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Walking the Camino
A modern Pilgrimage to Santiago
By Tony Kevin Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Copyright © 2007 Tony Kevin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-921753-83-1
CHAPTER 1
What Am I Doing Here?
I am sitting on a carved, granite way-marking stone, at a junction of rough, dirt trails in dry scrubland somewhere in the middle of Extremadura, the hottest and driest region of Spain. It is only eleven in the morning, but the sun is high in the sky and it is already over thirty degrees Celsius. The huge horizon is shimmering, liquifying in the heat. In a couple of hours it will be over forty. It is 28 May, still technically in spring, and all of southern Spain is baking in an unseasonally early summer heat-wave. Maybe it is global warming?
The back of my shirt and my wrists are soaked with sweat. I have walked sixteen kilometres already today, and there are six more kilometres to go before I reach the village of Alcuéscar and its cool refuge of the Residencia de Hermanos Esclavos de María y de los Pobres (the headquarters of the Spanish order of Brothers, Servants of Mary and the Poor), which I have been told contains one of the most comfortable a lbergues por los peregrinos (pilgrim hostels) in Spain. There are lots of tracks around here, but I won't get lost, because the reassuringly frequent yellow arrow waymarks point me onto the right direction of the camino at every junction.
I have been walking in Spain for three weeks already. I have walked close enough to 400 kilometres, and there are still 750 kilometres to go to reach Santiago, a hard-to-believe dream in my mind of green hills and flowing rivers. Here it is a barren landscape of parched, yellow grassland, dotted with grizzled encina trees, a hardy, local dryland oak. Spanish dry-cured ham, jamón serrano, tastes so special because Spanish pig-farmers let their black pigs out for free-range grazing in this kind of terrain for a few weeks in the autumn, gorging on fallen acorns before they are slaughtered and the hams cured through the cold, dry winters. This gives to the best jamón serrano what maturing in oak barrels gives to wine — a special extra-oaky flavour. The encina trees, seen at a distance, could be Australian eucalypts — with similar leathery, greyish-green leaves and twisted, gnarled trunks and limbs.
I started walking this morning just before dawn, at around six o'clock, from the village of Aljucén, enjoying five precious hours of cool walking. But by now, it is hot — no question. A late breakfast — one warm, squashy ripe pear with a wedge of manchego cheese, a delicious, hard, salty sheep's cheese from La Mancha province, and the remains of last night's dinner bread roll, washed down with the last litre of lukewarm water from my two 1-litre flasks, balanced one on each side of my pack. It is not a bad meal after your appetite has been sharpened by five hours on the road. I hope this meal and, more importantly, this water will fuel the final burst of energy that I will need to reach Alcuéscar, waiting somewhere behind those low hills up ahead.
You have to carry two litres of water on the camino, especially on hot days like this when you know there is a long stretch between villages with drinking water. And you have to keep drinking every couple of hours, otherwise it is easy for dehydration to set in before you know it. The warning signs are dizziness, fatigue, and pains in the legs and joints, but by then it's too late to get your energy back — you will be walking wounded for the rest of the day. I never knew I could make myself swallow so much water when I wasn't really thirsty. But the more you drink, the lighter the pack gets — and so it is good to stay watered-up.
What am I doing here? Why am I sitting in the blazing sun, in the middle of this harsh, god-forsaken landscape? I might as well be in Arizona or central Australia. This is not the kind of place where sensible people would choose to walk for pleasure. Why am I not at home with my family, enjoying the comforts of suburban Australia — watching football on the telly, reading the papers, getting another cold beer out of the refrigerator? Why is this 63-year-old, overweight, retired man sweating his way across Spain in high summer, lugging a heavy, sixteen-kilogram pack on top of his own ninety-four kilograms, which means 110 kilograms of weight bearing down on four tender sole and heel pads that have been taking the punishment of about 30,000 paces a day, every day over the past three weeks? No wonder I have the biggest and rawest foot blisters I have ever seen.
Yet my completed route already shows up as a satisfyingly long marking-pen trace on my Michelin maps of Spain. It makes me feel that the next 750 kilometres to Santiago might just be feasible, after all. The dream I had a few months ago in Australia, of one continuous walk across Spain from Granada to Santiago, might actually come true.
Maybe it is time to start writing some of this experience down on the camino, before I begin to forget it. It will be hard to recapture the feeling of all this afterwards. With my travel diary entries supplemented by occasional audio reflections on my MP3 player, I just might be able to hold onto some of these memories.
* * *
El Camino means 'the Way'. It is the only walking trail that matters in Spain. There are many possible alternative routes for el Camino: all lead to Santiago de Compostela, the famous cathedral city in the far northwest of Spain that is also capital of Galicia, one of Spain's autonomous communities (regions). Santiago is about 100 kilometres inland from Cape Finisterre, the most westerly point of continental Europe — the place where Europe ends. Fearful ancient and medieval mariners used to believe they would fall off the edge of the world if they sailed out of sight of Finisterre. Santiago is about the same distance south of La Coruña (in British history books, Corunna), the site of a disastrous British army defeat in 1809 during the Napoleonic wars in Spain. General Sir John Moore is buried in La Coruña, and each year a ceremony is held at his gravesite. He was the hero of a doomed British expeditionary force sent to Spain to help guerrillas resisting Napoleon's invasion. We learned at school a stirring patriotic poem, 'The burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna':
Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot,
O'er the grave where our hero we buried.
We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning,
By the struggling moonbeam's misty light
And the lanthorn dimly burning ...
There is a short camino — the Camino Inglés (the 'English way') — starting in La Coruña. But most pilgrims from Europe choose to walk the Camino Frances — the 'French way', three classic alternative routes from Vezelay, Le Puy, or Arles in France that converge at Roncesvalles in the Spanish Pyrenees into one busy pilgrim trail about 800 kilometres long that then runs due westwards across northern Spain, from Navarre and the Basque region, through the cities of Burgos and Leon, across the rugged mountains of León and thus finally into Santiago in Galicia. This justly famous route attracts many tens of thousands of pilgrims every year.
But I had chosen a camino far less travelled — the longest, hardest way that I could find, the Via de la Plata, which starts in Seville in the south. I also opted for a longer feeder variant from Granada, the Vía Mozárabe, which is 400 kilometres long and joins with the Via de la Plata at the old Roman city of Mérida, 200 kilometres north of Seville and 800 kilometres from Santiago.
My walk had started in Granada three weeks before, and I had just enjoyed two days of resting and sightseeing in Mérida. I had seven more weeks to try to reach Santiago, to collect my compostela (the official certificate of completion of pilgrimage) from the cathedral authorities there before my booked air-flight home. The authorities will check my sellos (overnight accommodation stamps) in my credencial — my 'pilgrim passport' — to satisfy themselves that I have truly walked the pledged pilgrimage route. Then it will be home again to the family and normal life.
My passport is already up to its third page of sellos, from churches, town halls, hostals , pilgrim refugios, and bars encountered on my way so far. There is something very satisfying about all the complexities of your life reduced to the simple daily goal of walking twenty to thirty-five kilometres, carrying everything that you own on your back, and having only one target to meet: to get a pilgrim stamp in the travel-record book at the end of each day.
All the sellos count, but the most valued are those from churches or monasteries, for they suggest your walk did have some religious purpose. Lowest in the pecking order are the stamps from bar-restaurants where you ate and drank on the way. As the guidebook delicately puts it, the ecclesiastical authorities in Santiago might not be too impressed by a pilgrim's credencial that looks like nothing more than evidence of a sustained pub-crawl across Spain. Tonight, I'll get a suitably prestigious stamp from the brothers in Alcuéscar.
Where did it start, this middle-aged folly? Interestingly, I have not yet met a single Spaniard on the camino who thought me mad or eccentric, or at least those I have met were too polite to say so if they did. The closer I get to Santiago, and the better known is this camino, the less likely that I will. Even in rapidly secularising Spain there seems to be a fondness still for the idea of e l camino, and an affection and respect for those who take on its challenge. It is partly about religion, and partly about nostalgia for the old Spain.
The new Spain is a modern country of big cities, factories, and highways with huge lorries and fast cars whizzing by. A pilgrim with his staff and backpack and cockleshell pendant and floppy sunhat walking along the verges of a Spanish highway is about as anachronistic as a person of similar appearance would be walking along a highway in Britain or the United States or Australia. Sensible Spaniards travel between towns by car or bus or train. Only penniless vagrants or pilgrims would walk along the edges of busy highways.
I rarely met Spanish walking pilgrims. Spaniards on pilgrimage to Santiago seem to prefer the faster and more modern option — doing their camino fast, on sturdy mountain-bikes, laden with heavy saddlebags and dressed in the latest resplendent multi-coloured lycra gear, with snazzy winged helmets and goggles. By superhuman feats of endurance, riding fast over the same rough trails that I am walking, they can complete the 1000 kilometres from Seville to Santiago in incredibly short times (fourteen days, even ten days). It is not my thing — for how could a pilgrim really meditate and let his mind go loose, steering a heavy bike at speed over rough bumpy paths? — but they seem to enjoy it. They come in all shapes and sizes, from super-fit athletic types to potbellied deskbound companions struggling to keep up with the leaders in the group. What they all share is a boundless enthusiasm and loud macho jollity: the bicyclista pilgrims always make their presence seen and heard on arrival in a village.
Coming up the track behind me now are some other, more unusual, pilgrims. Four horsemen, businessmen from Barcelona, are having the time of their lives riding the camino on four elegant Spanish thoroughbreds. I met los quatros caballeros in the pilgrim albergue in Aljucén last night, where they stayed, tethering their horses in the backyard. They are doing it in style, with a back-up carry-van driven by a fifth alternate rider, carrying all their gear and going ahead each day to scout out suitable accommodation and stabling. Riding calmly out of the heat haze towards me in their sleek and creamy Texan hats, they look as if they have just stepped out of a spaghetti Western movie. It's an efficient operation, as you would expect from a group of well-off restauranteurs and winemakers armed with mobile phones. This year they are riding the first half from Seville to Salamanca. Next year, they will complete their pilgrimage to Santiago. They are not rushing, walking their horses comfortably in the heat. Some genial 'Holas!' , a photo, and they are on their way again, clip-clopping into the blue haze ahead.
Next come two walkers chatting amiably in German, moving almost as fast as the horsemen: two fifty-ish athletes, built like greyhounds and as thin as whipcord, power-walking at a pace far beyond my dreams. They stop for a quick break and chat. They have already walked thirty-three kilometres today, all the way from Mérida. We are to meet again this evening in the Residencia, where one of them, a friendly Englishman living in Berlin, Bill Attwood, gives me the secret to overcoming my chronic blisters. Throw away your heavy wool outer socks, he said. Always wear two pairs of lightweight walking socks, the expensive kinds like Coolmax or Bridgestone — worth every cent. Keep your feet as dry as possible: stop halfway through the walking-day, take your boots and socks off, dry your feet well and rest them for half an hour, propped high up on a bench or on your backpack, to cool them and ease the swelling. Then talcum-powder them well before you put on two pairs of clean socks and your boots, which by now should be marginally drier. Bill's advice, which I followed exactly, worked wonders. A week later, my blisters were healing fast, and the soles and heels of my feet were at last hardening up. After Salamanca, there would be no more blisters.
Another group of walkers go by me, five fit young Germans (whom I had met last night at Aljucén), moving effortlessly with light day-packs — for they also have a back-up car. They started two hours after me. I had better get moving; it is depressing to be passed by so many fitter people. I pack up my breakfast remains, hoist the pack onto my extended knee, swing it smoothly over my shoulders, cinch up the waist-belt as tight as it will go to get the weight off my shoulders and down onto my hipbones, clip the chest-strap tightly to stop the pack bouncing around on my shoulders, grab my trusty wooden pilgrim's staff, and away we go again. After a while, with a well-packed and well-adjusted rucksack, you can forget you are carrying anything — until the end of the day, when soreness under the shoulder straps starts to remind you again.
Up into the last range of low hills, small farms start to appear in the scrub along the track: there are fences, olives, grapes, a few cows and sheep, modest farmhouses. Over the crest and it is greener now, more cultivated. I have entered an irrigated mixed-farming area of small fields, vegetable and cereals plots, orchards, vineyards. The path slopes gradually downwards into a shallow valley, looking ahead to a village up a slope on the horizon. It must be Alcuéscar. Distances to villages are deceptive: you can see a church-tower from up to ten kilometres away, but I had learned that only when you can distinguish the windows in the church-tower will the village be less than two kilometres away. As we get closer, I see a very large isolated building over to the left on its own, surrounded by wheatfields and vineyards and orchards. This must be the Residencia of the Brothers, and so I turn my steps towards it.
A few minutes later I am showing my pilgrim passport to a welcoming doorkeeper brother who escorts me upstairs to the albergue por los peregrinos: a self-contained pilgrim hostel area on the third floor of the Residencia, with a common room, a few small individual bedrooms, a large dormitory tightly packed with steel bunks, and a communal bathroom with lots of hot showers and clean toilets. It is all unisex and it is all free, though there is a discreet donations box on the wall — I dropped in a five-euro note. Because there were not many pilgrims that day, I scored a single room. It was spartan — a bed, a desk, and a chair were all it contained — but it offered all I needed. Looking out the window, writing, I saw a group of Africans, singing as they hoed and weeded vegetable gardens. Later I learned that these were penniless boat people who had come into Spain without papers, by cayuco (canoe) from Senegal to the nearby Spanish Canary Islands. They were being cared for by the brothers, learning Spanish and preparing for entry into the general community.
This order of brothers has quite a recent history. It was founded in 1939, just as the fratricidal Spanish Civil War was drawing to its bitter close, by a charismatic and visionary parish priest in Alcuéscar named Leocadio Galán Barrena. Father Leocadio started this charitable order of brothers, seeing the urgent need to address the terrible poverty and neglect of children in this part of Spain, after years of depression and civil war. There were so many orphans and homeless children — many, I suspect from the photographs I saw of the early years of the order, being the traumatised and orphaned children of civil war victims: they gaze out with hurt and anger in their dark-shadowed eyes. They are not smiling.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Walking the Camino by Tony Kevin. Copyright © 2007 Tony Kevin. Excerpted by permission of Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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