Wake me up before I go go

We’ve stopped but my feet are still walking 19 07 2010

This is a reality. We are in Santiago and I am sitting in the Franciscan Monastery with a Franciscan nun next to me talking to another pilgrim as I write. Alison, David and Christina are all on their beds resting. We arrived and were welcomed by Betty and Dougald who guided us around. We got our certificate (indulgence) and have had a lovely lunch (thank you D&B!!! The women giving out the certificates refused to believe that we had walked all the way from England. England is an island... you can’t walk from there, etc. I eventually convinced the woman who was looking after me and she got Alison’s woman to accept it reluctantly.

So, we have stopped the pilgrimage and are working out what needs to be done next.

We are shell shocked and are still in a refugio so we are gently entering back into the real world. It will take some time to really sort things out. All of the things that people take for granted that we have been doing without are now going to come back into our lives so we will have to work at this.

Walking with David and Christina has been a blessing. The walking has been hard and because of the heat and the terrain (and the heavy packs) Christina has found it very tough. It has been a lesson in humility for both of us as we have not been finding the walking that tough most of the time and she has had to dig really deep to do it – she is a strong, determined and generous hearted good friend whoi showed us all.

So we have had experiences like two days ago where we stayed in the temporary refugio set in a large warehouse type building. The town was celebrating their feast so the whole town partied u7ntil about 4 am. The dorms were sectioned off areas with bunks open to the warehouse except for a sort of net covering stretched across the top of the walls. This kept us slightly cooler but very noise in the place and all noises outside were magnified by the vast, empty space. So the bands and fireworks were clearly heard by all.

Then yesterday we walked a long day hoping to get to a place called Santa Irene. Suffering from heat exhaustion, it took every ounce of Christina’s strength to get to the rufugio (we arrived just after 4pm) only to find that a group of Poles had arrived just before us and there was only one bed left. The next place was over 4 km further on and the private refugio was closed for the day (Sunday). I was all for getting a taxi to the next place but we ended up with a young Spanish person offering to help us and he ‘phoned some local hostals/pensiones and found us a couple of double rooms only a k and a half away. So we had a good place to rest, we were able to walk there and we were another little bit further towards Santiago!

I am eager to get this loaded so we will search for a wifi place and upload what is here. I have lost track, know that I have missed bits out and have not checked the things I have written. I will sort it out later and perhaps add other bits and pieces before I call a halt to this particular blog. I have so much in the way of sketches, poems and the like I am not sure what to do with them and I have loads of things to write and experiment with that I am not sure where to start. From a creative point of view this journey has been incredible.

It has also been a wonderful time spent with Alison and we are both so grateful that we have been able to spend this time together. We need to think how we will be able to share some of this with others.... But Alison jumps straight back in to work on our return and she will be very busy so I will have to do some of that particular task.

So much to say and no time to get it written down so I will stop and save it all for later. The journey has its own momentum and I will still be travelling long after I leave this place. In fact Santiago is not very real to me at the moment. It looks a great city (I had not expected it to be so big – despite the fact that if I had thought about it it would have been obvious) so another place to come back to!

Needless to say, everyone has been in our prayers and thoughts and will continue to be so on this and other journeys.

Hola!

The big bang is no longer theory 17 07 2010

We are in Melide and it is Fiesta time! We walked across a wonderful rolling countryside to get here, climbing through the clouds and back down into green valleys with stone walled paths and dry-stone walled houses. We had breakfast in a modern little bar/restaurant where the people from the night before had not cleared up and the young guy doing breakfasts worked around the mess.

There were forests of oak and of pine and distant hills crosshatched with the greens of bracken highlighted with the bright yellows of broom and gorse. And most of the paths were deeply set into the hillsides and valleys with small streams cutting through the bottoms and others running down the sides of the way. Every house seemed to have these strange thin structures with either ventilation brick sides or wooden slats, a narrow door at one end of a long side and the whole thing with a proper sloping roof and set on a high platform at least six feet above the ground..... goodness knows what they are for. My suggestion was that they were for wind drying hams but no one in our little group knows.

Tomorrow we push on to St Irene and then to Santiago. Tomorrow is our second last day and the hundredth day on the road (excluding our time diverted away to Dominique’s graduation ceremony) so it is quite strange.

Santiago will be very expensive and we have not sorted out where we are going to stay yet! This s fine as we need to be able to let at least some thing happen at the will of the Holy Spirit, but it is hard for us and much harder for David and Christina – but they are taking it in their stride.

Tonight is yet another different experience for them as we stay in a temporary refugio – the proper one is being refurbished and this one is in a vast warehouse which has been sectioned off into dorms (but only about a tenth of the floor space so every sound echoes across this huge open volume in amazing ways – I sneezed earlier and it sounded like a gun being fired, which is truly an exaggeration of what my sneeze sounds like, honest!

We had a lovely meal in a small restaurant after a nice Polish Mass with a group of Poles who have done the Camino Primitive and are in the same part of the refugio as us. The two caminos join here and go on to Santiago. But now the lights are off and I must stop. I will send this off tomorrow (18th) and have to say that Iam thinking of my dad tonight as his birthday was one week and thirty years earlier than mine. Happy birthday day! Love Ian xcxcxc.


up the hills and down the dales we go 16 07 2010

I though I might be able to load a blog entry yesterday but failed. Perhaps today I will succeed, so...

We have spent the day walking up and down hills and much of our time has been in the rain. My camera decided to go on strike at the start of the day and I have sort of sorted it..... well it has lasted very well for a cheap camera. It was the cheapest in Tesco that looked like it might last the trip. It has been regularly soaked, dropped stuffed in pockets and used in every situation you could imagine and, apart from being too wide angled for most things and determined to flash at the slightest opportunity and occasionally refusing to take a picture without being coaxed, it has been great. In fact, for my style of digital visual sampling it has been pretty good. The very wide angle lens means I cannot do certain landscape photos (anything further than a short distance away disappears into a flat featureless horizon), but I can photograph buildings at close range and do other similar things. Sometimes it is not too good at reading the light (hence the flash photography) and it does slower exposures than I had wanted (causing blurring), but I just want to point and snap and the manual setting would be a nightmare for that.... I take well over a hundred pictures a day and often over 200).

Today was filled with all sorts of wonderful images that have not been captured on my camera. These include deep lush green valleys with small fields divided by dry stone walls and edged with fences made of wire and large single stones similar to ancient standing stones. Grey clouds lay in shelves across the tops of these valleys, shedding drizzle and occasional heavy rain onto the deep set paths with overhanging trees and high banks lined with bushes and flowers.The villages have been full of moss covered dry-stone buildings with rounded corners and dark slates with rounded edges, small round stone windows and slit windows with no glass in them (like the bathroom we used last night), Everywhere we encountered the dire aroma of cows shit which is particularly strong in this area and we walked down streets of uneven cobbles or large slabs of stone irregularly spattered with cow droppings. The cows are delightful creatures as they lumber along the roads or lanes from fields to milking parlours and back, but the smell is something that should be edited out of the experience.

We walked through Portomarin with its white houses perched above the bridge on the edge of a lovely long lake snaking through the deep valley. The bridge crosses the lake and leads the pilgrims to a grand staircase of 46 deep steps which takes you to the entrance to the town.we had a brief, light lunch there before heading on to our night stop in Ventas de Narin which is basically a few houses stock to the edge of a main road. A modern simple place and a good one to stop at as it will mean we can leapfrog the next main stopping point on the Camino and avoid (hopefully) most of the crowds.

Of course, the walk meant that we did over 31 Kms today and it seemed to be mainly up hill, so it was a punishing walk with full packs, etc. David and Christina are real stars dealing with this sort of walking – one day they are in Leicester, the next they are marching up mountains with us, handling extreme temperatures, rain and wind, the odd experience of different refugios each night and long steady climbs over steep, windy paths with extremely varied surfaces. Today we have walked on tarmac, cobbles, stone slabs, sandy paths and a wide variety of stony ones, along paths that were actually mountain streams and others that were basically medieval stone paths that have been broken up into a type of linear quarry that can only be describes as a path because it takes you from A to B. So, they deserve a huge thank you for being prepared to deal with such things and more just to spend time with us as we do our final plod towards Santiago. What is also amazing is that they seem to be enjoying the experience as much as we are. I would prefer to think that this proves that we really are not mad rather than proving that mad people like us also have mad friends....

So, now it is time for our supper and I think we will have a large, ice cold, dry sherry as an aperitif before we sit down to our pilgrim menu.

I have pleaded with D&C and Alison to refrain from counting down the days, hours miles and kilometres as we head to Santiago. It was a shock to discover just how little time is left and I don’t want to spend it looking beyond today (or at the very most the next day). But in Galicia they have placed a special stone every half a km along the path so it is difficult to avoid seeing that there are only 80 something kms left!!!! Ho hum....


A failed quick note from another internet free zone 16 07 2010

Since La Faba I have had basically no time to write. We have covered the route well and dealt with really hot sun and cold wet weather, we have been in a variety of Refugios, experienced the World Cup final on a terrace by a river and walked through beautiful mountains, fabulous valleys and exotic, medieval villages. There are villages with working farms and we have walked down through them dodging cow poo and the odd herd of cattle being driven along by men in traditional farmers’ clothes assisted by over eager dogs of various sorts.

We keep meeting lots of people along the way including a lovely French man called Michel and an American from North Carolina called George. We also encountered an artist from Toronto we met on our second night in Spain and enjoyed some time catching up with him during our visit to La Faba. He is into Latin American dance amongst other things and I have promised to send him the details of my (newly discovered) half cousin who runs a dance studio/school in Toronto.

Of course, we have also been seeing Sharon and Harvey from Canada, too. The last time we saw them was on the day when David lost his hat, then Christina lost hers - but we realised her was missing in time for David to trot back through the town and get it for her.

We said hello to Sharon and Harvey as we waited on a busy road out of that small town then watched two magnificent horses walking elegantly past us, also on the way to Santiago.

That was the day Alison fell over.

But I am doing this quick intro because the last several days have been a bit scrappy as far as wring has been concerned. I have written a few poems and am working on a couple of really exciting concepts. But this blog has been difficult to get going with such a different routine – four people walking is different from two and our daily rhythm has been changed so we are finding it difficult to get things done in the same way (or at all). My little note book is filling up aster than ever and my computer is feeling a bit neglected.

Today we walked through from Triacastella, past Sarria to a little place about 4 or 5 Kms beyond (sorry if I can’t add in the name before sending this), and we are perched on the side of a lovely wide valley looking back at the mountains. The municipal albergue was full so we walked past it and are staying in a very nice little Hostal/refugio which is more expensive but is very nice. Hopefully I will be able to link up with their internet connection but now we are about to go to the church for Mass and thren go to dinner.

La Faba tonight – OK! 12 07 2010

Strangely, I have had very little time to write since we arrived in Rabanal. Partly through spending time with our good friends Dougald and Betty and partly because of the arrival of our other good friends David and Christina.

So, we have spent a lot of time talking and all sorts of things and not much on the usual things we do during our time on the Camino and this includes writing my blog – sorry!

So, we spent a lovely couple of nights in Rabanal with Betty and Dougald in a seriously good Refugio with the biggest garden ever and with all sorts of good things besides. We enjoyed their company and that of many others too. We had some good food and a lovely mass on the Sunday (which was said by a lo9vely French priest, translated into English by a Canadian woman who originates from Brittany, then translated into Spanish by another woman ... and the readings were also done in German, read by a young man with a German Bible. We had the Mass in the garden.

That night, David and Christina arrived and we joined in a bit of a sing song led by some young Americans, Canadians and assorted other nationalities, sat around drinking Malt Whisky (thank you David) and chatted until Betty gently but firmly asked us to settle downh for the night (Refugios are places where everyone goes to bed early!!

We then walked a fair distance as the sun grew increasingly hot and strong. It was a tough start for D&C and, with a pretty heavy pack it became clear that it was going to take a considerable amount out of Christina which was a silly price for her to pay just to come walking with us. So, I suggested that it would be better if she had her pack sent on to the night stop rather than carrying it the whole way. We did that the next day and this proved really valuable. Especially since it was even hotter and longer and more punishing.... It is not the walking that can do the damage but the heat, the sun and the weight on our Backs and legs. Today we were going to climb even higher and longer so we did it again. This time we had to pick the bag up before the end of the walk and so she had to carry it up one of the steepest climbs on the Camino (to La Faba). Hopefully we will have it taken the whole way....

So, now we are in a seriously beautiful location on the top of a wooded ridge in the middle of the mountains. The refugio is really nice and the whole thing is proving to be a lovely experience.

We need the good environment because we had a hard time yesterday (well, Alison did) and today needed to end well.

Yesterday was one of those odd days. We took a long time getting out of the city we stayed in as the signposts were difficult to find and we were directed wrongly, etc. So, when we reached a place where we could sit down and have a drink we took the opportunity. It ended up being a sort of shop/restaurant/museum/bodega and they served us a glass of free wine each for being pilgrims. They also gave us each a large slice of Spanish sausage and potato pie which was very, very nice. We then decided to have a beer there so we ordered the drinks and those came with more large slices of pie ... which was all very nice and took care of our lunch for us.

However, on the way out of the last place (about 5kms short of our night stop) Alison tripped up, fell over and hit the side of her head badly on a wall. This was very scary and very messy as the blood just poured freely! Eventually we helped her sort it out and we walked up the hill in the hottest part of the day to find that the first refugio was full so we went to the second one a bit further along and managed to get ourselves places to sleep. Happily, she has no concussion though she does have a very sore head and it is painful to talk and eat. I confess it scared the life out of me....

So, today’s walk was tough for us all but harder still for Alison and she did what she is always doing – she handled it with grace and strength and led the way to the refugio. Tonight we rest!

Some thoughts ... 08 07 2010

I have heard a few people talking about the mystery of the Camino and how special it is, etc and then they get a bus passed the bits they think are ugly. The Camino, to them, seems to be this place filled with nature and beauty and ancient buildings: a place where real life should not intrude. We have also met those who spend all their time planning and aiming to see or experience everything. They meet others and swap information. They sit down with people who have done it before and write down the names of restaurants you can’t miss and types of wine that you need to try, etc.

Come to think of it, there is a lot of correlation between these two groups. There is a powerful acquisitiveness emanating from a few of them too – they must consume the maximum number of experiences from the Camino, etc. I can understand some of it, especially from those who have travelled half way across the world to be here and will never be able to return. I can see that those who have been preparing for this for so long will not want to miss anything if at all possible. All of this is quite natural and it is probably also related to the sort of books they have read about the Camino, the sorts of people they have talked with before coming and the sorts of travel/guide books they have obtained to help them through.

Sadly, there have been times when I could have screamed when the only place I have been able to sit down had a group of them with their books out, loudly swapping and proclaiming the unbridled delights of “that little restaurant that still retains its medieval character and serves utterly authentic octopus on cute little wooden platters”, etc. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to be told even indirectly what is ahead of me in so much detail. As it is, this part of the Camino is too full of information for my liking and it is getting me down (sorry if this sounds a bit gripy).

Strangely, we have gone for a very long time not really knowing what to expect when we arrive at the place we hope to settle down in for the night. We have often taken the risk of not booking anywhere in France where everyone seems to book well ahead. We have had good detail on the route (too much at times) but nothing about what is at the other end. Now there are lots of places and we have to choose where we are going to go. Plus, there are the realities that face anyone who is coming to the end of their trip. We have a deadline that is coming ever closer and we are encountering more and more pilgrims as we go. So places fill up quickly and decisions about where we are going to stay and why are becoming critical.

Having said all of that, if we had been able to have the option we would have still done this bit totally on trust. If we had been in a position (financially) to risk things and if we had just a bit more time to do it in we would have continued to walk in trust. We would have just got up in the morning and walked until we thought it was time to stop and then looked around to see where we could stay for the night. The less you have in the way of guides and the more flexibility you have in terms of time and finances would allow you to do this in a more satisfying way. But there again, I suppose that we don’t really mind. We are doing things basically at our pace anyway and we have spent so long on the road that we can handle the oddities of this part of the walk. I am just a little fed up of the touristic, high-consumption focussed elements that invade my inner peace. So, sorry about the gripe, I am feeling better already!

By the way, the bits of the route through the dirty parts of towns, through the council estate equivalents and the factories and busy roads, are all part of the richness of the Camino. Don’t reject or ignore them. The fossilised remains of a medieval village will hide the hard work, the poverty and the tough lives they held and that were the backdrop of earlier pilgrim’s journeys. Don’t be fooled by the flower filled fields – they are working environments, not rural theme parks - and those rugged little hills covered in thorn bushes by the side of the road are waste heaps from a mining industry that has only recently died. And everyone who waves at us and wishes us a good Camino as we walk are passing good will to us and taking some away from us, too. We are passing good will through a living community and the places where that good will is most needed will sometimes be in the dirty and grimy places that are not so pretty to walk through.

Of course, for us, all of this just means that we need to return to Spain and spend some “real” time here. Walking the Camino may mean that we will have spent a month in this wonderful country but we travel every day, we say hello and good bye to so many people and don’t stay long enough to do more. Next on the list for us is that we will learn Spanish, then we will come back and live here for a while – this is a new addition to our world plan but one we welcome with happy hearts!

And sorry to all who need to approach the Camino differently – I am not being proscriptive or even critical, really. I am just finding it hard to deal with that sort of approach when so much is already chipping away at me.... and we only have a few more days to go before it all stops, so I am a bit fragile.

I have been doing some work linking a few of my poems to pictures I have taken on the way. They sort of look like poetry/picture posters. One of them is about a dream I had that I was about to stop doing this. The poem seems to work quite well with a long, straight road disappearing into a dour, cloud filled sky. Ho hum... I should get out more!

Leon, Leon, so much to answer for...

Leon is another beautiful Spanish city. Again, it is different not only in character but in size and feel. The cathedral is stunning with a number of superb works of art but the building is a Gothic masterpiece in its own right with the whole of the top half of the walls filled with beautiful windows. We were stunned by it and the city needs to be explored in full at a later date.

The trail to Leon has been hot and pretty much flat but there has a been a variety of different elements to the landscape and the mountains have been a frequent companion on the horizon. As with other regions in Northern Spain, water has been a special thing with very fast flowing rivers with some good bridges crossing them and with more irrigation systems taking fast, clear cold water across the landscape in special canals, channels and concrete conduits designed to funnel it across the fields, down pipes and up through to other fields. All of this exclusively using gravity and the occasional judicious widening and narrowing of channels and employing specially designed sumps. The systems also leak from time to time forming mini streams along paths and narrow, dark pools along the sides of the road.

The Albergues have all been quite different although many of those occupying them have been the same people that we have been walking with and meeting from time to time each day as we do our camino. Most are Spanish and French, next are the Italians with a small handful of Germans and Dutch and then a smattering of others including some Canadians and Americans, a couple of Australians and a tiny number of Brits.

I have come to the conclusion that the idea of a communal meal is mostly a better idea than it is a reality. The people running the show really have to be able to do it properly to ensure that it works well and most of those who do it fall short by some way. The Spaniards (men, that is) are more about show than anything and the American women who have done it just don’t seem comfortable with the whole thing. Usually the choices made about what to do are not good, the volume of food is not right and its distribution is flawed and, sadly, sometimes they don’t even provide wine! The most recent one failed on a number of fronts partly because of the absence of wine, partly because the salad dressing ran out after the first small helping and then the traditional garlic soup was a problem. Both the wine and the soup had some origins in not getting enough supplies for the number of people who arrived at the place. They had expected around 15 and 32 turned up. So instead of getting more wine they just didn’t offer any and they bulked up the soup with more bread but had very little garlic or sausage to flavour it with. The final coupe de gras was that the local version of the soup requires a number of eggs to be broken into it and stirred around just before serving. This was fine for me but for a number of others (including Alison) it made the main dish pretty much inedible (I had hers) as some of the yoke had set but none of the white and this is not to everyone’s taste.

So some people walked twenty odd kms in unshaded hot sun, had a couple of bowls of lettuce with a few bits of tomato and some fly-caressed bread washed down by tepid water and a small apple or orange, then got up the next morning and walked a further 5 kms before they could get breakfast. This is not a particularly good way to treat pilgrims but the place was donativo (you paid as much as you could afford/thought the place was worth) and I’m sure they got a good amount from each of us despite the limited grub. Oh, of course, we had all taken part in preparing parts of it but we had no way of knowing what the whole thing was going to be until it arrived – we chopped vegetables, etc. in shifts, set the tables and so on. I knew that it was not enough garlic for the soup but didn’t know that the soup was it – the only thing in town.

The Albergues have all been quite different en route to here. We stayed in a very nice one with small rooms housing no more than 5 beds (not bunks) in each and there was a very nice set of gardens, a good bar/restaurant with good simple food, and a nice roof terrace, too. The showers and other facilities were fine too. Then we were in an old adobe building which was attractive but the social space was very limited and the communal meal was not brill and, even for the Camino, the facilities were limited (2 showers and 1 loo for the men and the same for the women). Then we were in a larger place with large dorms and slightly more facilities but the kitchen dining room was small and full of flies – even the pleasant courtyard area in the centre of the building complex suffered from the flies but the town was nice and we had a good pilgrim menu meal next door (despite the portions being too small – quality vs quantity). Then the place in Leon was interesting. A large refugio which was part of the convent right in the heart of the city. Large but comfortable dorms, small kitchen dining area but with no cooking facilities and breakfast included (bread, spreads and coffee/tea/hot choc). We had a nice set of salads for tea as there are lots of good supermarkets, covered market, etc in Leon. Now we are in a slightly down at heel municipal Albergue in a small village which has a very busy road right through it and a bigger motorway running parallel to it (all the traffic going through here is avoiding the toll payment on the motorway). The old and creaky bunk beds are all in one big room and, as this was probably a school the dorm looks like the school hall. 3 showers and 3 loos per gender and about 20 of us here tonight. The kitchen dining room is small but OK. 26km plus to get here but that makes tomorrow a bit shorter which is good because I think we are going up hill for a change – wow!