Walking the Way - Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Santiago de Compostela, Spain
I walked for 38 days along three different Camino pilgrimage paths for 730kms. It was a slow start and a speedy finish, a race and a reflection, it was painful and powerful and it all makes for a rather complicated and lengthy blog post!
It must be a rather tiresome sight for the folks of St Jean Pied-de-Port in the west of France to watch the parade of shiny new pilgrims in their fresh boots and clean backpacks wend their way up from the train station to the Pilgrim Office. But, judging from the outrageous tourist prices in the town, perhaps they're doing okay about it. I have a feeling that no matter how prepared you think you are for the Camino, how much you have read, planned and considered, the Camino has a way of turning everything upside down and making your journey something altogether different. Especially if you start in the wrong city. That’s right, friends, I was in the wrong city. My plan had been to walk the Camino del Norte. It’s longer and harder than the standard Camino Frances, but it’s also along Spain’s coastline and is noted for its natural beauty. It starts in Irun. Not St Jean. Sigh.
It was a good way to start, though. I got to cross the Pyrenees and spend four days on the traditional Frances route which was enough time for me to agree with my earlier decision that this route was not for me. It’s a crowded race and, even that late in August, it was positively packed with pilgrims. People are up as early as 4am to light out for the next stop and grab the best beds in the albergues (pilgrim hostels) and, frankly, it’s hard not to feel totally inadequate if you want to sleep in to a more godly hour.
Having walked the valley route of the Pyrenees (really pretty) and had two brilliant evenings in lesser known albergues with great company (three Australian women and an Englishman), I wandered in to Pamplona and jumped a bus north to San Sebastian. It’s a pretty place so I was amazed how after just four days of walking I felt surprisingly detached from the lovely city buzz and keen to walk again. I had intended to stop there for a day but the following morning found me climbing the stunning hills out of San Sebastian on what became one of the top five most beautiful days of walking I had. Every step became a self-congratulation for having come north to experience this.
I fell in with a German girl and we walked together to Guernica enjoying outstanding accommodation for two nights and really lacklustre accommodation for the other two. I picked a fight with a Frenchman and got accused of being a 'fake pilgrim’ by another Frenchman because I was sitting in a café having a cup of tea. I walked with that anger for several days. And all the while, we walked, up, down, around hills, through forests and village after village.
I loved Guernica and stayed for a rest day, resting my tired, blistered feet as I soaked up the Basque culture. The next section to Bilbao was a more lonesome time but still with some lovely days of views and reflection. I took my first bus at Bilbao, skipping two days of walking. Why? I don’t rightly know except I felt totally overwhelmed in the city; the albergue I was aiming for had closed for the year; and I ran into a Dutch couple heading out by bus and, in the stinking heat of the city, plans in tatters, I just followed their lead.
Not long after Bilbao, I had my first day of rain, an interesting experience making a nice change from the heat but certainly not really enabling views. The following day, I ended up at the Guemes albergue because about three different people mentioned it to me and then, everything changed. Guemes is a special albergue with a total focus on community and reflection. But that wasn’t what changed for me. It was the company I fell in to. I walked alone from Guemes over to Somo and then caught the ferry to Santander (it’s either that or a 20km round trip to get back on the route – no thanks). There were four pilgrims on the ferry I was on and we didn’t sit together – so much for the lessons of Guemes – but then as we docked, three of us ended up hunting down the yellow arrow markers again and then one guy peeled off leaving me and this Italian fellow named Matteo. We walked 25km that day which was my longest walk so far as I had been taking it really easy up until then walking 20km maximum each day. Walking 25km was wonderful! It felt like an accomplishment and, at the end, there were only four of us in a lovely albergue – me, Matteo, Dannie and some old lecture-style German guy. Matteo and Dannie had been walking loosely together for several days (although they had mislaid each other just before Somo that day) and so our little trio was formed over many many drinks that night.
I walked with Dannie and Matteo for many days. Dannie was on a time schedule and so every day we walked a minimum of 25km and up to 40km in order to make our way to Santiago by the end of the month. We crossed a train bridge together in a scene reminiscent of ‘Stand By Me’ but much less exciting. Except when the train did approach us as we were half way across and, as we hugged the bridge, the thought crossed my mind, ‘just how wide are these trains?’ and all three of us threw ourselves half over the side of the bridge, shouting reassurances to each other as we gripped on. The train came nowhere near us but my goodness weren’t we gleefully relieved afterwards!
We climbed hills, walked endless roads, baked under the Spanish sun but in between, we had such beautiful sights as we walked along the coast between the Bay of Biscay and the extraordinarily pretty Picos de Europa – a mountain range so close you felt you could reach out and touch it. We had awesome nights hanging out together and with other pilgrims and, always, for me, that sense of great accomplishment of just how far we were going.
Day 23 into Llanes was particularly horrendous as we walked 40 kilometres in the stinking heat. Strung out along the path, all three of us (and, no doubt, every other pilgrim) suffered the distress of walking a hillside path with no reassuring markers and no discernible way into the city – or off the bloody path – and the increasing conviction that you have been going the wrong way for the last three kilometres. I cried. Dannie called his mum. Matteo probably creased into a quiet but stoic frown. We all dealt with it in our own ways but I’ve no doubt that the relief we each felt when the path suddenly dipped into the back of the city and, before you know it, everything’s okay, you’ve arrived, was identical.
I had to accept, however, that I was not going to make it to Santiago de Compostela with the boys without another rest day so I made the tricky decision and jumped ahead by leaving the Camino del Norte route just before Sebrayu and skipping the two days walking which connects the Norte to the other Camino route we all intended to walk along – the Camino Primitivo. It’s called the Primitivo because it was the path that the very first pilgrim, King Alfonso, took to Santiago. And it’s a total ***** of a route. Less albergues and less rest stops. But the benefit – the almighty, astonishing views and the sheer pleasure of quiet walks in the forests.
I had two lovely days in Oviedo and met up with the boys again. There was a week-long feast of San Mateo which the Oviedans evidently feel is best celebrated with mojitos…and who were we to disagree?
Not long after we met up again, though, Matteo forged ahead on his own - compelled by his own profound Camino experience - but the Primitivo forces camaraderie and Dannie and I ended up moving as part of a bigger group anyway. The albergues are few and far between and a group of about 20 of us were loosely bonding as we followed the route day by day. We crossed a mountain, hiked above the cloud line and then stumbled to sea level again, enduring the pain of an endless downhill. I ended up walking more with a group of American women and an Englishman who kept a similar pace to me and greatly enjoyed their company. We endured endless rain for the last few days and even walked through a lightning storm which was cracking fun…well, more cracking than fun.
Then, three days out of Santiago, the Primitivo joins the Frances route and all the intimacy, peace and general wonderfulness of our Primitivo experience was lost among the pilgrims completing just the last 100kms to get their Compostela certificates and therefore derisively termed ‘tourigrinos’. You can pick them – they’re a little bit too clean and neatly dressed. Walking those hundreds of kilometres did not make any of us more tolerant, I’m afraid.
Even in the presence of the tourigrinos, walking in to Santiago de Compostela defies description but you can stand in the square in front of the Cathedral any day of the week and observe hundreds of pilgrims as they enter the last steps of their Way and submit to the idea of halting. It is incomparable.
So, this is a description of my physical journey across Spain, but my emotional experience – the far greater aspect of the trip – was much harder.
On Day 18 in Santona, a hippie deigned to tell me that 'you can't just walk the Camino with your feet, you have to walk with -' and then he gestured towards his lungs and neck. I think he meant the heart, but I wouldn't want the man undertaking surgery on me. Now, really, this is the first and most basic lesson of the Camino. You won't get far if your brain and heart aren't in the game. So thanks for that useless advice, hippie-dude, you are very deep and meaningful. Go play on a zither.
It was Day 14 just outside of Bilbao when, while straining up a hill on a terrible path that I found myself thinking the inevitable thoughts - 'why am I doing this to myself?' It hits everyone at some point and it's an interesting question on a slightly more complex level. Why walk across a country on feet mired in blisters with a constant ache running through one or both of your feet/ankles at any given time? Why don wet weather gear and walk through driving rain sweating like a ******* or shrink under a hat on a stinking hot day sweating like a *******? Why leave everything behind - every creature comfort you can think of - inevitably maintaining that half-washed, unkempt kind of look that you would never intend to be seen in public on a normal day? Why sleep in dorms of varying quality with strangers, many of whom could snore for their country and then get up at the crack of dawn, choke down a Spanish breakfast (which is depressingly dissimilar to the sort of breakfast I would want before walking all day)?
Because. That's why.
When you watch the Spanish around you, going about their daily business and you think of your friends back home going about theirs, you marvel at the idea: all I have to do today is walk. Just put one foot in front of the other until I stop.
You follow the signs (which are generally beautifully marked) and you just walk. You might chat to someone or you might drop into your own thoughts. You watch the view as the world slips ever so slowly by and you wonder to yourself, 'good god, did cars always go that fast?'
And sometimes you stop. In the middle of a forest, on a beach, on a cliff top, in the central plaza of a tiny village, on a farm's stone wall, next to a little river, on a bridge, sometimes just in the middle of a path. You might eat a peach or just stare at the world around you. Or you might change your socks to save your poor aching feet a bit of pain. Or you might be puffing so hard that you just need to catch your breath. And then, in many of those places, you find a silence. You glimpse the magnitude of, well, something. And it's a perfect moment.
So that is the wondrous part of the Camino. But for me, it also unleashed some of my deepest insecurities. It threw me, without any notice, into a rabbit warren of complex emotions. You have to learn that you walk your Camino alone, so does everyone else and their Camino has nothing to do with you. I hope I make myself clear. I developed wonderful connections with people around me; it was illuminating in a further understanding about the intricacies of the human condition. But in the end, you each walk your own pace, your own thoughts and your own reasons for being there. It’s a powerful lesson.
People smile knowingly and say, ‘you’ll come back and do it again’ but I suspect that this will not be the case for me. Am I glad I walked? Absolutely and always. But my lessons were ********. I’ll take the precious gift with me and pray very hard that I never have to learn them again.