Not the best night’s sleep – one poor woman in the dorm has a terrible cough and a man, for whom I have less sympathy, sets an alarm for 5 am and sleeps through it – twice! Preferred yesterday’s start – mein host woke us at 6 am with a classical compilation CD which sounded very like the one playing at the refugio at Manjarin. Think ‘Nessun dorma’ as the soundtrack to breakfast. Better than the AC/DC he’d threatened!

See little point in rising with the lark today as the mist is right down. Even at 8 am, when we leave, we can only see a short distance – that continued most of the day. Little chance of the ‘splendid views’ promised from Alto Riocabo’! We cover 24 km, nonetheless, so pleased with progress – 119 km to Santiago. Amazingly, we have now walked six of our twelve days and are well over half way in terms of distance :-).

Whether because of our late start, or the mist, we hardly see anyone till nearly at our Albergue on the outskirts of Sarria. The path down to Triacastela is nowhere near as steep as we’d feared after Aceibo, though it is odd walking through such thick mist – both glad not to be doing it alone, but glad its not actually raining. We are at Triacastela in time for coffee and stock up on empanadas for lunch, Compeeds and Ibuprofen for Rosie’s mouth. The latter only comes in large boxes of 600 mg tablets so we now have enough to set up as dealers in our own right!We choose the higher, shorter route from Triacastela to Furela today. Green lanes flanked by dry stone walls amidst deciduous woodland evoke the English countryside, as do the walled fields – both arable and pasture – as we descend the western slopes. From here it is not far to our chosen Albergue, Paloma y Lena, just four km short of Sarria. It’s a small, quiet hostel, just 20 beds, which we’ve decided we much prefer to the larger ones.