Camino de Santiago — Day 2

September 10 / Roncesvalles — Larrasoaña

At 5.30am there were already people getting ready to leave. The Dutch volunteers woke up everyone at 6am singing Gregorian chants, so I had to get up (the Dutch were volunteers that came each year to help with the albergue in high season). I am not a morning person so this was going to be the hardest part, being waked up by people at 5.30am. I will talk more about it on the future…

The day before I bought the ticket to have breakfast at Casa Sabino. Today it was sparking and they had a terrible organization so there was a long queue outside. After 20 minutes, I could have breakfast. I finished quickly and I started walking with the coat and the backpack cover. First learning: don’t book any breakfast, specially in Roncesvalles with so many pilgrims.

Luckily it stopped raining and I advanced at a good pace crossing different forests of the area. Lots of beech forests, ascents and descents and not a lot of talking in this first part. There were many people, I always had someone in front or behind me (remember that there were at least 450 pilgrims in Roncesvalles).

The official stage ends in Zubiri but I felt good and I wanted to make some progress in order to avoid being surrounded by many people. At Zubiri I met again with the Irish couple (Mike and Tracy) who were having lunch there and were going to continue also to the next town. I had lunch there too in order to rest a bit.

When I was arriving at Larrasoaña I met Bogi, a Hungarian girl from Budapest. We went to the public albergue together. It was a bit shabby, but I could met many people. Aside from Bogi, I talked to Ane (a ~20 year old Danish girl who has enjoying a sabbatic year before deciding what to study) and Brandom and his wife (an American couple from Tennesse). He was also an computer science engineer and we talked quite a bit of time about the sector and my experience. They were there with his parents and his brother. It was his parents’ anniversary and this was his family trip.

Bogi, Ane and I went to the supermarket to buy something to eat. It was a small market targeted to pilgrims which was a bit pricey; but it was managed by Angel, a guy who knew how to sell and build his own brand. He was really charming and he was giving away glasses of wine to everyone. He confessed to me that it was his strategy to attract more people to that small town. He was even famous in Korea! I saw many people taking photos with him or videos with him singing. We ended up being there 2 hours chatting with other pilgrims on its terrace.

I bought a fabada and a can of sardines and I went to have dinner at the albergue. There I met a Brazilian, several Irish young people (Stephanie was there too), Michael (the Danish guy from the day before) and a Japanese woman. Suddenly a group of 8 Koreans came and quickly cooked their meal. They invited us to a tasty tea. This group has asked us before to take a photo with them and a poster that said “1.000 km to Santiago”. It seams Koreans discovered the Camino after a Korean woman wrote a book explaining how it changed her life.

Around 10pm I went to sleep. Almost everyone was already sleeping. I still needed to get used to this change of schedules.