27.7km

I meet Ingrid, a Catalan girl, in the morning when I eat my breakfast. She tells me she is heading to Grañón, a town 7km beyond Santo Domingo de la Calzada, to a traditional albergue called San Juan Bautista. It’s behind a church, paid by donation, that comes with a shared meal. She strongly recommends going to it as part of the Camino experience. Two French have just come from there, doing the Camino in reverse, and they recommend it too. We decide to aim for Grañón even though we had a long walk yesterday.

We leave to wet pavements on an overcast morning and leave the town by ascending to a misty forest. A light but constant drizzle starts, our first rain on this Camino, and we change into our rainwear.

It’s a boring road today, but you can’t see too far, so you don’t think too much about the distance. The patter of raindrops on my hood is calming.

The town of Azofra is a good respite for indoor warmth, cafés con leche and some snacks.

We walk past tilled fields of maroon earth. The mist in the distant trees look like a Chinese painting.

Some slopes and pathways are muddy. I make a small game of avoiding mud puddles.

Today is like the way to Torres del Río, flat and monotonous, but the rain adds another dimension.

Fog vs mist

You don’t encounter either much in Singapore, so I’ve never known the difference. I’ve learned that essentially, fog is when you can see less than 1km away, and mist is when you can see further than 1km away.

We go past a golf course and share our coincidental mutual disdain for the activity. Nearby, they is a car collision accident at a junction, probably caused by the low visibility of the fog. A lady involved sees us and still wishes us “buen camino”, despite her troubles of the day.

We leave the fog behind to open fields of what Samuel tells me is canola. Cloud cover is light so the fields are pretty. Strong winds start, and I put my damp laundry back on my bag for drying.

As we approach Santo Domingo de la Calzada, the sky turns overcast, although it’s probably more of the strong wind blowing the rain clouds to where we are. I joke to Ji Sung that it is “domingo (Sunday) in Domingo”. We stop for lunch at a restaurant, where I have pochas con almas (beans with clam stew), and chuletillas de cerdero (pork chops). Two of us choose ice cream for dessert and the other two choose coffee, and we realise we can make affogatos for us all.

It is 7km more to Grañón. We follow farm roads. The sky is dark and cloudy with the sun hidden behind, which doesn’t make for good photos, but comfortable walking.

From a dirt path beside a highway, Grañón is visible a few kilometres away, framed by dramatic clouds.

We arrive at 5.20pm, and it starts drizzling as we enter a door from behind a church, up stone steps. We are welcomed by the warmest man in any accommodation so far. Queen is blasting from his portable speaker. Ingrid is already there, and she had kindly informed the host that the four of us will be coming too. He does not give us stamps for our credencial, saying we will find out why later.

It’s a beautiful place, meant to be different from a typical albergue—a donativo run by a volunteer hospitalero. We’re sleeping on padded mats on the floor, but the other facilities are all perfectly setup in-place. And because there is only a few of us, we can double the mats.

What follows is one of the best nights of my life that surprised and delighted me at every turn. If you’re ever walking the Camino, feel free to skip the rest of today’s entry and just know that I strongly recommend this place.

After we freshen up, our host ushers us into the kitchen to cook dinner together, with ingredients that are already there. It is a well-stocked kitchen that even has a hand blender. We decide to make pumpkin soup, Korean-style garlic fried chicken, and Spanish-style fried potatoes with chorizo and eggs. Starting to prep together, we have surprisingly good kitchen chemistry.

We are yearning for alcohol for tonight’s ensuing feast, so our host beckons me out of the albergue, and brings me to the nearby bar to get beers and wine. Before we leave, he proposes we both get a beer at the counter first. I find out his name is Fermín, he’s from Madrid, he walked the Camino in 1999, and he now volunteers to run this place. I am his first ever Singaporean guest.

After cooking up a storm, it is 9pm and we are hungry. One more set of cutlery is laid out so that “in case a pilgrim walks in, he has a place to eat”. Fermín sits us down, and it feels like we are about to say a solemn pre-meal grace. Then Fermín starts hitting the table and clapping in rhythm like “We Will Rock You” and says, here, we do a rap prayer.

ESTE ES EL RAP DE LA BENDICIÓN
BENDICE SEÑOR LA ALIMENTACIÓN
BENDICE A MIS AMIGOS
BENDICE A MIS HERMANOS
BENDICE A TODO AQUEL
QUE TE DE LA MANO
ESTIRA EL BRAZO, RECOGELO
Y CON ESTO QUEDA BENDECIDO TO

THIS IS THE RAP OF BLESSING
BLESS THE LORD FOR THE FOOD
BLESS MY FRIENDS
BLESS MY BROTHERS
BLESS EVERYONE THAT GAVE YOU A HAND
REACH OUT YOUR ARM, AND PICK IT BACK UP
AND WITH THIS WE FINISH THE BLESSING

We tuck in, and everything is really good, done to perfection. The best meal on my Camino thus far. The regional La Rioja wine is also great. Fermín tells us that when we are done, he will bring us into the church by a secret passageway for a special ceremony he does with every group of pilgrims that come here.

He brings us into a balcony at the back of the church. The front chancel is lit, so we can see the altar, but we are mostly in the dark. There are seats and he has lit small candles and placed them at the armrests.

We take our seats. Fermín is holding a larger candle. He says this is the pilgrims candle, and when we hold it, we are to say what’s on our hearts and minds today, in our own language. On the Camino we often don’t have a chance to release what we are thinking, and this is a chance to do so.

I catch some of Fermín’s Spanish but not much. Other than that I don’t understand Catalan, Korean, or Swiss German but I can feel the emotion. When the candle reaches me, I’m teary and feel immense gratefulness.

After the ceremony, Fermín says we are to end with hugs. He reveals the real stamps of the albergue—here, hugs will be the stamps on our heart.