From Motorway E15 to Novelda

[mapsmarker marker=”5″]

This is my own GPS track.  The squiggly bits at the start are due to the erratic way in which my awful GPS (Garmin e-trex) finds the signal.

A beautiful morning to wake up on my chosen veranda.

Nearly ready to move off.

My first early morning.  Being, by now, an experienced Caminante, I had learned the joy of being on the move by day-break.  The silence, which becomes as nourishing as food on a camino, is intense at this moment.  I don’t mean the absence of sound:  I mean a stillness, a catch of breath that the day is being born, an imperative reverence before the majesty of the slowly gathering light.

Morning light.

The path, after the motorway at last becomes interesting, climbing over rocky terrain eaten away by torrential rains and flooded arroyos.  In some places the climbs are short but steep and stony.  For the first time, too, I felt solitude, the solitude which is the opposite of aloneness.  I merge and become part of the world around me.  My surroundings surround me and incorporate me.  There are degrees of this feeling which first came to me intensely near Sanabria on the Camino Sanabres, so I will say no more just now.

Walking into solitude

The experience was brief because the wilderness soon descends into a large plain, with more roads, factories and railway lines.  There is a need in such “civilization” to concentrate on traffic, finding the path, engine noises and people. Urban and semi-urban landscapes are also interesting.  Our human sculpting of our environment, our consuming of space, our creativity cry out to be listened to and understood, stimulating a flow of questions which fill my mind.  Diverting, indeed, but this is not peaceful like the mountains or even the great cultivated plains in Spain where man and nature co-operate to produce wine and food.

Descending into civilization, Monforte del Cid

I arrived in Novelda and was very tired indeed.