Thursday, September 27, 2012

ENVIO DE FOTOS 2

QUERIDA ANN OBSERVA SI SALIERON BIEN, SI NO AVISAME POR EMAIL PARA PASARTE MAS FOTOS...
 
SALUDOS
 

envio de fotos

HOLA ANN COMO ESTAS YO ESPERANDO NOTICIAS TUYA ESPERO QUE TE ENCUENTRES BIEN. TE MANDO UN ABRAZO Y MUCHAS BENDICIONES, CUIDATE Y MANTENEME AL TANTO SOBRE TU PEREGRINACION.
GRACIAS POR ELEGIR A MI PUEBLO Y MI CASA PARA DESCANZAR.

GRACIAS  MI PEREGRINGA

UN BESO GERMAN



Monday, September 24, 2012

Day 11 View from the Flatlands

I spy a lone tree ahead on the grassy field path.  A place to sit in the shade, a bit out of the wind, a perfect place for a short rest.  It´s at least two hours away by foot.  So spacious is the land here, so flat.  Flatter than Kansas.  Grassy fields, countless grazing cows in the distance at every direction, herds of unbridled horses, uniterrupted by much of anything else..the occasional wind turbine pump to drain the land of the salty water, a small cluster of trees surrounding an old homestead now in ruins.

The land seems merely a hand´s breadth above the water level, and much of the land is inundated by recent rains with a hand´s breadth of cold floodwater I cross barefooted.  It´s pretty land, green and breezy, but broadly underpopulated, save for the abundance of chatty birds and scurrying guinea pigs.

The villages are widely spaced along this old camino real, leaving few places to sit and rest, as in under a lone tree, two-hours´walk away.  Endurance is a necessity.  The villages seem swallowed by the curvature of the earth and only appear from a distance of less than 10 kilometers.  For as many places as I´ve visited, this is new and interesting terrain.

La gente es, por supuesto, muy buena.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Monday, September 17, 2012

photo on the go...


I don't know why this is on the side, but here's an example of kindness in-transit, a gastropub in Miami worth going to...

Day 4 A Pilgrim Once Again

Happy I am to be a pilgrim again.  (My feet ache, of course.)

Argentina has been good to me.  The pilgrimage progresses, a little slowly because of my new stiff boots, but beautifully.  Springtime here brings scented blooms of jasmine in gardens, magnolias bursting out on bare branches, lambs, calves, and colts in the great fields.  The humidity has surprised me and mosquitos are everywhere - each swat on my bare arms brings a half dozen smashed cadavers tumbling to the biomass of the earth.  Such is the world.

The days have been pretty warm and sunny - so I'm again sunburnt, more on my right half as I walk westward.  Sadly for me, the evenings have brought on the cloud cover and I have yet to see the southern constellations.  I've got some time ahead of me.

Some oddities of Argentina - greetings are made by pressing the right cheek, kissing sounds optional, no handshake involved.  Although most people are clearly of European stock, the number of times I've been pointed at with the delighted squeal of 'Rubia!' suggests that they find fair-haired blue-eyed folks something worthy of note.

Foot pilgrims are a rarity, even in Luján with their precious Nuestra Señora and hoards flocking there each year, bus pilgrims or enormous groups walking in particular week with all the logistics taken care of.  A few times now I've been told that it would be easier to find accommodation if I were in a group that called ahead.  Nonetheless, kindness prevails, sometimes with a heavy dose of persistence, and accommodation is found - a Catholic school, a mission, a hostel, a convent of retired nuns, a village church.  It's been easy as always to receive water from anyone I ask, generally accompanied by offers of food, more than I can carry, and comfortable conversation, even with my halting Spanish.

I'm happy to be a pilgrim again.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

In Transit...

Greetings from Miami...
Transit is a trying time for a pilgrim.  I want to begin, yet I have to get there first.  Denver - Charlotte - Miami.... 36 hours... onward to San Paolo (I had to check; earlier I thought I was going through Rio) - finally, if all goes well, I'll arrive in Buenos Aires, get to the Santuario San Cayetano and begin the pilgrimage.  I'm biding my time for the prolonged hours in Miami.

I was quite preoccupied with buttoning up the pilgrimage I led to Chimayo, which included writing a book describing the route.  [Visit caminotochimayo.blogspot.com to find the link to Tattered Cover Press for El Camino del Norte a Chimayo.]  Now, my focus is shifted and affixed on my style pilgrimage: walking village to village through remote corners of the world toward a well-known destination.

The sketched plan for the first great segment has me crossing Argentina to Mendoza, over the Andes to Santiago, Chile, up the coast to the great desert, back to the mountains to enter Peru and aiming for Cuzco for Christmas.  Even by my standards, it's ambitious and will require a pace of 45 km per day without a break; realistically, I'll need to up it to 50 km per day to enable me to take a few short days and in so doing, rest and repair as needed.  The motivation of speed is not that I need to reach the Basilica of Guadalupe at a certain time, but more practically, I'm aiming to enter the jungles before the rainy season of spring.  If I can't maintain the pace, I'll enjoy some other destiny.  I've got to start with some plan in mind

By this time tomorrow, transit will be over; I'll have left mugginess and humidity behind and step out in late winter under the skies of the southern hemisphere.  I'll try to blog when I can and ask people to post the photos they take of me so everyone knows where I am.