¡Buen Camino!
It turned out that the picturesque town of Burgos had a nice library which made my stay longer than expected. I’d be there in the morning when it opened and in the evening until it closed, reading about two books a day: H.Schultz’s touching narrative about his turnover of Starbucks, books about entrepreneurship and marketing, and about „what Einstein may have told his hairdresser“, an interesting collection of the intricate questions of daily life (like what to do when in a falling lift). Burgos happens to be on the main track of the famous pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. That is a route from the South of France through the North of Spain, about 800km for about 40 days. You collect stamps all along the way in the accomodation facilities and the visiting spots and when you arrive Santiago with enough stamps you get a certificate in your language (if you did the camino „for private reasons“) or in latin (if you did it „for religious reasons“). That’s how the pilgrim system works.
One sunny afternoon, I stood in one of the lovely little pedestrian streets, when a man, for his accent an Austrian, came by in a rush shouting „¿peregrino, peregrino? ¿albergue, albergue?“ He immediately hastened away into the direction I pointed him to. This was my first encounter with a pilgrim in action. For two days in the lovely green hillsides (that is, upwards and downwards) to Logroño and Estella, I should meet more people than on the countryside of Southamerica in a whole year: friendly people of all ages and nationalities, struggling with the sun, moaning about theirs blebs, gathering in groups or solely. „You go in the wrong direction! Aren’t you on the camino?“ – „I’m just cycling here.“
While I respect them for their outdoor activity, I personally don’t share their preference to go for the beaten track: walking in the crowd, on a predefined way, in a prescribed direction, seeing preconceived things, sleeping in completely organized places. In Estella, I even spent a night in a pilgrim’s hostal, just for the experience. Light was eclipsed with the sun at 10 o’clock, the first left at 6 o’clock the next morning. With 40 snarkling people in one room, it was not the best sleep night of my life, but the atmosphere was pleasant: the home was run by a team of mentally impaired people who invited me for their pasta dinner – they had cooked about twice too much – and we spent a very funny evening.