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Published: October 10th 2012
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Panorama
Day 9, the panorama Route: Cirueña - Belorado
Again a (too) sunny day.
I walked 30 km in about 7 hours; not bad given the warmth. The surroundings here are somewhat dull, fields as far as you can see, very little variation and no trees and shade anywhere. Deforestation took its toll some time ago. Fortunately today there were 4 villages on the way each marked with its old church in the middle at the highest point. Amazing to see the elaborate decoration in gold in each one of them and that to know that these villages have no more than a couple of hundred inhabitants.
Last nights lodging turned out to be a bit surprising. The couple of times that I have slept at an albergue I have not had problems with people snoring. This morning nevertheless, I was woken up by someone sleeping on the floor above me...
Today's choice is not a lot better. Checked into a hotel with tiny rooms and no elevator. Wrong choice, but at least I have my own bathroom and it is clean. The food at the hotel turned out to be reasonably good, so it was not an entire loss.
Given
the lack of variation in the panorama, I had time to come up with the following arithmetic: The distance between St. Jean and Santiago is about 780 km that is 780.000 meters and if each step is about 50 cm, I have to make 1.560.000 step to get to Santiago. I guess I still have some million steps to go.....
I have had some questions on things on the Camino:
• Do you walk with same people all the time? Each one goes on its own pace. You come across other pilgrims and periodically you walk along with them for a while. Typically you ask where they are from, where they started this morning and what the destination of the day is. After a number of days you become to know a number of people and conversations may last somewhat longer and cover more personal stuff.
• Does everybody carry its backpack? No, but most do. There are courier services that take your backpack from one place to another. Cost you €6 per day per pack. Have not done it, but others indicate that this works well.
Something on pilgrims:<br style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal;"
/>There are different type of pilgrims. There the regular ones (as am I); the lighter ones, who send their backpacks from A to B and the superlights. These are normally older people that you may see several times a days. Initially you get a reaction of WTF, I must be taking the wrong route. Later you find out that they walk a couple of km and then they get on a bus to be let loose sometime later again.
Added note: what I found out after I used the courier service at a later stage in my walk, is that sending your backpack to a specific address - hotel, albergues or what else - you star to build in a lot of inflexibility. Normally you have an objective, but if you feel good, you can decide, as I have done on serveral occasions, to walk on. On the contrary, if you do not feel good, you have to walk on to where they dropped your backpack.
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