Day 6 - To Vila Nova Barquina

After our excellent evening meal  with Helena and Honora, our young Italian lady we had a good night's sleep in our luxury abode. They joined us again for breakfast before we set out.

It is a shame that they are, off the main Camino route and also not near the end of one of the main stages. Many people doggedly follow the "stages" described in the main guide book although these are normally around 30+ km per day. That is just too far for a lot of people, but they follow the book, finding it very hard and get disheartened. We work on a daily distance of about 20 km a day, where we can, and manage with that. Occasionally, like yesterday, we just have to walk more than 20km, but we try not to.

The first stage of our walk today was, we were warned, on a very busy road with absolutely no pavement areas at the side. Neither of these statements turned out to be completely true. At times several vehicles were in our vicinity and some times there was no where to walk other than the road surface, but, as far as we can remember we never got both together. It wasn't a great walking place but OK. The weather was very pleasant, so things were fine. Initially it was rather misty, but the sun soon cleared that and the rest of the walking was good.

This is horse, and Stork, country and we saw plenty of evidence of both. In one place we passed a line of power pylons, each adorned with several Stork nests.

We soon seemed to be in Golega, the next largish town where we found a cafe in the pleasant centre.

Barbara was feeling a little lacking in get-up-and-go this morning so tried a drink of hot chocolate, which worked its magic, she felt much more energetic after that.

The yellow Camino marker arrow signs were rather scarce asd unclear today, possibly because up to yesterday the Camino track and and the pilgrimage route to Fatima followed the same route. At Santarem the two tracks separated and, we feel, the Camino route becomes the poor relation, getting less attention. Nevertheless we managed OK with the arrows that were there, two guide books and a gps track on my phone. As before there seem to have been several changes in the route fairly recently as sometimes we had the choice of several possibilities depending on which guide you liked at. We stopped at Sao Caetano and had a small coffee in a tiny Archeological museum staffed by 3 young women. No sign of any visitors others than us. Shortly afterwards we passed through a strange "Ghost Town" sort of place, Quinta Cardiga. This had been a very large palace with all its supporting buildings, stables, farm buildings, church etc. All remarkably intact but completely deserted.

We did read that there had been some sort of plan to renovate the main palsce buildings to make a Posada, the Portuguese equivalent of the Spanish Paradores. It could well work as its location is excellent very close to the Tajo river, and with excellent view s etc. I hope it works out.

Very soon afterwards we left the Camino route to get to our stopping place for tonight. As we've found on this Camino finding a suitable place to stay can take some imagination and accepting the fact that the only place is not actually quite on the Camino route. This is the case today, as, yesterday, out lodgings are about 1 km off the main Camino route.  The place we are staying in is a motel, on a garage/ petrol station site. Adequate, but un-pretentious.  It has what looks like a good restaurant, but as it's Monday, it is closed this evening. So we wandered down the road and had a delicious meal at another restaurant.

DAY 5 – To Azinhaga

We did have the dormitory to ourselves last night as we’d thought we might. There seemed to be a group of men in another room upstairs but ours stayed exclusive to us. We both slept well, each in our own bottom bunk. One thing that I haven’t mentioned about this trip is that when the sun shines it can be very warm but the evenings and dull days are cold.  Before going to bed last night we spent some time in a lounge , Barbara reading and me writing the blog. We were both cosily wrapped in our sleeping bags. That aside we both slept very well. Breakfast consisted of the usual cold meat and cheese etc. It was a very good spread and very filling.

Today we planned to walk to Azinhaga. We have booked at a small guest house, which has good reviews.  We soon rejoined the Camino route and walked out of Santarem. We knew that the town was built on higher ground than the surrounding area but were rather surprised just how high it was until we started down a very steep track taking us out of town.

 Looking back we could see the town walls towering above us. At the bottom we entered a long stretch of very flat land, walking through an agricultural area, mainly vineyards.  

It was a very nice walk for about an hour, not particularly sunny, rather dull but dry. At least to start with. We began to notice drizzle in the breeze prompting us to put on our lightweight wind/shower proof jackets. Shortly afterwards the rain started, strong enough to warrant getting out out large raincoats. Just in time as it turned out as the rain started in torrents. It poured for at least an hour, a deluge as Barbara described it, certainly the tracks we were walking on changed from being simply dusty to being extremely muddy. We carried on walking, we had to as there was no shelter anywhere, just wide open fields for miles in  directions adjacent to the River Tajo. It soon became necessary to use our walking poles for support as the mud was so slippery that it was difficult walking, sliding where it was flat and almost impossible to stand on a long downwards slope that we had to traverse.

Eventually we managed to reach a road that had a hard surface and we could walk more or less normally again. The rain however continued for a while longer before finally stopping. We eventually came to Vale de Figuirea, a small town at the top of a small hill. We had coffees and a small savoury snack each and then carried on. 

Our planning of those stage of the route revealed lots of inconsistencies in different descriptions of the route to take. It seems as if several major changes have been made in the route in recent years and some of the guides are incorrect. We simply followed the arrows which have been consistently good all the way from Lisbon so far. The initial stretch had been quite easy, the stretch in the rain and mud more difficult but very interesting, but the latter stretch became eventually rather tedious as we we were just waking seemingly endless straight, flat country lanes. We had one more break at Pombalino, where we left the Camino route to walk about a mile to our lodgings for the night.

Our place tonight is stunning, port of a large private house, fully fitted with everything you might need. We have a private bedroom about 30ft square with adjacent bathroom and shower. A large lounge with wood burning stove and a delightful evening dinner with our hosted Helena. She was assisted by a young Italian lady who seems to be here as part of her Tourism training program. We all had an enjoyable evening