Vía de la Plata

: In January of 2020, I flew to Spain with the intention of walking the Camino de Santiago. What I didn’t know until a few months before going on this trip is that the Camino de Santiago is not just one path but a series of them that start from different parts of Spain (and Europe in general) and all end up in Santiago de Compostela in the far northwest of the country where the remains of Saint James the Apostle are said to be buried. The route I chose – the Vía de la Plata, which starts in Seville in the south of Spain – is one of the least popular. And on top of being one of the less popular routes, people tend to avoid hitting the trail in January and that’s what really appealed to me. The solitude. That and shedding all the responsibility towards other people and work that one tends to accumulate when he/she spends a lot of time in one place. While on the Camino, I had no real obligations other than walking, eating and sleeping each day. It was pretty nice. Sometimes, I feel I need something like that to reset my mind and be able to keep on existing. Anyway, with no further ado, the trail is 1000km long and runs through four territories, the first of which is…

Andalucía

: Catedral de Sevilla

: Gettin’ head in church

: Glass

: Inside the cathedral

: La Giralda is the name given to the bell tower at the Catedral de Sevilla

: View from heading up La Giralda bell tower

: Top view

: Another tower view

: Street view of Seville

: Droopy peepee

: A beastiality quilt in the lobby of the place I was staying in Seville

: Leaving behind the urban sprawl of Seville

: Starting to find some peace

: Under the Bridge like RHCP

: Smokestack

: Smokestack art up close

: I think that toilet was left out there for hikers to dump in

: Just me and my thoughts out here

: Someone wrote “Buen Camino” on this rock which is a phrase that a lot of people – people on the side of the road, other “pilgrims,” people in the towns you pass through, etc… – will say to you when they see you walking with your bag on. There’s generally a lot of respect given to peregrinos (pilgrims) who take time off from their regular lives to embark on this hike/religious pilgrimage (the camino is whatever you want it to be, “walk your own camino” is another oft-heard expression in the Camino community) to experience a more simpler form of existence

: Little something drawn on the wall in the albergue in which I stayed my first night on the trail. There’s no need to camp along the way while doing the Camino de Santiago. It’s easy to enjoy because it has great infrastructure and doesn’t require extensive planning. They have the “albergues” for “pilgrims” to stay at in every town that cost between $10-20 bucks a night and a lot of the resaturants along the way have special meal deals for pilgrims with pretty good food.

: I think I only saw about ten other hikers total during my 38 days on the trail, most of whom were also introverted and weren’t looking for an overtly social experience. I made a couple friends on the Camino with whom I’d share a meal at night and talk but for the most part walked alone

: Castle

: Free oranges? Don’t mind if I do

: Magical sunrise

: Approaching a town called Almadén de la Plata

: In the town

: Iberian hams hanging in a local store. According to a site called jamonify.com, “The main reason hams hang is practical, hanging hams are cured better as humidity reduces and the fat excess drops very slowly. That´s why we see a plastic article at the bottom of each ham called sombrerito or chorrera (little hat) in Spanish that collects the fat dripping.”

: Cacti on a foggy morning

: Babe

: Have you seen the little piggies crawling in the dirt?

: PUTA

Extremadura

: For a dude from Chicago where everything is dead as fuck in the winter, it’s always nice to see some green in the month of January

: The sign says “REMEMBER” and someone scribbled “to love” and “to laugh” under it

: This scene looks more peaceful than it actually is. This part of the path was running parallel to a major highway and was probably less than a hundred feet away from it. So, although aesthetically pleasing, it was kinda loud and hectic-feeling for me

: Looking back on the ground I’d covered that day

: Cafe DP? Great place to get stuffed

: Bar El Coño? Great place to eat out

: “He had white horses. And ladies by the score. All dressed in satin. And waiting by the door. Oooooooooh what a lucky man he was!”

: Cow tipped

: Classic Extremadura landscape

: Entering a town called Fuente de Cantos

: Hot sexy soap opera style Jesus

: Gracias, come again!

: Window

: Sunset in Zafra

: Storks make enormous nests

: Chilly day with temps hovering right around freezing and strong winds. Couldn’t feel my fingers and when I went to yank a stubborn lid off a can of tuna, I cut the shit outta my hand. I was out in the middle of nowhere and spent the next four hours walking with my hand elevated in the air above the level of my heart hoping it would stop bleeding. It kept oozing and by the time I got to the albergue my clothes and my backpack were covered in blood.

: I’m on a road to nowhere

: I like what the artist has done here, replacing his subject’s torso with a drippy dick

: Another innovative work of art. Bravo

: Rainiest day on the trail. Very muddy experience. Slipping, sliding and/or sinking with every step

: Approaching the city of Mérida

: Old Roman ruins in Mérida

: Roman theater

: Acueducto de los Milagros

: More stork nests

: All throughout the 1000km of the trail you can find yellow arrows painted on walls and streets to help the pilgrims stay on track en route to Santiago de Compostela

: Church in Aljucén

: Let there be light

: Jesus auditioning for Boyz II Men

: Average pilgrim meal in one of the small town bars

: “El Pueblo de los Tontos” = “Town of stupid people” “Fumar porros es vida” = “Smoking joints is life”

: Slightly washed-out portion of the trail. I took my shoes off and rolled up my pants to walk through it

: A lot of areas prone to flooding in Extremadura had stepping stones like this along the path to help avoid getting all soaked n shit

: Little town called Río Ayuela

: Sick night club, bro

: Art

: Rising sun as seen from an overpass

: Lil more art

: Cáceres

: Moooooo

: Just movin’ along

: Cañaveral – I think I ate a pretty awesome lunch in that town

: I thought the center of this breadbasket looked kinda like a butthole

: And cue the bedbugs. I was stuck with these fuckers for the rest of my time on the camino. Even though I’d check thoroughly every night before bed and could find no sign of them, the next morning I’d wake up with new bites, sometimes even in a straight line across my forehead. They don’t carry diseases but it had an adverse effect on my mental health. I was growing more and more paranoid every morning I’d wake up to new bumps on my bod

: I was walking in the middle of nowhere along the highway (not too much traffic in these parts) and at one point there was this fancy sports car speeding towards me and just as it was about to pass me this bird had been flying perpendicularly to the road and flew right into the car’s tire and the tire threw the dead bird right in front of me where it landed here in this brush. Kinda reminded me of that time Randy Johnson threw a fastball and it hit a bird amid its trajectory to home plate. Explosion of feathers. One in a million chance

: U know I be sippin on that chocolate milk uh-huh

: It’s unclear to me what cultural significance Laurel and Hardy who’ve each been dead for over fifty years may have in 21st century Spain

: Shut uppa ya moutha!

: Ghost town

: I really liked this stretch of the trail. Just about as backwoodsy as it gets on the Via de la Plata

: The grafiti on this abandoned shack says, “Jesús, confío en ti” which means “Jesus, I trust in you”

: I did it all for the Nuky

: Sixty-fuckin-nine

: Baños de Montemayor

: Cross outside of Baños

Castilla y León

: Woods

: A lot of the albergues along the way had bulletin boards with information about local stuff and about the camino in general. On a lot of the boards had been some sort of flyer with this Italian lady on it. After a while I grew tired of her ubiquity and…

: …couldn’t resist temptation

: Old houses in La Calzada de Béjar

: Reflejos

: Kickin’ it with JC in the albergue

: Some albergue artwork. I thought this might look a bit better if instead of shaping this clay pot or whatever he’s doing…

: …this artisan was instead fisting some dude’s A-hole

: Lovely day, Bill Withers

: Another piece of art I came across that was just lacking that “it” factor. I felt it needed something.

: To me, this painting just makes so much more sense if the chick has a dick in her hands (shrug)

: Approaching the city of Salamanca

: Entering Salamanca

: Catedral de Salamanca as seen from the bridge over the river Tormes

: In town

: Nice

: Plaza Mayor

: Nice place to spend the afternoon walking around

: Some handmade quality shit

: This image representing a medical clinic was lacking something. It needed something to show that the doctor really cares about his patients. It needed…

: …some of this. The doctor’s like, “Don’t worry. I won’t tell your wife. That’d be a HIPAA violation.”

: A very frosty start to the day

: One Tree Hill

: Welcome to Zamora

: The Duero River

: ¿como acto de violencia o de amor?

: I really like this building. That paint job is trippy as fuck

: Zamora is another nice place for an afternoon stroll

: I get that this ritual/tradition has a cultural and religious significance here and that I shouldn’t be observing other people’s cultures through an American lens, but how the fuck am I supposed to look at this shit and not think of the KKK?

: This to me looked like someone had stolen someone else’s inground pool. It’s like they carved it out of the ground and transported it to their backyard n just kept it like that…an above-ground inground pool

: Hay pyramids

: Dude, these storks gotta take enormous dumps. I’m surprised the walls and roofs around their gigantic nests aren’t just completely splattered with stinky stork shit

: A door with posters on it just ditched on the side of the road

: Car cemetery

: Albino stop sign

: Although it was cold and rainy, this stretch had a tropical, Central American sort of feel to it. I dunno. It’s probably just my ‘magination…runnin away with me

: Very cool bridge

: The manufacturers attached the pouring mechanism on the wrong part of this milk carton. How do you fuck that up?

: I really enjoyed the feel of this stretch of the hike

: I just stood there in silence watching and listening to these plants whisper as the wind whipped through them

: Very unusual sunrise with a full moon visible up in the sky there

: View from the dam near Calzadilla de Tera

: The middle-aged Dutch fellow with whom I’d hang out at night during this part of the camino asked me if I thought they could’ve possibly made a more phallic-looking bell tower for this church

: The counter of the restaurant I ate dinner at had all these names of world cities on it and I was like, “Abu Dhabi, okay Singapore, cool, Indianapolis…wait. What? Indianapolis? Are you serious? That’s too fuckin weird.”

: Rural rural rural

: Just one foot in front of the other all day every day

: What the fuck type of plants are those?

: More woods

: “Despacio coño” = something like “Fuck! Slow down!” or maybe “Slow the fuck down.” That is, unless they meant it to be taken literally as “slow pussy” but I don’t think that that’s the case. I didn’t see any slow-moving vaginas trying to cross the road here

: Puebla de Sanabria

: Lubián which is one of, if not the last town in Castilla y León before entering Galicia

: ojete = asshole

: Public safety flyer on one of the billboards in one of the albergues warning pilgrims how to behave if a sheep dog starts getting aggressive towards you for getting too close to their flock. Sound advice. For future walkers – and I speak from experience – I added the warning that you shouldn’t try to bang the sheep if you don’t want trouble with the sheep dogs

Galicia

: Entering Galicia

: I like it better when people put in the effort to actually DRAW dicks on walls and not just write “la polla” and think you’re a hardcore badass for having done so

: A Vilavella, Galicia

: Hoho sweet address

: These doors be lookin’ like Ash Wednesday

: I’d have to say that Galicia was definitely the most hilly of the four regions

: Nice morning

: Very scenic stretch of the Camino

: Crisp air in the low 40s with lots of sun to keep me warm…another nice day to be out on the trail

: I was tempted to steal this guy’s beer

: Pride can make you feel strong, but it’ll never make you feel happy. To that I respond with…

: …a shirtless selfie to show how ripped I am from all that walking as a means to build up my ego, thus compensating for my perpetual struggle with self-criticism and low self-esteem.

: Excuse me, does this web belong to Charlotte?

: Hill outside the town of Laza

: I don’t know what these are called but we used to have them in front of our house when I was growing up and we got in trouble one time for uprooting them and throwing them at cars driving down the block

: My phone says the name of the town where this photo was taken is A Alber Ria. I’m not sure how accurate that is but it’s not important. You see, scallop shells are a symbol representing the Camino de Santiago. There’s some debate about the history of this symbol, but I won’t get into it. What I would like to mention is that the owner of this cafe I stumbled upon in whatever the name of this town is, has had every passing pilgrim for the past 2-3 decades sign and date a shell for him to hang on the walls and ceilings. It was pretty interesting to walk around the place and check them all out

: Moving along

: I know it was winter when I was here, but to me it had a very fall sort of feel in this area

: They have a lot of these things in Galicia – in pretty much every small town I passed through. At first glance, I thought they were family crypts or something like that where they’ve just piled generations of dead family members for the past couple centuries. It legitimately creeped me out. But then, eventually, some guy explained to me that they used to store the year’s harvest up in these things because they kept the food at a safe height off the ground to protect from flooding and varmints and shit like that

: The road is long…

: …with many a winding turn. And trees that look like scary monsters!!!

: Peepees all over the place! What is a boy to do!?

: Doesn’t this feel like fall to you? Walking through it felt like late-October to me. It felt like I had a date with destiny in some dense New England backwoods, with a headless horseman quickly approaching from behind to relieve me of my noggin.

: Dummy chillin on the utility pole with a bottle of hard booze

: I took the liberty of adding a tilde over that first A to change the name of that town to “lick it”

: That smokestack looks like a giraffe’s neck but perhaps only half as sturdy. I think a stiff breeze could take that thing down

: This third floor addition looks like they just picked up an already-made house with a crane and dropped it down onto the already-existing two-floor structure and declared the job done

: Pulling the neck of the goose (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)

: This was some pretty cool art on the outskirts of Ourense

: Aye Aye, Captain

: A robot that knows how to thug

: Bridges amaze me, man. Although I often find myself disappointed in humanity, this is actually some pretty cool shit that people have managed to achieve

: yo, dis real. none o’ dat fake shit

: 69km! Yeah buddy. The home stretch

: “So I got to keep on walkin,” like Edwin Starr says. “I got to walk on”

: Probably my favorite lunch on the trek. Very satisfying

: Careful, don’t enter. The dog doesn’t bite but the owner does.

: Company called Nudesa. Thought it’d look better as an advertisement encouraging everyone to “Send nudes to Tim”

: Entering Santiago de Compostela

: O’Cum all ye faithful

: There she is. La Catedral de Santiago de Compostela. I made it after 38 days of walking – no off days. It was a nice experience

: Here is the compostela I was awarded. It’s a document signifying that you’ve completed the Camino de Santiago. I dedicated it to my grandma and gave it to her as a gift.

: At the airport. One last donger for the road!