Looking down on two deep river valleys, we could just hear the waters echoing their different sounds as they made their never pausing way through this, our first major rainforest. A very long gentle slope took us to Cortinas’ hilltop followed by a large drop into the Valga Valley, where we met up with the echoing waters. Similar topography took us through more beautiful and moss gathering trees.

A glimpse of our Polish friends was the only sighting today of familiar faces as we threaded our way more slowly through the sharp twisting pathways of our third last day before switching to our blog link ‘Portugal 2019’. It may however not just related to Portugal.  

Slowly, partly thanks to a close friend back home in Sydney, who suggested videoing parts of our journey that may be useful to show others what we are doing and to bring a perspective that cannot be seen in a photo. I might use it in some other way that could be useful in showing what one of many PD people are doing at the same level as those without.

It’s a chance also to diversify the already eclectic skills of my wife as she was the only person available to take on this challenge. Other skills were born in our new home of Padron, through two famous prose writers. Firstly there was Rosalia de Castro who wrote “exceptionally beautiful prose, and poetry marked by saudade, an ineffable combination of nostalgia, longing and melancholy; a strong opponent of authoritative abuse;  and formidable defender of human rights. Camilo Jose Cela was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989 ‘for a rich and intensive prose which, with restrained compassion, forms a challenging vision of man’s vulnerability’. 

While Corrie went shopping for scissors to give me a hair trim, I went to Rosalia’s old house, now a museum. It was fascinating to hear the influence she had over Galician culture where some of her poetry was so indicative of how she saw the true Galicia, that it was put to music and woven into the Galician soul. 

Through a delightful park and across a colourful river full of soft seaweeds in a multitude of greens, I was gifted a soothing end to my faint brush with Rosalia.