Go and ...Return?

Crossing the Tagus River enroute to Plasencia by bus.

This week's Camino a Ítaca looks back on a recent event where I was ... stranded, 80kms from home because there were no connections. Click over and read the original in Spanish or read the English version below. 

Eighty kilometres really isn’t far, but after six-thirty on a Saturday afternoon, Caceres seemed as far away from Plasencia as the moon. There was simply no way to get home. What made it more frustrating was that from the heights of The Pearl of the Valley I felt that I could almost see my destination in the distance. There it lie, somewhere beyond the swinging sabers of the wind giants that help power the city. But it’s a three day walk along the Ruta de la Plata and my only option was to wait for the next train.

Sunday was quiet on the streets of Plasencia, but the midday train platform buzzed in comparison. Sleepy-eyed university students leaned on enormous suitcases stuffed with freshly ironed clothes and tupperware filled with their mother’s cooking. Professionals with much more portable luggage stared at their phones, seemingly willing the train to be on time. Parents and grandparents looked on and remembered how the train had once been the key that opened the door to the world beyond these valleys.

The rails run south from the city and then wind their way through the singular landscape that is the dehesa until they reach the barrier of the jagged sierra that marks where Monfragüe begins. The train, which had left Atocha at ten o’clock that morning, then skirted the range until it squeezed through a couloir between steep cliffs hung with garlands of rock roses. Vultures, taking advantage of the updrafts that these narrow valleys produce, circled overhead as the train cautiously picked its way across the sierra. When it finally emerged out on the other side, a treeless, undulating carpet of green unfurled itself towards Caceres and the distant Montanchez on the horizons of the vast spaces of Extremadura.

As the train approaches Cañaveral, the old railway slips under the future. Overhead, a gleaming, blue-fenced electrified track shoots off like an illusory promise over an impressive series of viaducts that give the impression that the track is floating over the furrowed terrain below. Then in a fleeting moment, it’s gone. Lost behind the hilly thickets as the train instead creeps crept further down along the sinuous curves of the 1960’s track that borders the Alcantara/Oriol reservoir.

Decades of broken promises ring in your ears as the train crawls through a series of tenebrous tunnels so narrow that the pressure makes them pop as you roll through. This essential link to the future clings precariously to the banks of the reservoir and, in the same way, to the past. The chimerical promise of a future on equal footing with the rest of the country continues to run just out of sight.

After the queasy twists and turns that zig zag the train out of the confines of this inland sea, you once again catch a glimpse of that blue promise as it beelines towards its destination, only to see it disappear yet again. Another promise unkept, another appeal to be patient.

Trains have always been about freedom. They allow you to chase your dreams and experience other worlds. Ideally, they also allow you to come home, if given the chance.