Day 4 -- Ponferrada to Villafranca de Bierzo

Wednesday, June 6
22.5 km -- on the bus

The Walking Wounded
Patricia, of the broken arm and the bashed-up face, was only the beginning. Every pilgrim I meet is struggling with minor ailments, usually blisters or shin splints or swollen ankles or knee problems. A good chunk of them are also dealing with more serious issues, often having to do with falls. A bicylist I spoke with at the albergue in Ponferrada last night had skidded on gravel and badly scraped one side of his body. A British woman walking alone had tumbled down a hill and was all bruised and battered. A Belgian woman was sweating out a fever in the albergue, but didn´t want to take any medicine. On an even more serious note, Patricia told me that three people died on the Camino the first week she was walking. Two were struck by lightning on the open plain near Leon. How the third died I don´t know.

I take my place among the walking wounded. My complaints are minor but they kept me from walking today. The steep descent the last few days pushed my foot against the end of my boot and my litle toe is raw, at the end, on the underside, and between it and the next toe. It seems like a small thing but I can´t put on my boot or even my tennis shoe without excruciating pain. I´ve tried many kinds of bandages--compeed, moleskin, gauze with tape, tape alone--and it doesn´t help. There´s nothing like spending 20 minutes on dressing a wound only to have the bandage fall off in five minutes.

I was going to stay an extra day at the enormous hostal in Ponferrada (capacity 160), which is a sort of de facto pilgrim hospital, being in the only town around where you can get medical attention. It´s also the only alberque I´ve seen that allows stays of more than a day if you need to recover before moving on.

It´s run by a big ruddy German couple who at first seemed brusque but are actually soft touches who let those who need to linger for days. They even have a doctor from the Red Cross come in every afternoon to give pilgrims advice about sprains, strains, and fractures, and help people drain and dress their blisters. The state of people´s feet is truly atrocious--I don´t know how some of these people keep walking. One guy´s heel looked like an onion, it had so many layers of skin hanging off it. Blisters are definitely the hair shirts and barbed whips of the modern pilgrim. Did pilgrims in the middle ages get blisters, or is it all our modern equipment that gets us into trouble?

At any alberque what people are doing is attending to their feet and writing in their journals. I bet a good chunk of the people I see have blogs too. When people aren´t talking about the spiritual side of the Camino they´re comparing notes on foot care. Everyone has their theories. Many swear by what is basically greasing your feet. One French guy who´d already walked 1000 km said he used ¨pilgrim´s balm¨ on his feet and he hadn´t had one blister (I got the sense that it was kind of like Bag Balm). One of the South African crew, a long-limbed beauty who wears short shorts, is always rubbing cream into her feet. The other day she revealed to me that it was actually very expensive face cream that she´d brought along but was now using on her feet, them being more important than preventing wrinkles, at least for the next few weeks.

People routinely share foot care supplies, and last night my bunkmate Anka (so many Ankas, Ingas, Brigittes, and Hildas) from Bavaria helped me dress my feet and was shocked by the paucity of my supplies. I don´t even have any antiseptic spray, which was a real oversight. I also have no compeed, blister dressings which as many swear by but which I didn´t find before leaving (I should have looked harder).

The Riding Wounded
This morning I went to the only outdoor equipment shop in town (and probably for hundred of miles around) and bought a pair of heavy duty Tevas for a shocking 90 Euros. Here I was lampooning convertible pants and I´ll be walking in Tevas with socks. The Camino makes me swallow my pride. The Tevas allow me to walk (they don´t press on my little toe), though not easily. I still have arch problems (I have high arches, and no shoes have enough support) and pains up the side of my shins (is that shin splints?), so I took the day off, taking a 30-minute bus ride from Ponfrerrada that was so comfortable I didn´t want it to end. Tomorrow I will try to cross the mountains into Galicia in Tevas.

From Villafranca de Bierzo (where I am right now) to O Cebreiro you go from about 500 meters to around 1300. But like the mountains I just came over, this is supposed to be a beautiful stretch of Camino.

If you have to bus it at any point, between Ponferrada and Villafranca de Bierzo is not a bad choice. The Camino here goes through a rather hot (33 C today), heavily settled valley, and for much of the way you´re actually walking along the highway. I know because as I was sitting in the air-conditioned bus, we sped by scores of pilgrims.

I felt bad but it was either that or stay in Ponferrada and lose a day, which I can´t really afford to do time-wise, having to make a flight out of Santiago.

Bad pilgrim of the day
Me. For my cranky lack of charity in the last few days, and for my pride, which told me I could power through even as other pilgrims fell by the wayside. I am having my comeuppance, and I´m having to adjust my plan. I´m also realizing that every pilgrim has to do the same--adjust to injuries or scale back their ambitions. Of course some do power through, doing 30 or 40 km a day and never being brought low by injuries. These are the people you see once and then never see again. But the rest of us, struggling along, see other again and again.

And of course I keep running into Nola/Passion, whom I judged so harshly and who I am beginning to like. Maybe she´s my lesson. I judge her then have to judge myself just as harshly, then maybe I am compassionate with her and can also have some compassion for myself. HP, what is the term Carlos Casteñeda uses for a person who both plagues and teaches you?