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Day 10 - Camino Francés: Los Arcos to Viana · WCBH

• 0:25
  It's day 10, it is March the 9th, we've left Los Arcos and we are heading to Viana,
• 0:35
  about 20 kilometres, I think it's 19 kilometres listed, but about the 20 kilometre
• 0:40
  mark, depending which path and any deviation that we may take.
• 0:45
  Whilst walking along this morning, we're trying
• 0:48
  to rank our favourite accommodations and
• 0:51
  favourite town so far it's actually really hard so easy for everything to start
• 0:58
  to just sort of blend in blur into one and then takes a little bit of a prompt
• 1:04
  oh you remember that place it had the shared kitchen or you remember that place
• 1:08
  it had the really good radiator,
• 1:11
  remember that place we didn't have a private bathroom and toilet and shower
• 1:17
  yeah we need that to sort of prompt ourselves but it does start to flood back 10 days in.
• 1:26
  The Camino's broken into three broad stages the first part is the mind no let
• 1:35
  me get that right the first part is the body that's meant to test you physically
• 1:40
  and certainly you're trying to get Camino fit,
• 1:44
  despite the prep that you may have done,
• 1:46
  walking long distances day in, day out,
• 1:50
  dealing with the temperature, whatever that may be.
• 1:54
  For us, it's winter or coming out of winter and we're from the tropics and a lot of the hills, etc.
• 2:03
  After the body, we head into the mind.
• 2:07
  Apparently, there's some very long stretches where the scenery doesn't change a whole lot.
• 2:15
  I believe that part's called the meseta.
• 2:19
  I don't know how close we are to that, but the back end of yesterday and the start of today,
• 2:26
  it's like you're in a painting and you're just slowly walking along in that
• 2:31
  painting, the one scenery that doesn't change.
• 2:35
  So if you can imagine that over the first nine days, sometimes every corner,
• 2:42
  but the scenery was constantly changing.
• 2:46
  There's a hill, there's a gully, there's a river, there's a town, there's a road.
• 2:52
  But the back end of yesterday for the last couple of hours and the start of
• 2:56
  today, it's like we are in a field,
• 3:00
  a farm field, there's a road and on
• 3:04
  the horizon you can see the next town and there's
• 3:07
  a long straight rocky sandy flat
• 3:11
  relatively flat track a few undulations that's off in the distance it's like
• 3:17
  you're sort of stuck in that that picture frame and you are a character in that
• 3:23
  frame just sort of slowly walking along Anyway,
• 3:29
  that's how it feels this morning, whether this is an introduction to what the
• 3:33
  Meseta is like, makes distance, estimating distance, a little bit difficult.
• 3:39
  That town off in the distance, is that five kilometres away?
• 3:44
  Is it ten? Is that where we're going to tonight? Who knows?
• 3:48
  So body first, then mind, and then spirit. I'm assuming the mind part is that
• 3:53
  sort of that will, that test. Why am I doing this?
• 3:57
  It's long. Can I make it? Et cetera.
• 4:01
  And then the last part is the spirit, you know, the lessons that the Camino
• 4:06
  will have taught us by that stage and coming in towards Santiago.
• 4:11
  And yeah, so three stages. We did well this morning.
• 4:16
  We're about an hour in front of where we've been the last couple of mornings.
• 4:22
  We've been struggling to get out by 9am, but this morning we're out by 8am,
• 4:27
  so that gets us an hour in front.
• 4:30
  So hopefully that means we arrive an hour earlier this afternoon.
• 4:35
  It's roughly the same distance as yesterday, but we did have some really very
• 4:41
  steep hills, long hills that we had to battle with early on yesterday.
• 4:44
  And if we just remain those images in that picture frame, walking towards that
• 4:51
  dot on the horizon, I reckon we're in for a nice day because the weather,
• 4:56
  I don't want to say it now because it was blue and clear this morning,
• 5:01
  but it is a little bit grey now. Fingers crossed anyway.
• 5:07
  Just passing another church i expected to see a lot of churches here in spain
• 5:12
  obviously a catholic country but the amount of rural churches some small and
• 5:18
  modest but the amount of rural churches,
• 5:21
  that are really big now the towns mightn't be too far away from each other but
• 5:27
  they are significant and beautiful all made out of stone must be a quarry or
• 5:33
  something nearby so that yellowy
• 5:37
  sand stony type colour stone that's been used for a lot of them,
• 5:41
  always at the top of the hill as well.
• 5:44
  So we've made it out of the picture frame. We made it to a town,
• 5:49
  I think the name was Sand Sol, where we had like a late breakfast, early morning tea.
• 5:58
  Kind of a bit of lunch thrown in there as well because they had baguettes and
• 6:02
  we thought it might be our only stop for today.
• 6:07
  There were dogs there as well, friendly dogs, but they wanted the food.
• 6:11
  They don't speak char, so they were a real humbug.
• 6:15
  But anyway, I tried to char them a few times, and my old Spanish man said they
• 6:22
  don't speak English, they speak Spanish.
• 6:26
  So I don't know what char translates to in Spanish.
• 6:30
  We're making good time today, I feel.
• 6:34
  Once we got out of the picture frame, which was that long rolling path towards
• 6:42
  the towns on the edge of the horizon,
• 6:46
  which was Sansol and then Torres del Rio, something along that,
• 6:52
  which was actually more beautiful than Sansol.
• 6:54
  Once we passed those, we've got back into...
• 6:58
  Something that we're quite familiar with, walk up a hill just to walk down that
• 7:03
  hill, to walk up the next hill just to walk down the hill.
• 7:06
  So we're back on the, what's that machine called, the steppelator?
• 7:13
  We're going up and down, up and down, up and down. But we've got about nine
• 7:18
  kilometers to go to Viana.
• 7:20
  We're making good time. We're hoping to be there. Well, I was going to say 1
• 7:24
  p.m., but I think that's probably a bit ambitious. If we're there by two,
• 7:28
  that probably puts us about two hours in front of the last couple of days.
• 7:32
  So we're here. We've made it from Los Arcas to Vienna.
• 7:36
  This town looks so cool. One of those stone towns on top of a big hill,
• 7:42
  big church right on top of the hill, but the streets are narrow,
• 7:45
  all stone buildings connected, lots of cafes and shops and restaurants, etc.
• 7:50
  Can't wait for siesta to be over and get out there and explore the town and
• 7:55
  have some nice dinner but it is siesta at the moment so i'll get back to watching
• 8:00
  the simpsons in spanish and hopefully my spanish improves although i i am confident
• 8:06
  now of in ordering tea and coffee in spanish.