Episode Transcript
DAY 5 MORNING BEFORE WALKING
Alrighty, Day Five in Puente le Reina, about to leave our treehouse and head to Estella.
I've just invented a new acronym, BTS. It's not just an awesome K-pop group, it's also bags, tight shoes, and sticks, so we don't forget things. I think we've both BTS’d this morning, haven't we?
I think tight shoes is a stretch for a ‘T.’
It's beautiful weather. Birds are singing. Ready to go. Hopefully we find somewhere open with coffee soon. Our usual quest.
DAY 5 SUMMARY
Hi everyone, and welcome to Is This The Way, a podcast where we walk the Camino de Santiago. I'm Francesca. And I'm Gaven.
And it's Day Five and we are walking from Puente le Reina to Estella la Bella – Estella the beautiful. What does the guidebook say about today? The guidebook says: revel in marvellous rolling agricultural views, enter history on a Roman road, and discover a wealth of churches in Estella la Bella.
Ah, the Roman roads, the first of many. Yeah, we're going to have a slightly unfortunate time with a Roman road, but that's probably in 20 days time. Later on we will see many Roman roads, including apparently the best preserved Roman road. So maybe we'll leave Roman roads for now and we'll tell you more about that when we get to it.
In terms of stats for today, the guidebook says it's 21.8 kilometers, took us about 24 kilometers when we were tracking it. It's a little bit longer. It rates it a 1 / 3 for difficulty, which is probably pretty fair. It was quite flat, aside from a little bit of a climb just in the morning out of Puente le Reina. It's funny, I don't remember this climb at all, so I felt like it was a very easy but hot day. Yeah, I remember the climb because we went out of town and it's kind of you kind of go down a little bit. And that went really steeply off because it kind of goes there's like a freeway that's like cuts through the hills and it's kind of comes up the hill on one side and then down the other side of it. I think we got our first stop for the morning just on the other side of that. But I remember it's like it's a very like steep hike for about a kilometer. I left you behind completely and waited at the top for you, which is probably why you don't remember. I guess I was pottering up behind you.
We'd probably give it like a three out of 10. On a slightly wider scale. It's a very easy day. Still, compared to some of the earlier ones. Well, then it took us 4 1/2 hours to get there, but there was quite punishing heat though. Yeah, the heat wave that have been in the news finally caught up to us. So we had a top of 41 degrees Celsius while we were walking, which was pretty full on. And it's not so much the heat during the day because that's okay when you're walking and you're getting sweaty and there are plenty of places for water and things along the way, so it wasn't too bad. And we're used to hot climate, so that's okay. It's more that it doesn't stop being hot in the evening either. So right up until midnight, it's still in the very high 30 degrees Celsius, which is extremely hot at night.
Particularly these villages where they're not built for summer climates so much. They're more built to be warm in winter and okay in summer. That's really strange because Spain has always been a hot climate. Maybe they are built for summer, I don't know. But maybe it's just like more extreme summer, yeah our experience of today was just unrelenting heat. And I think given everything with climate change, this is probably going to become more and more normal for people walking the Camino in the summer.
So we have a few tips, I think, of how to try and tackle that because we did a few things to try and minimize the impact of heat on us, including – not moving as one, but when you have to walk, you know, 25 kilometers – you found this amazing thing that we used every day. Oh yeah, we had these electrolyte tablets. We found them at Amazon actually, we'll put a link in the podcast description for those. And you just take a couple of those with a big drink of water during the day and it just really helps to stave off dehydration. So we're both a little bit prone to headaches and we didn't have any issues at all on the entire Camino. We just have one or two of these with some water usually at our morning break and we'd be completely fine, that worked really well. Definitely our tip of managing hot weather is take those, they were incredible. And staving off that ache that starts to creep in or just that tiredness, it really helped to remove that. So yeah, these electrolyte tablets were incredible. And again, I don't think I saw anyone else taking them. And they're cool because they're really portable because these are just little capsules that you just swallow like any other tablet with a drink of water. Whereas most of the electrolyte tablets are things that like fizz when you put them in water or need to be mixed or powders and things like that, which are not going to work really well when you want something like in the middle of your walk when you're getting dehydrated. So these were fantastic, I definitely recommend them. I have them in a little pouch on the belt of my backpack in a zip lock bag, and we just take two of those, and felt great the whole time. Had no real problems with dehydration or anything.
So that's probably one of our tips for the heat. Otherwise, there weren't that many notable stops today on our way to Estella. It was kind of a pleasant walk, but there were a couple of things that I wanted to mention. The first was the town of Lorca that you walk through, apparently in the Codex Calinextus… Try again… In the Codex Calixtinus, apparently in Lorca the hapless pilgrims would unknowingly water their horses in the poisonous Rio Salado, and Navarran men would lie in wait to skin the horses once they died. How horrible is that? Yeah, so don't ride your horses through Lorca. And we did see someone with a horse, so hopefully he paid attention and didn't water his horse in Lorca. We didn't see him again with a horse after that. No, don’t say that!
So one other thing is you pass through this, this nice little picnic area and you're talking about this main road and there was an underpass that had been created underneath it. And unfortunately it's because a Pilgrim was hit by a car when crossing over the road and they basically created this underpass for that particular point. And I guess it's just something to note that you need to be really aware of your surroundings when you're walking. You do often share roads with cars sometimes like trucks and other things that can be a little bit scary. This was quite a busy highway as well. And you kind of come up out of trees and things and then all of a sudden you go to cross a multi lane highway and I guess your head's not really in the like “this is fast traffic on a highway” kind of kind of mode and particularly like a flow of pilgrims constantly going over there, it's going to be dangerous. But the fact that someone had to die before they put in an underpass or an overpass is pretty terrible. It is. But make sure that you take… care. Take care. Keep an eye out for each other. Yeah. It's easy to lose track of all these things when you're just walking every day. But there are spots where you are on the side of highways and crossing roads and things.
And then you arrive in Estella. And what did you think of Estella? It was Estella the pretty OK. Yes, it was Estella the All right. We thought it was fine. I could see when you look at it now, you know, if it had looked the same in the far enough in the past, it would be a really pretty town, like little cobbled streets and nice houses and things like that. It's got a river that goes through the middle. I guess it's built up and expanded a little bit more as well. It was perfectly nice. It's not something we're walking were like, “Oh my God, it's beautiful.” Yes, with terrible Italian accents when we're technically in Spain, So it's probably Esteya. Are you saying there can't be Italian pilgrims? They may well be. But also thinking about pronunciation, wouldn't it be Esteya la Baya when double L's become Y? The best we can do is be consistently wrong. True, we will do that.
It did have some lovely churches. We walked past this Iglesia del Santo Sepulcro, which has all these amazing reliefs on the outside, so you'll probably spot that on your way in. I don't know if it's open or if you can go inside or was all locked up when we were there. We may well have been there during siesta time potentially. Yeah, probably if we're getting there at the end of the day. So I do think a lot of things shut during certain hours for siesta, which is unfortunate because that's usually when you're walking throughout the day. So you may get caught out occasionally with that. But just the facade of the church is quite epic.
And also these nice little alleyways and things with little cafes in them. So very pretty, pleasant, place and a lot of tourists, just normal tourists were there. We had a really nice apartment, but it was just so hot. It was crazy. And I guess that's just a heat wave for you more than anything else. But it was hot and it was. We stayed in just a regular apartment, like an Airbnb rental, rather than Albergue. And the apartment block noise carries quite a lot as well with people going about their daily life and things. So it's very highly rated, but I think for us, probably just because of those conditions, the noise and the heat, I actually wouldn't recommend that people stay there if they want. I was actually going back through booking and looking, because we include the links on every episode – it's not listed anymore. So maybe they've stopped doing the holiday lettings. It was a really nice apartment, well fitted out, they had everything you need except a fan or an air conditioner.
And anyway, you'll hear us later, but we're like, “maybe we'll have a good night's sleep”. Spoiler Alert. We do not. But we can talk about that later. I think I go from sounding quite perky up until an hour to sounding like Death morning after this sound. You sound very rough tomorrow. So yes, that'll be interesting to see the contrast.
Well, let's see how we got on.
DAY 5 AFTERNOON AFTER WALKING
All right. It's the end of day five. We are in, where are we in Estella? It was 39 Celsius up until just recently, it's still pretty close to that at almost 8:00 PM. So we tried to find the coolest possible place we can find because our apartment has no air con and no fan. It's like sitting in a steam room. It’s a bit grim. So now we're sitting in an alleyway that at least has a little, tiny bit of breeze going through it and some shade. Yeah, but very pleasant, beautiful little houses and has flags hanging up. We're sitting at this really nice little bar that has these incredible cookies, these, like peanut butter chocolate things. So I'm feeling pretty content right now. If you're ever going to do this, walk and pass through a Estella, look out for Namaste. Good coffee. Really good peanut butter cookies. And great service and really friendly, friendly manner. It’s definitely been a good spot for us while we've while we've been here. But yeah, man, have we needed it because it is hot, hot, hot today, yeah, 39 degrees for most of the afternoon from about midday onwards. Scheduled to hit 41 tomorrow. And we've got almost 30 kilometres to work tomorrow in that. So unfortunately we're hitting the second heat wave of the summer in Spain, we thought we'd missed the heat wave, but it's back again.
We started the day with a relatively easy walk. Yeah. Then at about four kilometer mark just before the 1st hour for a break, it went up. And we're looking at the elevation on our Runkeeper, and it's vertical for about 1 kilometer, and then we came just a little like right up next to the highway, and then drop down the other side into the first town, where thankfully there’s a nice seat in the shade to rest for a little bit. But to be fair, that was an OK stop, but generally the stops haven't been that great today, so we've really liked powered through the whole walk, as you said, like the fastest…
Each day so far has been our fastest basically sequentially. Every day has been our fastest day. So we are obviously not horribly unfit, but I think we are getting like more conditioned to long walking. Versus running, because running 5-10km is really different to walking 20 to 30km. And with backpacks as well, which are relatively heavy. Each day I'm definitely getting fitter and fitter. I'm feeling pretty good actually in terms of fitness, now that we're on day five, and kind of getting into the swing of things. We're catching up on people as well, we saw a lady that we met yesterday and she left at 5:30 AM and we passed her like just outside of Estella and we left at 7:30am. So we basically caught up with like 2 hours worth of people. But I mean, again, we're lucky that we're fit, right and have good endurance, so we can do that kind of walking. On the first day we had people powering past us as well. And some of those, some of those people who haven't seen again. I guess they’ve shot ahead somewhere or they're getting up really early and then staying ahead. But generally, we're seeing familiar faces each day towards like the second-half of the walk. So it seems like in the mornings we're pretty much on our own, and then after about lunchtime, we start to hit all the people who left early. And generally end up going a little bit faster in our walking pace.
At the same time I'm not like powering through and therefore missing out on everything. I think we just naturally walk quickly. But I mean, luckily with your sticks and stuff, you can look around while you're walking so you can really enjoy, all the scenery around you. You can see ahead if there are any holes or anything you need to avoid. But otherwise you can really just be exploring your surroundings while walking. I stopped quite a bit. There was a walk through this incredible pine forest. And the smell very nostalgic to me from holidays in Spain as a child. So I really enjoy just standing there for a bit and breathing in this, piney, dusty, hot air.
And today you push your boundaries and learn a new skill. Eating while walking! Yeah, I don't like doing that. It's challenging. Coordination is difficult. Food almost went over the shoulder into the air. I’m still learning how to do it, and I definitely don't like it. I'd prefer to just stop. I was picturing in my head like a montage of Peter from Family Guy trying to take steps and eat with horrible consequences the entire time – you take one bite and then fall off a cliff or something.
Yeah, but otherwise, I mean definitely been a a pretty chilled day to be honest. Like, other than literally just trying not to move too much just for the all of the heat and, you know, like, open the window to get some fresh air and the air is hot. The wind is like, baking hot. Well, there wasn't even wind for most of the afternoon. Even the wind is just as hot as well, so everything is hot. So we're feeling a bit sticky. We had some helados, some ice cream, to try and cool us down, but otherwise I think it's just gonna be trying to hopefully sleep well, but let's see how hot it is tonight. I think it'll a difficult one. It is meant to drop off after… about midnight. Yeah, back down to like some cooler levels. As long as there's some wind, a bit of air movement, though, it's fine.
We have got a few more blisters and rubbing and red spots and things on our feet today. And I got bitten by something. Something fell into my sock, I’ve got a massive bite mark on my ankle. I don't know what it was, but it was determined bite its way out of my socks and shoes. Tomorrow we're looking forward to going to this famous wine fountain. It’s attached to a winery ‘Irache Monastery’. So that will be our highlight tomorrow morning. The only downside is it's literally the first thing we go to. So yeah, that will be our experience tomorrow then. Well, let's wrap it up and try and cool down. Yep, let's leave it there until tomorrow.
OUTRO
Thanks everyone for listening.
We hope you've enjoyed Is This The Way and have taken away some inspiration and ideas about how you might approach the Camino. If you'd like to get in touch or find some more information about each episode, head over to our website: https://isthistheway.net.
Buen Camino!
