Tuesday: I have no wisdom for your walls.

From Monsilla it is a long 30+km walk (one guidebook says 31, another says 35) to Astorga. The weather, which has been pretty good for the last few days, is brilliantly hot and sunny today.

I walk the first 16km with Nico along a straight farm road. The distant bluish grey clouds slowly differentiate themselves from the greyish blue mountains. The sun riding behind our backs lights up the dried out fields of maize and red earth. Once again the colours are so vibrant that Nico and I can't help but think of the monochrome winter colours that we will return to in November.

We cross the enormously long bridge into Hospitalet (around which there is much medieval jousting legend) and reunited with John and Angela, have a picnic lunch. However we still have another 16km to go. The country is beautiful, wooded rolling country, but the sun is hot, and we are tired by the time we get within sight of Astorga. We come across David, a man from Barcelona who accosts us with generosity. "This is your home?" we ask. "No, this is your home." "Please help yourself, David made this today." Referring to oneself in the third person is never a good sign, and David's story is troubling: he left his own company behind, but also a wife and children. And yet he lives here, and has done for three years, in a shanty style dwelling, in order to give away food and drink to pilgrims. There is something wonderful about the Camino, in that it invites and enables people to set up houses and bars and albergues on principles of great generosity. And yet, for David, well-intentioned though I'm sure he was, something had clearly gone awry.

The hostel at Mansilla had graffitied walls, again with the invitation to make your own contribution. It's as if we've reached a point on the Camino at which we are meant to have acquired such wisdom and boiled it down into pithy aphorisms. Constanze, Andre and Angela discuss what they might write on the walls. I too think of poems and quotations, but of course, I write nothing. As I come away I reflect that I have no wisdom to add to these walls. I have jokes and poems and stories and history and lives of the saints, but everything I have is so derived. I have no wisdom to give to these walls.

About two kilometres before I reach David I was reflecting on what I life and the Camino might have taught me. Vaguely I reach for some conclusion along these lines: we do not know happiness until we learn generosity. And here on the road I meet someone trying to be happy by possessing nothing and giving everything away. I'm not convinced he's quite found his happiness, but he was certainly sincere.

The last few kilometres into Astorga seem to go on forever. Outside of town a multi-ramped footbridge rises over the railway line like an absurd joke or an instrument of torture. Everyone at the hostel, when we finally reach it, comments on it.

San Javier proves a lovely hostel in which to flop and recover. Mass is at 8pm and despite a desperate search for an open restaurant that isn't Italian or Cuban, we eventually find a place that will serve the local speciality: Cocida Maragata, which is meat first, vegetables second and broth last.