There has been much talk of which route to take: the camino normale, duro or dragonde. John and Kris will take the Dragonde but Nico, whose back is still not right is clear he wants to take the normal route. Angela will take the duro which entails one hill before rejoining the normal route.
I go with Nico, and the climb up the valley is fine, though it is a ity that our steps are dogged at every turn, by the main road. Eventually we are on s road which crosses back and forth the rio varajaro while the motorway crosses our route overhead.
We are take through more Lakeland style villages and pass a number of old ladies with baskets collecting chestnuts.
The route gets more interesting and beautiful as we ascend further and the road peters out into a path. The views become more impressive . We look back to a sunlit valley, but the higher we go the closer we get to the cloud that hovers about the valley head. Eventually we see a rainbow, and as we pass the border post to Galicea the pass into rain and thick fog.
O Cebreiro is wonderfully atmospheric in the swirling fog. The church is the oldest on the French camino, and has the patten and chalice from a 14th c Eucharistic miracle that is something like the miracle of Bolsena: a doubting priest and a pious layman at mass, and the priest's doubts are confounded by the host dripping blood.
The church is also famed because its parish priest Fr Elias, wrote the guide to the camino in 1971, regalvinising interest, and in 1982 he painted the now famous yellow arrows along the way. It is good to have reached O Cebreiro for the church (there was mass at 7pm) and for the excellent food (galego caldo soup etc.) but the hostel smells of drains and the main dormitory is filled with the most notorious snorers on the camino, along with a toddler and a small child, the children of a cycling couple. As soon as this is filled and a second dormitory opened, the discerning of us decamp to this where we can hope for a better night's sleep.
(If it had been open, the hostel run by the German friends, some kilometers back would have been a much better bet.)
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