Last night we had a great dinner just down the road from our digs. Dinner was only slightly marred by a lady on an adjacent table requiring every option to be translated and understood. She was there as we arrived, and still there when we left exploring all translations to the ninth degree. Our ordering took 30 secs. Anyway, here is the grub. Cheese cake omitted – a delicious goats cheese salad and chicken and mushroom pasta.

Today’s ride was relatively easy at 80km and 731m of climbing. The hills were kind and very manageable, apart from one unreasonably steep one where we pushed.

We set off early on a N road to avoid the morning rush. Bit foggy again so we dressed in our finest yellow. Then hopped on and off of the Camino track as we took directions from the Garmin. By midday we ended up on the Atlantic Coast and had a wonderful ride south along the coast. Very scenic.

View from our digs as we propelled ourselves into the day.

This was a tad odd. As we passed through Redondela we came across this ‘sculpture’. OK, I don’t know why or how this was created. But bear in mind we have seen some wonderful bronze work, and then we come across this. Husband and wife with shrunken Nessy. It looks like a couple of blokes had a good night out on the booze and thought it would be a grand idea to knock up some artwork!

Going through Vigo we made a slight ricket and took a rather large tunnel to the dock. Noisy, but safe as all drivers were very good and gave lots of room. One driver gave a motorbike a good blast on the horn as he had the nerve to stay in the overtaking lane for a nano-second too long. This brings me to my observations on speed limits. One really good thing about Spain is that they have sensibly low speed limits. However, drivers generally ignore them. They treat the speed limit as a minimum speed limit. But as I have said before, they all give cyclists a very wide berth, which is fantastic.

Once we emerged from our Vigo tunnel we spotted a super cycle path. I do suspect we missed it pre-tunnel. This path was separated from the road by a hard shoulder, then large blocks. A clear and most pleasant cycle track, sometimes shared with pedestrians.

We ran along the docks where they park the boats in colour order! How nice is that?

View across the inlet.

Views down the Atlantic Coast.

A few shots along the way.

By the beach

Wall popped up as divider.

This was rather sobering. A memorial to a cyclist, carved in the style of the local stone work we have seen a great deal of.

Near the end we spotted a cliff side cafe and took coffee and ice cream as one of today’s many rewards. There we met two Kiwis, Cath and Mike, who were heading north on electric mountain bikes. Here is a trio of Kiwis.

Today we reset the compasses and headed south toward Portugal. It was a mixed bag of roads from busy N roads during rush hour to tiny tracks barely wide enough for one person. Compounded with the sun timing its appearance during the assents, it was not as pleasant as first imagined during our planning phase yesterday. We are also now headed on the Camino Portuguese path so we have the pilgrims head on as they walk from Portugal to Spain, which did tend to make the way a tad easier as most saw us coming. The ride was 76km and 899m of climbing. Well, it was on my Garmin, Karen’s is always lower for some reason.

We passed lots of small vineyards today. One thing I noted is those stone posts. Yes, they are stone, not concrete. The structure was always made with stone columns with a wide variety of beams running between them. Sometimes concrete, as in this pic, then bamboo took favour and when closer to the railway line, yes railway lines (see second pic), sometimes odd scraps of wood. But always these stone columns.

Baby grapes.

We stopped off the busy N road when we got very hot and had a rest. Found this chap picking his feet.

A nice track.

Obstacle time. I would have helped but wanted to capture the moment.

A very nice track.

We crossed some wetlands.

This lady was driving her rotorvator at flank speed along the track, snails were passing her with ease.

Garmin guided us through towns when we took notice of it!

During a stop off, Karen took a few photos for this collage.

Crop protection frog, Spider Man was also there.

A rare picture of the chef preparing our lunch.

Water bottles topped off with fresh spring water, we hope.

Typical ‘wide’ track through the villages.

Came across this railway. Road sign that you can see the back of showed two cars, red and black, signing no overtaking!! Track was just wide enough for two bikes!

View from digs

Following a leisurely breakfast, we found the official certification office for the camino. Following a short queue we were issued with our personal certificates, all in Latin. We shall from hence forth be known as Catharinam and Godefridum.

A few fact and figures:

Last year 437,500 completed the Caminos. That’s across all the Caminos not just the Camino Frances that we followed, although the Frances is the most popular.

When Karen did it 10 years ago there were 215,000 pilgrims, so that explains why she observed it being busier than when she first did it!

We arrived yesterday as part of the highest daily count so far at 1748.

We then entered our planning phase. We planned out our routes up to and including Porto, Portugal. The digs had a large reception space we could use. This is serious stuff where Karen did the hard graft with me giving close support with nods and ‘OKs’ at the right point during this process.

So, overall a quiet but productive rest day in Santiago de Compostela.

Today was surprisingly easy as the chief navigator had declared the ride as a 60km one, but when we were within 1 km of the Cathedral, we had only done 49km! So a quick revision was made, and it was an earlier day than expected.

Today, while again having some very stiff climbs, was very enjoyable indeed. We have completed our first leg, only one leg and two arms to go!

It was a bit foggy at the start so hi-viz was donned. Nice vine training on the right, difficult to tell from pic but these are being trained into a long porch shape over the adjacent field. The pic also shows our chief navigator in the distance.

We saw many more farms with the cattle in barns, the smell being rather over-powering at times.

Nice views again.

We dropped into many villages like this, a lovely spot.

We met a Spanish rider. I’ll call him Bilbao, as he lives there, and we failed to tease his name out of him. We had come across this jolly chap three times before. A really nice bloke who constantly eased into many conversations as to how hot it was in southern Spain (we had previously explained our route to him). In fact even after we said our goodbyes today, he dropped the same message. This message has now been registered and our planning team are considering our options for southern Spain. Bilbao suggested the coast line, but we had specifically excluded this on the grounds of avoiding the ‘British’ towns there.

Today’s ride included some fairly swift descents. Being of the more stout build I rarely reach my comfortable terminal velocity, so need to apply brakes. This ranges from a few snubs to WTF full on braking. So we were surprised today when Bilbao, between explaining how very hot it was in southern Spain, explained that he lost all braking and had to use his feet. I hope we bump into him again – a nice chap.

Weaving our way through narrow streets of Santiago de Compostela, we caught a glimpse of the cathedral up ahead. We also started to see the walking pilgrims again, after our EV3 route took us away from the walking track today.

Our EV3 route was advising us to take a circuitous route. We knew ‘better’ and headed straight for the target, and then lots of stairs! But it was worth it as we came across a bagpipe player! Yip, in the middle of the city, this bloke was banging out unrecognisable tunes on his pipes! Didn’t expect that.

On arrival at the cathedral, the end of the pilgrimage, there were many pilgrims in the plaza. Some in quiet contemplation, others mildly excited and some groups absolutely ecstatic, sort of winning the lottery ecstatic. Some just sunbathed, or perhaps they had passed out. Bearing in mind we had seen the arrival of pilgrims at many towns, the numbers seemed a tad high, the pilgrimmetric flow was huge, so I remain unconvinced they had all completed the walk.

A monk just nipping back from the bar:

This is my blog office.

We met a Canadian chap who offered to take our pic. Think he was called wiss, ciss, fizz or something like that. He had cycled across France and the whole Camino Frances. We shared a few stories. Spoke about cycle touring across Canada, bear attacks etc. His view was that the rail system was not developed to carry bicycles, and bear attacks are just about chance or luck.

Wiss took our picture:

Anyway we are both chuffed that we have completed this leg and now look forward to some R&R on our rest day. Well after a rather nice dinner. This was our pudding – a sweet crepe with white chocolate ganache, fruits of the forest, and strawberry ice-cream:

It was immediately noticeable today that the volume of pilgrims had markedly increased. This is due to Sarria being at the minimum distance for a walking pilgrim to qualify for credential of completion, 100km-ish. A big difference was the coalescence of large pilgrim groups. Most groups stuck to one side of the track, or the edge of road. But one large group of Italian pilgrims (identified by large amounts of arm waving and distorted facial gestures), about 20 in number, occupied the whole road. This was unfortunate as I was in full descent mode, bearing down at warp factor 8 and was not eager to use my brakes. So a nice loud “Hola” gave my due warning and I passed, without reducing the the Italian population.

Pilgrims grouping up at the start of the day, leaving Sarria.

Fog soon enveloped us.

So in order to comply with Spanish regulations we donned our high vis vests. Prepared we are.

Later on. Note chap with the brolly. As it turns out he was about 8 hours early for the rain.

We had a choice of taking the N road, a more major road type, or more minor roads that followed the EV3. We chose the latter. This was a wise move as we had a canopy of trees providing some welcome shade.

We came across this mural painted upon an old deserted industrial building. This fella is gazing upon his cheese. I would go so far to say he loves this particular cheese. “Blessed are the cheese makers”.

Along the route we saw many of these buildings, long structures often high off the ground with wooden slatted sides (the one in the fore ground has been bricked up). We thought maybe they were for burials, or perhaps curing meat. But our host later told us they were used for drying grain many years ago and are no longer used.

Another feature in these parts is the use of large slate slabs strung with barbed wire to serve as a fence. (well I found that interesting).

Another construction interest is there is wide building of new road networks here. Lots of prestressed concrete being used here. Hopefully they are using a different contractor to that used for the ones we saw collapsed a few days back.

We passed through lots of forests, some of which are being harvested. You can’t see it from this shot but there is a bloke reversing a trailer laden with wood with a small tractor. He was rubbish at reversing and kept hitting the massive pile of logs.

Great sign made from Core 10 (low chromium steel).

Interesting fact about Portomarin – most of the historic buildings here were relocated, brick by brick, to allow the construction of a dam which then flooded the old town. The water of said dam is below. Second interesting fact about Portomarin – there is a bloke driving a small white van who is confused as to what side of the road to drive on. I’m puzzled at how he could steer as he used both arms to wave at us, presumably using semaphore. A twat.

More harvesting, this time Eucalyptus trees.

Rain was forecast for 1400hrs, and we weaved past many rain clouds, only catching the odd drop of rain. 5 mins from our digs in Arzua it got very grey and dark. Then the lightening sparked up which rather encouraged a faster pace. As we got within 100m of our digs the heavens opened up. It was a mad race for the reception porch. We made it, just moist. It was a really good day’s riding today – 86kms with 1,720m of climbing, including quite a few climbs of 8-12%. No team talk required today, spirits are high. The team is happy, the leg muscles are a bit sore.