Etapa 1: St Jean to Roncesvalles

We started walking this morning at around 6:15am, which seems early, but it turns out that when you’re sleeping in a shared space and everyone else starts getting ready for the day at 5:00am, you’re not going to be able to sleep in any later anyways.

Today’s walk was approximately 25km over the Napoleon Route (as opposed to the Valcarlos route that follows the road) from Saint Jean Pied de Port to Roncesvalles, a small town based around the Royal Collegiate of Santa Maria. The first 8km to Orrison are said to be the most challenging, and they possibly were, but it was made out to be a very challenging route, when it was actually quite reasonable. Sure, there was a bit of puffing and sweating, but at no point was I concerned about our ability to make it!

We stopped at Orrison for a breakfast of coffee and sandwiches – cheese for mum and salami for me – and a wee rest, before refilling our water bottles and continuing on our way. The next stage took us through farm land, and we saw quite a few sheep, some horses, and a few cows. They were all wearing bells, which was interesting! Imagine NZ farmers needing to buy bells for all of their animals…

The high point of the walk took us up to 1430m of altitude (we started at ~170m) and just after the highest point we crossed the border back into Spain. There was a bit of up and down for the next wee while, before we needed to decide which route to take down to Roncesvalles: the “dangerous” but pretty route that the pilgrims’ office in Saint Jean told us clearly not to take, or the safe but boring route… We took the dangerous one, of course!

It wasn’t as bad as they made it out to be, but it was very steep. We had to take it pretty slow, and I was thankful for my hiking poles, but really it was quite manageable. I will admit that those last few kilometres were the most challenging part of the day, much harder than the uphill climb, but that’s ok. At least it was short!

One curiosity (and my favourite one) from the walk was the number of chunky black slugs along the way! There were hundreds of them, I’ve easily quadrupled the number of slugs I’ve seen during my lifetime today. And they were so big! Where did they come from? Why were they there? Did they know they were al risk of being squashed like so many of their buddies?

Anyways…

We arrived in Roncesvalles in the early afternoon and checked in at the albergue. The whole “town” of Roncesvalles is centred around the church here, and the associated church buildings. There’s a couple of restaurants outside of this, but really there’s not much else. We found our beds, had showers, and did laundry, then hung around until it was dinner time at 7:00pm. We shared a dinner table with another mother-daughter combo, from the States. It was a pleasant meal, and nice to get to know a couple more people.

Now though, I’m pooped, so I’m going to bed! I’ll leave you with a couple more photos from the day.