traffic. When we reached the albergue, it was occupied by a solitary walker from Mallorca who had put the heating up to maximum on all the radiators. Handy because we were all pretty damp. There were wet sleeping bags, boots, socks, clothes… Enrique, Julio and I went down to the bar (the voluntary donation was, well, not very voluntary here) to pay and Julio rang his wife (it was their 40th wedding anniversary). Then back up to the sauna that the albergue had become and an attempt to sleep.