Comments from the Camino

 

Off to the Camino today while Murray moves the boat down the coast and over to France with the aid of Jez, Dave and Dave.

Long day to get to Paris; two bus rides followed by delayed plane trip, then another bus journey followed by a hot sweaty walk to the hotel.  Paris don’t impress me much.  It’s hot, dirty, expensive and smells of wee wee but at least the people were friendly!!  A useful thing when you can’t find your hotel because your map only has half the roads marked!

Anyway finally meet up with Sonya and Anna and up the Eiffel Tower we go after a hugely long queue!  Tres manifique! Didn’t opt for the 15E glass of romantic champagne but enjoyed the lovely views over the city and they lit the whole thing up when we came down which was pretty special.

The next morning Sonya and I hit the metro, then the train and make our way to the start of The Way.  (or the Camino de Santiago de Compostella – for those uninitiated in the world of long distance hiking!  This section of track runs from St Jean Pied de Port (France) to Santiago (Spain))  Bon/Buen Camino!

 

St Jean Pied de Port is lovely and the hotel we have booked is delightful.  Mother and daughter have just the right amount of quirkiness and the rooms are tres jolie and wonderfully higgledy piggledy.  The macerating toilet turns out as “scary” as expected for Sonya and I get to try out some new phases… “I am desolated.  There is a problem with the toilet… He is blocked!” 

Next we get our Pellegrino passports from the Pilgrimo office (these let us stay at auberge/albergue – cheap hostels and get special meals etc along the way), enjoy some local vino and basque beer (yes they do make good beer in France, Murray!) and hit the trail the next day. 

 

The Pyrenees are steep and unluckily (or luckily temperature wise – cold enough for light jumpers!) we spend most of the day slogging up hill in the fog.  No views but very atmospheric; sheep and cows bells tinkling in the gloom, cars and hikers looming in and out of the mist and the sound of Sonya heavy panting all adds to the experience.  After lunch we cross the cattle stop into Spain (Europe without boarders at its best!), traverse through some of the last remaining untouched beech forest in Europe, gallop out of the clouds and down the very steep hill into Roncesvalles.  The first albergue is an eye opener… a massive ex-monastery(?) converted into a hostel.  Surprisingly modern fittings etc and nothing like the horror stories you read about the hostels (bed bugs, dirty sheets, crappy facilities etc!)

Unfortunately there are still masses of hikers (260 registered for passports the day before!) all crammed together and after our first communal pilgrim meal (again surprisingly nice and interesting company – a psychiatric nurse and a psychic medium from Iceland – a well suited couple???  By the way Mr Medium, if your hill phobic girlfriend lets you live; there were more hills than just the ones on the first day!) we enjoy a very broken night sleep and ponder the question whether temporary insanity is a winning defence when smothering horrific snorers! 

The next day we are understandably tired after our exertions and crap nights sleep but the day dawns early on The Way (they wake you up and boot you out of the hostels at sparrows fart) so we stuff all our gear into our packs and head off into the Spanish countryside.  Today is all about trees… lots of them and trying to learn some Spanish.  “Hermosa vista”.  Beautiful view indeed and it’s really pretty wandering through the low hills (yes; hills, Mr Medium!!) and “pique–niquing” in rolling valleys.  We pass though lovely Basque villages; blinding white chalet style buildings with terracotta roofs, full of multicoloured cats, barking dogs and jolly red coke machines (just what we need to pep ourselves up – it’s the real thing!)  One dog has its day when it makes off with a hikers baguette – Got to hand it to Americans - not sure I would have seen the funny side.  I have picked up a cold and although my throat burns I’m still enjoying myself and we end the day by checking into a lovely small albergue where meet a few more hikers. 

Wilfreida and Johann have walked from Germany.  In their 60’s they epitomise long distance hiking gods… wiry square muscles, nut brown legs from the sock line to the bottom of their shorts, a slight shuffle when packless and ready for a beer at the end of each day!  Later in the pharmacy (where the long suffering pharmacist grumpily sells me bee pollen throat spray or was that prettily packaged poison?!) we meet ‘Hotsprings” aka Sam (Ahh, Hotsprings, what I wouldn’t give to be sitting in one of your hot tubs right now watching the bugs – Hotsprings is a small town on the Appalachian Trail just in case you are thinking I might be trading Murray in for a younger model!) and Missouri (Sam’s dad and former baguette owner – damn these dogs!).  Missouri (self proclaimed ex-hippy) has seen the film “The Way” (and possibly the light) and has tagged along with Hotsprings to find himself again.  Luckily Hotsprings possesses the Pollyanna gene and is coping well with Dad’s intrusion on his experience!  Tagging along for now is the quintersensual man from Maine; “Mad Morris”.  In your face and up your nose.  Harmless but irritating we all recoil and aim to lose him (and the lady that is walking with her dead father!) at the first opportunity!  Ahhh, long distance trails and care in the community have a lot in common.

Day three.  The sun is out (lovely) I’m snotty but good to go and we head out through the countryside towards Pamplona.  To start with it’s a mixture of natural and manmade tracks winding through leafy valleys and open farmland but soon becomes concrete roads and tracks overlooking sunflower fields and manufacturing towns.  The last section into Pamplona proper is through satellite towns and scary pro-Basque graffiti – “Freedom for the Basque Country” most of it proclaims but the local inhabitants seem friendly and we get stopped by one old guy who worked in Australia.  They don’t have much personal space but you get used to being stroked, held by the hand, kissed and told that Kiwi’s are “sympathetic” tourists.

 

 

 

Pamplona comes as a surprise.  Not sure what I was expecting but it is beautiful.  The central plaza is lovely and the old town quaint and welcoming.  We finally find ourselves a cheap hotel room after a fruitless march around town to one mentioned in the guide that turns out to be closed and enjoy a stroll through the cobbled streets that play host to running of the bulls once a year.  It’s our first experience of a big town on the trail and it shows in our choice of lodging location.  What appeared, at post lunch break, to be a quiet picturesque street transforms itself into the centre of all things going off that evening. 

During the day you don’t see many people in Spain.  The image of tranquil, deserted villages and towns springs to mind.  This is because they are the only nocturnal branch of the homo sapien family.  Come 5pm they start to stir.  At dusk the low chatter becomes a roar and they sweep out of their houses and descend into town to feast and display.  A voracious hoard; squabbling and hollering like a troop of howler monkeys on the move.  All night this racket continues, till at last dawn breaks and they flee the heat and light, retreating behind half closed roller blinds to await the cool night air once more. 

 

Needless to say I did not sleep much at all and awoke to no voice (lucky Sonya!!).  It’s another hot day.  Blisteringly so and no shade to speak of.  Sweat runs like rivers over our skin but having had two shit summers in a row (thanks UK!) I am enjoying the heat immensely!

 

All day we stroll (well grind really!) through endless fields of sunflowers, a parade of exercisers and litter.

 

 

The Spanish are great exercisers and everywhere you go people are walking, running, biking and getting fit but they are also dirty little buggers and behind every tree and in every picnic spot the loo paper and detritus piles high.  Come on people have some respect for the environment!

 

We climb (damn that Icelandic twat!!) up to the crest of today’s bare hills and take in a vista of windfarms and wrought iron sculpture.  It’s a great view and made all the prettier by the long downhill on the other side.

There are also a lot of camino cyclists on these sections.  Yes, you can bike the trail as well – and thanks boys, some of you made the day go more smoothly – but I certainly wouldn’t be happy pushing my bike up some of these gnarlier bits.  Two legs better then two wheels! 

 

We stop for the night in Puente la Reina.  A pretty village and very much reliant on the pilgrim trade.  It’s a lovely evening and we enjoy watching the world go by (including to fine looking Spanish horses practicing for some future fiesta no doubt) with a couple of beers and gins and lemonades before a nice meal out in a quiet little restaurant.

Had to be a dog somewhere!

It’s a slow start in the morning (in a room by ourselves, so no annoying alarm clocks and rustling plastic bags in the wee early hours of the morning!)  It’s hot again and the sunscreen is slathered on at regular intervals.  No shade and 36 degrees leads to some serious water intake and 4 litres are consumed over the course of the day but scarily no piddle stops either.  (I was pretty sure our kidneys are still functioning and sure enough a beer or two at the end produces the desired trip to the WC – phew!)  Its arable land now and animals are replaced by stacks of straw and stubble covered fields that go on fenceless for miles.  Its beautiful and tiny grey stone villages punctuated with bell towers and steeples dot the knolls along the horizon. 

You can’t guarantee a shop in these tiny places but if it one thing the Spanish like in a village it’s a pharmacia and the Pellegrino’s keep them in business with blisters, strains and in my case more drugs for my never ending cold.  It’s a long snivelly slog into the last town for the day made even longer by the “no room at the inn” speech (Good girl Sonya… very brave, no crying!) and a major walk uphill to the last “stable” in town.  The gym did a nice line in camp beds but was somewhat lacking in the culinary department… still it was food and boy are we starting to get hungry each day!

It’s an early start the next day.  Up and out by 7.00am… not conducive to enjoying the nearby free wine fountain (is it a sign of an alcoholic to be drinking red wine before 8am??!) but at least you get some miles under your belt early on.  In fact we wonder why people start off this early as we feel the pressure to keep up with the pack.  Normally our lazy starts mean we are walking only a few people and it’s all very relaxed… today we feel the pace and start to suffer with sore feet and dicky legs!  It’s a dusty day and the earth is a baking iron red but the hilltop towns have an abundance of water and drinking fountains of various qualities keep us from becoming dry husks.

We are nearing the end of the friendly Basque territory but I manage to squeeze in one last cuddle and cheek smooch with a old, mad geezer before settling down to our first taste of tapas and a bit of flamenco dancing.  The tapas was wonderful but bite sided chucks of anything are not enough to satiate a hungry pilgrim and the poor man hard a hard job rearranging his display fast enough to keep up with the calls for more nibbles and make it look like he had something left for the locals to chow down on!  As an aside, call me a philistine but the slivers fancy black pig jambon aged for two years at the seaside just tasted like any other yummy ham to me. 

Then it was just enough time before curfew… yes they shut you out if you don’t get home by 10pm… to watch some raw backstreets flamenco with a bucksome wench and her slinky hipped partner before hitting the sack to lay awake wondering about the pros and cons of bedbugs while being serenaded by a hawking, sawing supersonic snorer.  Maybe I am just too old for hostel life!

Now I could be wrong but I am pretty sure that Mr Snorer might have been a contributing factor to the progression of the next morning’s events but either way it was not a good day for Sonya and culminated in a minor meltdown and small paddy involving a goodly amount of words that shouldn’t be used in mixed company and a lot of stomping.  Very amusing, but not in a way that you show in front of the person exhibiting a tendency to kick their pack! 

(Have to say this particular incident wasn’t quite as entertaining as the “Dance of a thousand flies” as performed daily by Sonya and her host of tiny irritating “Flyettes”! Glad you remembered to tone that done once you were on your own, sweetie!)

It was a quiet day after “the incident”, mostly concrete and road walking.  Small things are noted like an abundance of striped snails coating every tree trunk and blade of grass for about two hundred metres strip.  The landscape is now vineyards with cutaway mountains in the distance.  A tidal wave of cloud builds up behind them, overtops and then rushes down to the valleys below.  There is rain in the air and thunder rolls menacingly around the hills.  A fitting backdrop to a fuming Sonya.

More vineyards the next day.  Red soil topped with immaculately tended vines and welcome shade trees.  Its pretty walking and we end the day at a small albergue in a tiny village.  One albergue and one restaurant; the perfect combination.  We enjoy a lovely meal out in the company of Hotsprings and Missouri before enjoying a relatively good nights sleep.

We can tell we are in Spain proper now.  The people seem a little less friendly, the scenery involves less hills and trees and our Spanish (such that it is!!) is more understandable.
 

Day 9 is a long one.  Lots of road walking and sore feet are starting to make a play more the main source of conversation.  Sonya’s feet resemble slightly dried out jellyfish; bloated and weepy, with crisps of skin dotted about for good measure!  Mine are in AT mode and ache badly by the end of the day but are otherwise fine.  We wander through a very pretty village (Azofra) and then decide enough is enough and call it a day at 25km in Ciruerie.  It’s a rundown albergue run by the Spanish version of John Cleese in Faulty Towers.  Grumpy doesn’t cover it and it doesn’t cover me either by the time I have sat through his bitching and moaning about our lack of Spanish, his very nice one-pot-wonder lentil meal and been booted out of bed the next day at 6am.  I am over long distance hiking and over being treated like a kid… grump, grump, grump!  Needless to say it’s my turn for a bad start the next day and Sonya enjoys a quiet morning!

We put in a 30km day through never-ending wheat fields with straw mountains.  It’s hot and long and we are both tired and sore but Belorado is a lovely stop and we treat ourselves to a cheap hotel and spend the rest of the evening kicking back with drinks and lots of food.  The crew and cast of ‘The Way” spent a lot of time here and in true Hollywood style the streets have their hand and foot prints in the concrete and the back streets are filled with American style bars that no longer open. 

 

 

The days are starting to run together now as is happens in long distance hiking.  You get up and have breakfast.  You set off thinking about when morning play might be.  You have morning play.  You walk some more thinking about lunch.  You have lunch.  You walk the rest of the way thinking about snacks and what to have for dinner.  Towards the end of the day you whimper a bit about sore feet and then there’s the good bit when you stop.  And then it’s a round of talk about how much you are looking forward to dinner and are there any snacks?  Then you have dinner and fall asleep.  I am close to my end point, Burgos and I’m looking forward to finishing!!  Hats off to you, Sonya… go girl, you can make it!  (Don’t worry Kerryn, she can do it but your name does get mentioned a lot… are your ears burning??!)

 





It’s my second to last day and it’s a lovely walk with a large section through dense woods so there is plenty of protection for the sun as we grind up and down the undulating terrain.  We get passed and pass other hikers.  Some are in so much pain they have to do a high speed shuffle.  Some are more sprightly and whizz past leaving us in their wake.  

I'm going slightly mad!

We finally make it to St Juan and another converted monastery.  Not like Roncesvalles however… rundown and grubby is the order of the day here.  It’s a shame as the building is wonderful.  The café next door serves wonderful food and we dine on plump morcillo (blood) sausages and leafy salads before retiring to our respective squeaking bunkbeds.  Just one day to go!

Another early start!  Some people’s alarms go off at 2, 3 and 5am… what’s the point of walking in the dark???  Worst still some people’s alarms go off and they don’t even bother to get up… now surely that is a solid defence in up any coming murder charge! 

Just one more day!!

As it turns out it has to be the worst walk to date.  Long, boring, hot and the last section through the outskirts of Burgos, which go on and on for miles, is noisy and confusing.  The traffic is horrific and we lose our way a couple of times.  It’s all a bit disheartening but finally we stumble into the old part of town and it is serene in comparison and, like Pamplona, very beautiful.  The fountains, parks, trees and grand old buildings are a delight and it is a fitting place to end my journey.

 

About sums up how I felt!

 

Thanks Sonya and the Camino.  I have enjoyed myself immensely… 300km done but no more long distance hikes for me and now, oh bugger, it’s just a matter of dealing with the 24hr, across two countries, journey by, bus, overnight train, metro, train, bus to Cherbourg to meet up with Murray and Bramble.  Deep joy!

 

Oh… and the boy’s trip across the channel?  Well it appears there was a lot of eating and rather large amounts of drinking.  Some people were worse for wear at times and some people were fine all the time.  Poor old CC got sailed hard but performed amazingly (7.4 knot average across the channel and a max speed of 11.4 knots recorded at some point) and Bramble survived it all without me!  But more about this later…