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Before the BeginningSt. Jean Pied de Port across the Pyrenees to Roncesvalles
Zubiri and Larrasoaña to Pamplona and Cizur Menor
Puente la Reina, Estella, Viana
Nájera to Santo Domingo de la Calzada
Villafranca Montes de Oca and San Juan de Ortega
Burgos, Hontanas, Castrojeríz
Frómista and Carrión de los Condes to Terradillos de los Templarios
El Burgo Raneros to León
Villadangos del Paramo to Astorga
Rabanal del Camino to Molinaseca, Villafranca del Bierzo, O Cebreiro
To Triacastela and Samos
To Barbadelo and Portomarín
Palas do Rey, Arzúa, Arca
Santiago de Compostela
After a month of walking, the pilgrim loses his mind. Not in the psychiatric
sense, but like an obsolete and forgotten appliance.
-- Jack Hitt, in Off the Road
Just short of a thousand years ago , the first century of a new millennium was a century of change. England got a new Norman king, William the Conqueror. The dukes of Normandy themselves were newly converted to Christianity and vigorously promoted the faith at home and abroad. Northern Spain was entering a new time of peace under Sancho the Great of Navarre. Half a world away a land that would be named Aotearoa and later still New Zealand, was receiving the first Polynesian settlers to arrive there in their giant ships.
The shape of Christian faith was changing as well. Lay and clerical Christians were abandoning that view of the contemplative life which idealised stasis and had found its expression in the Benedictine monasteries and their accompanying Rule. Human existence had hitherto been viewed as a matter of enduring as well as possible the attacks of spiritual forces, but St. Anselm and others imbued with the new spirituality saw life more as a matter of journeying and seeking. The imagery of movement laid hold on the imagination, invading secular as well as religious thought and literature. The theme had a natural appeal to the age which produced the Crusades, but it outlived the Crusades, and would produce in time that great popular masterpiece Pilgrim's Progress.
So eleventh century pilgrims undertook their journeys in a different spirit from those who had gone before. The earlier pilgrims went out from places, the new breed went out to them. The point of the early pilgrimages had been to exile oneself from home and security and wander per agrum -- through the countryside. With the new individualism there was a consciousness that God goes with each person wherever they travel. These pilgrims who undertook a journey and returned safe home brought with them proof of God's mobility.
At the same time it was acknowledged that there was such a thing as lay theology. Therefore there was a need for spiritual exercises which the devout could undertake while preserving their lay status. The Church, as so often and so wisely, provided a framework within which this spirituality could be expressed. A "holy order" of pilgrims was acknowledged, placing them alongside the monastic and priestly orders. Saintly relics were discovered at convenient locations and imbued with miraculous powers so that the faithful pilgrim might gain not only the spiritual benefits of the journey but also a cure for some physical ailment. Then there was the theory of penances. According to this theory, God kept a book of account on you in which you were permanently in spiritual debt. By undertaking a penitential act like a pilgrimage the faithful could reduce their indebtedness and thus the time they would have to spend in Purgatory. The three-point plan of recognition, miracles and redemption legitimised the energy of spiritual questing and provided a language with which to talk about it.
The Way itself constituted an axis where the everyday world and the divine world might intersect. Where the spires of the many churches might puncture the heavenly sphere, and where heaven itself might bulge downward to create a tube of ambiguity wherein the faithful might walk. And physical relics of those doubly potent persons, the Saints of God, might sweep the beholder into their own overlapping realities.
There are all sorts of reasons why people undertake the Camino today. The badge of a pilgrim is still the scallop shell of Saint James. The traditional way to travel is on foot or on horseback, and pilgrims continue to do both. Some travel by mountain bike, though this is considered both a little too speedy and a little too modern to be completely authentic. By one means or the other, each year some thousands of persons forsake their television sets, their cars, their wall-to-wall carpets and their personal computers to make the uncomfortable and demanding journey to Santiago de Compostela. And as the twentieth century runs into the twenty-first, their numbers increase every year.
So what gave me the motivation to tackle the Camino? Simple -- I caught it from a friend. The friend's name is Pat Quaife, and she is one of the best friends the Camino has in the English speaking world. Pat, though an Englishwoman, got some of her university education in New Zealand and it was through that circumstance that she and my wife Gail became firm friends. These two maintain the habit of the Christmas letter, and hers for 1982 was a stunner. Twenty pages of close typing, and all about an expedition she'd undertaken the previous year to a place in Spain called Santiago de Compostela.
For Pat, it was a project that had grown in her mind for nineteen years since she had encountered the tradition while studying medieval French. Her desire to do for herself what she had read of others doing grew to the point where in August-October 1981 she and a colleague undertook on bikes both the French and the Spanish portions of the Camino de Santiago. Pat went on to revive the English Confraternity of Saint James, for twelve years to be its President and to receive an Honour from the King of Spain for her services to the Camino.
Pat kept us informed about the Camino and the Confraternity over the next decade, and the thought came to me in turn that this would be a worthwhile thing to tackle. I had the idea in my mind in 1992 when we traversed Grand Canyon, the walk that convinced Gail that her career as a long distance walker would end right there. So when Pat stayed with us for Christmas 1994, I knew that the pilgrimage really was what I wanted to do, and the main questions were how and when to do it. Some of these were answered in a practical guidebook she has written for English pilgrims, but for the rest she just said quietly, "You'll do what you have to do."
So on New Year's Day 1995 I started training to walk the Camino. Really this was just as much testing as training, for at that stage I was none too certain that I had what it takes physically or mentally. So I started on a thirteen kilometre circuit that I'd used years ago for running, a tour through pleasant farmland. This formed the basis of my training, and I gradually added extra mileage until I was doing twenty-four kilometres at a time. This was a little short of what I'd have to do on the real journey, for to get there in a month it takes about twenty-eight kilometres a day. With that distance achieved, I swapped my sports shoes for the boots I hoped to wear. I'd had these since 1960, when I bought them for six pounds five shillings (we still used pounds, shillings and pence in those days) and they had served me well for thirty five years The question for the boots was the same as for their wearer -- would they stand up to this sort of punishment, or would they fall apart at the seams? Finally I got to doing the distance with my pack on my back. No joints gave way, I did not expire in the heat -- this was the New Zealand summer, and temperatures in our area reached thirty degrees often enough -- nor was I struck down by any debilitating illness.
When Easter arrived I made my decision. The Camino would definitely be on. My wife Gail told me that from this moment I was no longer the same man. She said, "That is when you started your pilgrimage," and really she was right, for from that day on, there would be no turning back. Just to make sure, I went and paid a large amount of money to my travel agent for a return airfare to Europe. The die was well and truly cast.
The decision made, it was time to start training in earnest on a new route. This one stretched from Taradale where I live to Hastings where I work -- about sixteen kilometres each way. By five-thirty each morning I'd be out walking, and apart from the moon and the stars, I'd be in pitch darkness. Darkness punctuated occasionally by the lights of an approaching vehicle, because it is a public highway I was walking along, and even at that hour there is a surprising amount of traffic about. About half are trucks, roaring along with their trailers of unknown produce; the other half private cars driven by early workers starting their day at nearby processing plants.
There would be a torch in my hand and when a vehicle approached I would turn it on and point it vaguely forward in the hope the driver will see me and leave me enough space on the verge of the road to walk on. In case he didn't, I'd keep an eye on the ditch beside the road -- ready to leap into it if I had to, but without enthusiasm, for there's a depth of water in there and it was too cold for a swim. Some of the driving that goes on at that time of the morning isn't too flash. There are the one-eyed monsters that look like motorbikes but turn out to be cars and utes with only one headlight working. And things can get a bit exciting when you're sharing the road with two big trucks trying to pass each other at 120 km/hr. At times like these, the ditch looks like a haven of comfort and security, wet bottom or no wet bottom.
I didn't really need the torch for illumination. Even under starlight, the white line at the edge of the road was clearly visible and if it hadn't been for the traffic I wouldn't have needed to do the business with the torch. Neither would I have needed the dinky little tail light I had attached to the back of my pack to protect me from being struck down from behind.
Reaching the little settlement of Waiohiki, at a certain point I would flash my torch along the fences to see if a particular gate was open or closed. If it was open, the Dog That Never Sleeps would emerge to have a go at me on the verge instead of just baying from its own front lawn. It's not a huge dog, but its looks and its disposition are nasty, and seem worse by torchlight. Pat had warned me that dogs would be a problem in Spain, so instead of dodging trouble by wallking on the other side ofthe road, I made a point of this little rehearsal each morning. We'd have our altercation, and every time I escaped with limbs intact, hoping uncharitably that the racket had at least deprived the Hound from Hell's owners of some of their early morning shut-eye.
Have my feet got any new blisters today, I'd wonder. How they felt wouldn't tell me -- it had been months since the nerves of the lower extremities could yield information so precise. From mid-thigh downwards, there was just a generalized ache covering knees, muscles, ankles, heels, soles and toes. It took a visual inspection to discover anything new, and by the time I'd got my boots off I wouldn't care anyway.
About three-quarters of an hour to the next settlement, Pakowhai. A car would do the distance in three minutes. There, I'd see the local garage opening up to catch some early customers, and know it must be six-thirty. By now there' be a definite pink tinge to the clouds on the left and I'd know that sunrise was on the way. If things worked out well, the dawn would actually occur when I was at the highest point of the morning's journey, the Chesterhope bridge, and I'd get a nice view of the sun rising out of the sea. I thought, I must make a point of getting up early to catch the sunrise while I'm in Spain. Little did I realise that while on the Camino I would see every sunrise for a month, and that fully a quarter of my walking would be done in the dark before dawn.
Then quite suddenly the darkness would dissipate and I'd see clearly for quite a distance. Cars and trucks still had their lights on, but I could see them without that. From now on things would be much easier. There was still an hour's walking in front of me, but it would be straightforward.
So I'd get to the office, sneak in by the side entrance and head for the men's room where I'd clean up and put on the work clothes I'd brought in my pack along with the other stuff I'd put in there as make-weight. Then I'd emerge, greet my workmates and start the working day. Nine hours later I'd be doing the same walk again, this time in the reverse direction. I reckoned that if I did the whole business a hundred times over half a year, I could get fit enough to tackle the Camino, the pilgrims' route to Santiago de Compostela.
After ten weeks of this, my view of the process had changed. Fitness was coming on, and I was no longer thinking about blisters because it was weeks since I'd had one. The aches had gone from my muscles and joints, and there sometimes came a spring in my step even though my pack was heavier than ever with the junk I'd been loading into it. Mind you, nothing seemed to alter the uniformity of my speed over the ground -- I would cover exactly six kilometres an hour regardless of how I felt, what the weather was, or how much I tried to hurry. This was on hard, level tarsealed surface admittedly, I could not expect to find such good footing on the real track -- and so it proved, for my average speed from St Jean to Santiago turned out a little above four kilometres to the hour.
I'd had a walkman radio since I started training, but by now I was using it less and less as the walking became less of a challenge and left me more freedom to enjoy my own thoughts. Mornings were darker now -- when I crossed Chesterhope bridge the sun would still be deep below the horizon and wouldn't appear until I reached the city limits. But the cold that goes with the darkness before dawn seemed to clear the air and I'd find myself taking off my warm hat and craning back my neck for a better look at the crystal heavens, the Southern Cross and the Milky Way. Not for too long though, for there was still the traffic to deal with.
It was surprising how many people I met socially, who had spotted me on the road at one time or another. They appeared by this stage to know about what I was doing, though a good number were confused about Santiago, being more familiar with that larger Santiago, the capital of Chile. I had generally to explain the whole business of pilgrimage, for though we use the word it has reality for us only in the general sense of a long anticipated journey undertaken to a particular destination. The idea of doing it painfully and prayerfully is not part of our culture, and people found it puzzling. Their puzzlement and my own inability to explain my motivation in logical terms, sapped my confidence and when my bishop stated publicly, "it seems a stupid idea to me," I was about ready to give up. John Bunyan knew the problem, and that the remedy is pilgrim pig-headedness: "...whoso beset him round / with dismal stories / do but themselves confound / his strength the more is."
Quite a few commented that I was looking fitter now, and they presumed that I'd lost a lot of weight. If only it were true! But the bathroom scales said that within a pound or two I weighed just the same as when I started. It must just have been a redistribution, not a reduction. Too bad.
Friends ask the obvious question: why do you want to walk eight hundred kilometres just to see some two thousand year old bones? What's the point? A thousand years ago there would have been an answer ready to hand: you did this difficult thing in order to escape some of God's punishment for your sins. Or alternatively, you had a nasty disease you wanted to get rid of. A modern Anglican rejects these proposition and searches for an answer in logical terms, without success. But people seem to understand when you offer them the Everest answer: I'm doing it just because it's there. So my pilgrimage, whatever else, would be a kind of horizontal Everest.
A degree of dissatisfaction with easy religion is also involved. El Camino has little to offer by way of instant gratification. The pilgrimage appeals to those who believe that if faith costs nothing, that's about what it's worth. Admittedly there may be in this a measure of asceticism, an attitude of No Pain No Gain.
The Camino is often used, Pat had said, by people who are making some change in their life, perhaps from job to job, into or out of marriage. In my case the question was whether to take the final step to ordination as an Anglican priest. I had done the training, got the qualifications, had the nudge from the bishop and ordered my life to accommodate a priestly ministry. So what point was there in delaying?
True, there were a number of things about which I had questions at the intellectual level. To see whether religious experience in the spirit of the eleventh century would be valid on the verge of the twenty-first And, coming as I do from New Zealand which has no state church, to spend time in a country that does. But above all, my motive was spiritual: to take on the strangeness, the effort and the insecurity that pilgrimage has always represented, to let down the barriers and interact with God afresh in new realities, new aspects of old reality.
In May the opportunity presented itself to take the new, fitter body to the starting place for my physical pilgrimage. The point I sought is located at 42°53' south of the equator, 171°28' east of Greenwich, for Santiago Cathedral lies at 42°53'N 8°32'W. The general area of forty-three south, one-seventy-one east is forbidding mountainous territory, most of the area being more than two thousand metres above sea level. This is New Zealand's Southern Alps region, where seventeen peaks exceed three thousand metres and Mount Cook himself rises to 3,764 metres. The exact spot is on the slopes of Mount Rolleston, a modest 2,271 metres tall.
Pilgrims sometimes get lucky, though. Snaking across the Alps from Christchurch on the east coast to Greymouth on the west, is one of the few roads, Arthur's Pass. The Pass itself is a notch in the mountain chain, dipping to an altitude of only 923 metres. Buses travel it daily, even trains -- they call themselves TraNZalpine -- and although it winds and dips considerably, it is there. Santiago de Compostela's antipodean point is just alongside this road, close to its summit and not too far from the only population in the vicinity, a mountain village serving the sportspeople who come in winter. (Do Not Feed The Keas, the signs say.) So in a rented car, I was able to drive there in great comfort and found the spot easily. I was even able to have a cup of coffee in a proper roadhouse and a prayer in a proper church, the tiny mountain chapel which serves the mountaineers and the few families who inhabit the area.
Doing so helped to settle me and to convince me that my pilgrimage was really 'on'. Beneath my feet as I prayed -- even the timing was right, I later discovered -- the pilgrim mass was being said in the Cathedral de Santiago. Emerging into the cold wind and rain of Arthur's Pass I knew that the time for vacillation was over and from this point onward there'd be "... no discouragement / shall make him once relent / his first avowed intent / to be a pilgrim."
Two months later, the day arrived for my departure from New Zealand -- July 25th, St. James' Day. A more conventionally pious person would have been moved by the significance of the date, but I can't lay claim to that sort of piety. I visited the little chapel in Auckland airport and offered the ordinary prayers of a departing traveller, but had no visions of St. James nor spiritual fireworks of any other kind. Two days later, entering Europe through the French city of Marseille, I was warmly greeted by air temperatures twenty-five degrees hotter than the ones I left behind in the New Zealand winter. Warmly greeted, too, by old friends Gérard and Claudie Capdevielle, who whisked me off to their home in Montpellier to acclimatise and get rid of jet lag.
Montpellier, though it is at the "wrong" end of the Pyrenees, was a good place to re-acquaint myself with life in Europe after an absence of sixteen years. French awareness of New Zealand was at something of a high: the All Blacks' almost-successful campaign to uplift the World Cup had attracted a lot of attention, as did the NZ film "Once Were Warriors" which was showing in Gaumont cinemas at the time. They called it "L'Âme des Guerrieurs," the spirit of the warriors. But more significantly, the resumption of French nuclear testing in the Pacific, recently announced by president Jacques Chirac, was a serious embarrassment to all the French people I met and they were quick to dissociate themselves from their government's action. There seemed to be petitions everywhere calling for the cancellation of the tests, even at the world pétanque championships, then taking place in Montpellier.
After this brief R&R, and visiting old friends in the region, it was time to get to the starting point for the pilgrimage. To do so you need a train ticket, and getting one of these involves a life or death struggle in the railway station with a vending machine of fearful complexity. Eventually this infernal device delivered a printed card entitling me to second class space on a train leaving Montpellier at a quarter past three the following morning. In the event, the train was surprisingly comfortable and it was possible to sleep as it wound its way from the Mediterranean end of the Pyrenees toward the Atlantic, passing on the way through that other famous place of pilgrimage, Lourdes. A sort of railcar took me over the final stretch, from Bayonne to St. Jean Pied de Port.
Pray for us, my friends said as they farewelled me. Other French people said, pray for our children. French people place a value the prayers of pilgrims which is both touching and humbling.
St. Jean Pied de Port is a fairly horrible little tourist town. It has some features of interest but they are so well overlaid with commercial tourism that the general impression is fairly bad. To be fair, the day I was there was a Sunday and a fine one at that, but the thousands who came to gawk and buy ice cream did nothing for the town.
I did find the pilgrims' office, actually the private home of Madame Debril, and at 2pm located the lady herself. She was in a grumpy mood, having been interrupted at her lunch by a pushy French couple who hadn't respected the notice, Fermé 12.00 à 14.00. She had given them the bums' rush, but since I had waited until the appointed hour, treated me with courtesy and increasing warmth. We chatted in French for an hour or so, and she gave me the advice, "Suivez les flèches jaunes, monsieur, ne regardez rien autre." The warning was valuable, for Europe is crisscrossed by a network of historic routes variously marked, and only one of them -- the one with the yellow arrows -- is the walker's path to Santiago. .I was able to give Madame Debril news of Pat, whom she hadn't heard of for some months. She told me that I was not the first Kiwi to pass through Saint Jean en route to Compostela but the second -- a Franciscan brother had walked from Rome to Santiago -- and she promised to send me his address when she found it in her records.
What I did not know at that stage of the journey, was that Madame Debril has a reputation for chewing up pilgrims and spitting out the pips. Jack Hitt, in his Off the Road, reports in detail the verbal savaging he received from her, including the ultimate insult: "You are not a true pilgrim!" Bettina Selby's Pilgrim's Road tells of a young Englishman reduced to tears by the same treatment. Being a "true pilgrim" seems very important to Madame Debril, and considering that she herself has never walked the Camino ("When I was young I did not have the time, and now I am old I do not have the strength.") she is perhaps unduly sensitive on the point.
The True Pilgrim theme resurfaces in the refugio at St Jean, reinforced a with
the wall sign: Es tu vrai pelerin? Facile à prouver
Laisse donc ce gîte comme tu l'as trouvé.
So who is True Pilgrim? Nobody seems to have an operational definition, but you develop your own internal one, so when Pat saw my boots she said at once: "Oh, very pilgrim!" and she knew what she meant. A personal definition of True Pilgrim naturally includes people like yourself and excludes people you don't like. Everybody's definition excludes tourists, though tourists are an equally ill-defined section of humanity. What's interesting is that the True Pilgrim matter looms so large in the mind, and I think this has something to do with the personal insecurity that is an ingredient of the pilgrim condition. More usefully, having a means to identify other True Pilgrims helps to establish community with them. It's a community which includes those True Pilgrims whom you will never meet in the flesh, in this time and over the life of the Camino.
Madame Debril found a place for me in this, the tiniest refugio I would encounter. Flat out on one of the six beds I found a very fit looking but also very tired looking Frenchman aged about thirty. He turned out to be a history teacher from Besançon who had walked from that city and so was already halfway through his pilgrimage. Pascal -- that was his name -- seemed a congenial chap and must have been a persuasive talker, for he had convinced Madame Debril to bend the normal rule and let him stay two nights in the refugio thus gaining a rest day. He had already a month's walking experience behind him, and better yet, a very detailed map. This was a man I could get along with; he and I would travel together for the next four days, formative ones for me as I learned how to handle the Camino.
We had each thought 5am a good starting time for the stage from St. Jean, the last refugio on the French side of the Pyrenees, to Roncesvalles which is the first on the Spanish side. So we did that, first packing our gear under the street light outside the refugio for at that time the night was still pitch black. Once we left the town I used my dinky little taillights but there was little enough traffic for them to signal to. (Later on at Los Arcos, I would, perhaps prematurely, send my taillights home.)
Leaving St. Jean and still on tarsealed road, we started to climb steadily and this didn't seem too bad until rather than following the road, Pascal insisted on taking a route through a forest. Pat's guide specifically advises against this, but having no map I lacked the confidence to question his decision. Soon I wished I had, for we had embarked on a period of several hours -- it seemed like forever -- of very hard climbing on forest paths. These were not always clearly waymarked and we were physically extended, so the route was often difficult to find. In fact, what we were doing would almost have qualified as "bush bashing" back home, and I cannot imagine how an unfit person would have handled it. Fortunately there was enough mist, cloud and forest cover to protect us from getting overheated, for that would have been the final straw.
Certainly the views -- when we got them -- were spectacular, and somewhat reminiscent of our own bush highlands. When the sun rose, or seemed to, I stopped and bellowed a Maori dawn call into the valleys:
He po, he po
He ao, he ao.
Takiri mai te ata, korihi te manu,
Ka ao, ka ao, ka awatea!
Papaki tu ana te tai ki te reinga,
Ka ao, ka ao, ka ao te ra!
(It is night, it is night,
But it is day, it is day.
The morning is breaking, the bird is singing,
Behold the day, the day, the dawn!
The sea laps against the departing place of spirits,
Behold the day, the day, the risen sun!)
The valleys seeming unmoved by this harangue, we continued our bush walking until higher up we came upon open farmland with little flocks of sheep. Each flock stayed very much together, there was little tendency for them to scatter, and this was achieved by the little mountain bells which a certain number of the sheep wore around their necks -- it seemed to be about one in five. Cattle, goats and even horses all wore the same kind of bells, which made a constant, pleasant sound whenever we were near them. Just to be on the safe side, each flock or herd had at least one herdsman looking after it, each as picturesque as the next in his beret, neckerchief and stick. For this is the country of the Basques, those proud, independent people unrelated to either their French or Spanish neighbours and who like to remind you of the fact at every opportunity.
At one point where the Camino takes an unexpected turn, a modern cross marks the point of departure. The inscription on it -- in Basque and in French -- is significant and appropriate: I am the Way. Later on, I would encounter a pilgrim whose tee-shirt bore the whole message: Soy el Camino, la Verdad y la Vida. At length we crossed the high point of our climb, at 1,440 metres. Somewhere around here, we also crossed the French/Spanish border, and a less dramatic frontier crossing you could not imagine. No guards, no passport control, no sniffer dogs, just a sign on a stone saying you are now in Spain. A bit of an anticlimax, really.
This is country that echoes to the Song of Roland, that ancient ballad which the French like to claim as their first work of literature. Pascal explained to me, however, that the legend of the Song is quite different from the history of the events involved. Legend says that Charlemagne was contending with the Moors at the time of the events in question, history says it was the Basques, not the Moors. Jack Hitt's book Off the Road wryly describes his researches into the Roland story and adds the detail that Charlemagne's grief at Roland's death led him to undertake the very first pilgrimage to Santiago. "Since Roland died in 778," writes Jack, "and Santiago's body was discovered in 814, this makes Charlemagne's pilgrimage not only the first but quite likely the slowest." So much for a nice story.
While in the mood for debunking legends, Pascal also explained to me that pilgrims who identify themselves by wearing a scallop shell on their clothes or pack, are not following the ancient practice at all. Originally, you didn't get to wear the shell until you arrived at Santiago and so the only walkers who should wear the shell were those who had done the pilgrimage before. What I heard later lent force to that theory, for apparently the Bishop of Santiago has the historic right to excommunicate any seller of scallop shells outside that city's limits. I hedged my bets by purchasing a tiny metal badge in the shape of a scallop shell and wearing it unobtrusively on my hat. But really, nobody needs to see a badge to recognise a pilgrim needs as such -- the tired eyes, the sunken cheeks, the funny walk are a sure enough mark for anyone.
Coming over the brow of the hill, we got a good long look at Roncesvalles, our destination for the day, and in descending to it, lost the height so painfully gained. Arriving at the monastery there, I was absolutely wiped out by the effort of the day. A kind man greeted us and took our packs to a place of safety where he locked them away securely until the refugio would open at 4pm. This was a helpful move on his part, but a real bad one for me, since all my food, papers and spare clothes were in the said pack. So was my French money, which might have bought me a beer, and I had no pesetas owing to a problem I'd with a cash machine in St. Jean. Supposedly capable of delivering either French or Spanish currency for your Visa card, it would only give me francs for mine, not pesetas.
So in Roncesvalles I sat on a bench outside the monastery, pulled my hat over my eyes and went to sleep in the sun. Probably a bad idea, but what else was there to do? Eventually the pilgrim office opened again and we were taken in to the relatively huge refugio with its forty-two beds. At 8pm we attended a special pilgrims' mass, received a special benediction, then went down to one of the local restaurants for the special pilgrims' meal. This cost 550 pesetas -- Pascal staked me out till I could get some cash -- and that's about what it was worth. Consisting mostly of a fried egg, it left me rather less than satisfied, but I was too tired to care and soon wiped out again.
At Roncesvalles, I had a peculiar experience with my credencial. This little book is carried by most pilgrims to collect the special stamps which are available at every refuge and also at some churches, town halls and even certain bars. Mine had come from England, from the Confraternity of Saint James of which I am a member. Well made in Britain, it is nicely designed and has a stout plastic cover. But for some reason it met with disapproval from the Brothers at Roncesvalles, who insisted that I purchase a European one, a far flimsier affair. So I finished up with two credenciales and wherever I stopped I resolutely demanded two stamps. This didn't seem to bother anybody much, though at Estella they tried to charge me double for my bed, just a misunderstanding I think.
Much later, a Spanish pilgrim explained that the English credencial might have been seen as "Protestant" by the Catholic brothers, and therefore tainted. As events turned out, I only met this Catholic/Protestant problem once more while on the Camino. In the meantime, with two credenciales I was covered both ways.
Despite our preference for an earlier start, the next morning we were not permitted to leave the monastery at Roncevalles until 6.30 am. We dodged a bunch of German cyclists with a huge Mercedes bus as their support vehicle, and headed out through pleasant country parallel to the main road. But even then our departure was messy, for half an hour down the trail we discovered that Pascal left his washing behind at the refuge. Could he afford to leave it there and push on nevertheless? No, there was really essential stuff there, socks and underpants, so a return trip was indicated. While I guarded both our packs, Pascal set off jogging back to Roncevalles.
In a remarkably short time he was back with me. Had he sprinted all the way? No, he'd encountered some members of the Guardia Civil and they had given him a ride in their patrol car.
Perhaps a quarter of the people I met spoke some French, most of these being other pilgrims from France, Belgium and Switzerland as well as some local people. So my French being fluent, it served me passably well as a medium of communication at first. But my Spanish needed to improve, and that right quickly.
In one of the villages between Roncesvalles and Zubiri -- I think it was Viscarret -- there was a bank open, and anxious to repay the pesetas I'd borrowed from Pascal I faced up to the first really serious linguistic hurdle -- getting some local currency on a New Zealand credit card. This, I knew, would put the acid on my Spanish if I was to obtain what I actually wanted instead of simply making a prat of myself. Would they accept the card? Would they believe there was such a place as New Zealand? With these anxieties in mind I took a deep breath and stepped in the open door. I did not immediately get inside, for said door was a little narrower than my pack which stuck firmly in the opening and brought me to a sudden halt. I tried to wrench myself free, but gently enough so as to do no damage to door or architrave, especially as my undignified performance was being observed with a total lack of expression by the man within.
"Buenos días, Señor"
"Holá, peregrino." He obviously knew a pilgrim when he saw one.
"¿Las tarjetas de credito se prendan aquí? With great care I trotted out this
stock question, Credit cards take themselves here do they? (Almost right, but
not quite. Neither prendar nor prender means take. -- it is the French verb
prendre which has this meaning. This was not the only time I added a French
word to the Castellano vocabulary; trobar to find is another of mine..
Fortunately Spanish people are intelligent and tolerant.)
"Sí, no problema."
"¿Visa?"
"Sí, no problema."
"MasterCard es mejor para mí." I had both, preferred the MasterCard, plonked it
on the counter at let him get an eyeful of its incriminating legend, Bank of
New Zealand.
"Master. No problema."
This was going well. Neither of us, it seemed, had a care in the world.
"¿Cuanto quieres?"
I was prepared for this. "Cinco mil pesetas, por favor." Five thousand pesetas
was about sixtyfive dollars Kiwi. (The exchange rate at the time was eighty
pesetas to the New Zealand dollar. This equates to about 120 pesetas per
American dollar or 200 to the British pound.) Five thousand would cover my debt
of a thousand to Pascal and probably get me to Pamplona.
"Tu pasaporte, por favor."
Oh shit, I should have thought of that. The passport was exactly at the bottom
of the pack for security's sake, and sealed in a plastic bag. There was nothing
for it but to dig it out, and the process quickly covered the floor of the
little bank with hiker's clobber. Mercifully they had no other customers at the
time. Eventually my searching fingers found the passport and I dragged it out.
He copied down its number, gave me my card, passport and money and for the
first time in our encounter, cracked his face with a broad smile.
"Buon camino, peregrino." Courteously turning his back, he left me to gather up
my gear and leave.
The gentleman on the other side of the counter doubtless has long experience of pilgrims' uncertain efforts with his nation's language, and in any case if you enter a bank waving a Visa card, there's not much doubt about what you want. Though later in Pamplona I made the mistake of going into an investment bank for the purpose, and didn't get anywhere at all.
Hole-in-the-wall machines demand no linguistic skill, even providing you with a button that lets you operate the thing in English if you want to. You have to get used, however, to the fact that they deliver pesetas in multiples of a thousand, with a minimum of 5,000. The numbers look horrendous until you get used to them. Unfortunately for me, I got a little too used to the thousands game, for on the return to New Zealand I had occasion to use the money machine at Tokyo's Narita airport. Needing 40,000 yen, I confidently keyed in the number 40 just as I'd done in Spain, only to realise too late that the question on the screen had been, "How many 10,000 yen notes do you require?" Suddenly, I found myself clutching 400,000 yen -- over six thousand New Zealand dollars -- and wishing there was some way to stick most of it back into the machine. Unfortunately there isn't, and when eventually I was able to convert the yens back into our currency, I lost a lot of money in the transaction.
So Pascal and I got on our way again and the walking was so much easier than the day before that we did not stop at Zubiri as planned, but pressed on the extra 5 Km to Larrasoaña. There, a pleasant modern refugio awaited us -- and it was open when we arrived. The albergo turned out to be the mayor of Larrasoaña himself, Señor Santiago Zubiri Elizade, whose business card bears the proud title, "Amigo del Camino de Santiago". He proves his right to the title by giving each pilgrim a personal greeting on arrival and -- perhaps even more welcome -- a pitcher of ice water straight from the fridge. Between this and the nearby river swimming hole, which gradually filled up with pilgrims bathing their feet and other body parts, we managed to get our temperature down far enough to secure a good night's sleep in the comfortable bunks.
The day's walk from Larrasoaña to Pamplona was only twenty easy kilometres, and we arrived in the city at 10 am. The original plan had been to go four kilometres further, to the village of Cizur Menor, in order to stay at one of the notable refuges of the Camino, the family one run by the Roncals. Maribel Roncal, a personal friend of Pat's, is the family member who particularly attends to the pilgrims. In 1987 they used to get about forty pilgrims a year through their refuge: now it can be forty a night. Since the nominal capacity is sixteen beds, this becomes a tight squeeze. For Maribel, it has also turned what was once a kindly interest in pilgrims' welfare into a full-time job.
But where Pascal and I stayed was Pamplona itself, the city famous for its annual bull run. It is impressive: the old part is encircled by ramparts which look old (but aren't) and dominated by the impressively simple cathedral. The inside is also impressive, not overly decorated. My guide told me (if I correctly understood her) that in times past the stones had been painted over, but the paint had been removed to reveal the simple beauty of the masonry.
In Pamplona, we are still in País Vasco, the Basque country, and the physical evidence of this is the bilingual signs you see everywhere, bearing the same information in Castellano and in Basque. Basque is a language like no other in Western Europe, so it is difficult at times to see the connection between the words in the two halves of the sign.
Castellano is the name that Spanish people use when speaking of the language we foreigners call "Spanish". A good proportion of the people who live within Spain's borders regard Castellano as a foreign tongue, and speak it only reluctantly. Castilla y León, having become the dominant region economically, also dominates linguistically, to the displeasure of Galicians, Catalans and Basques, all of whom possess their own languages and given the option, would prefer to speak them.
In Burgos I met a teacher of languages who hailed from Galicia in Spain's northwest corner. He explained to me that Castellano was not an indigenous language at all, but a made-up one invented to facilitate communication between the Castillians and the Basques. If true, this would explain Castellano's uncomplicated grammar and rather simple vocabulary which make it so much easier to learn than French.
At Pamplona I followed up on a contact I'd made through Rotary International, of which I am a member. Some months previously I had written to a few Rotary clubs in cities along the Camino, to ask essential questions like, what's the weather like in August, and more importantly, do they take Visa in your area. Pamplona was one of the places I'd I had a helpful answer from, and it occurred to me to follow up the earlier contact. I realised that to do so I would have to confront the second great language hurdle: making a telephone call. To make the call I purchased a Spanish telephone card from a little shop and somehow got a 1000-peseta one for only 900 -- I never did find out why.
Phone, card and my Castellano vocabulary worked all right and before long I was having a stumbling conversation with my fellow Rotarian Javier Retegui Zubieta. His photographic shop was in the old town and easy to find, so before long we were shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries. Javier and his wife were kindness himself, taking me in hand and seeing to it that I got a cold beer, which I needed, and a tour of the city, which I wanted. Since the tour was a walking tour that lasted two and a half hours, I was glad the walk from Larrasoaña had been as easy as it was. At its conclusion, Javier took me to a sporting club which is rather like a country club in the city. Very large, modern and well appointed, it was full of good-looking people in swimsuits relaxing around several swimming pools -- not topless though, Spain hasn't relaxed that much -- or playing desultory games of tennis. He arranged for me to get a shower there, which otherwise would not have been possible until the refuge opened at 4 pm, and gave me a very enjoyable lunch.
Leaving Pamplona the next morning, less than an hour's walking brought us to Cizur Menor where we met up with the pilgrims who had spent the night there, and we pressed on toward Puente la Reina. By this stage little groups of pilgrims were forming in no organised or intentional way, but people were finding out who they got on with and who spoke which languages and who walked at about the right pace -- for it's as hard to walk slower than your natural pace as it is to walk faster. None of this was binding in any way: if anyone decided -- as Pascal did at the end of this day -- that they needed to go further or faster than the group was moving, they would just leave the rest behind and find another group further ahead.
So I associated with a bunch of reasonably fit, unpompous French-speaking pilgrims, and this was good for me since some of these people were fluent in Castellano also. I benefitted frequently from their advice and help in a variety of ways. There being no English speakers around, I had to call on them to help me improve my Castellano, and this worked reasonably because both languages being derived from Latin, there is a certain amount of vocabulary which is much the same in Castellano as it is in French. It was natural for me to exploit my experience with French and where possible, to generalise this across to the other language. One result of this was that I became known to the Castellano-speaking pilgrims as "the Frenchman who speaks a little Castellano" -- just as years before I had been known in France as "the Dutchman who speaks a little French". Equally wide of the mark in both cases.
Puente la Reina impressed me with the size and number of its churches -- astonishing considering the town's population is only two thousand. I found two of them particularly striking: the church of Santiago (St. James) with its overwhelming decoration and gold leaf, and the plainer but still superb Church of the Crucifixion with its twin naves. The Puente itself is Romanesque and twelfth-century and built for pilgrims, but there is confusion about exactly which reina endowed it. She might have been Queen Urraca of Léon-Castille, or possibly Sancho the Great's wife, Doña Mayor. Then again, she could have been their daughter in law, Doña Estefania. Royal carelessness is not restricted to Puente la Reina; we would meet it again in Palas do Rey.
The town has another significance: it is where the winter and summer routes across the Pyrenees come together. I was following the summer route, which is impassable in the winter. The alternative is to come through Somport and Jaca with its important Romanesque cathedral. >From Puente la Reina the Way goes west, following the one in the sky which the Spanish call the Vía Láctea and we know as the Milky Way.
It was in Puente la Reina that I made an important acquisition: I bought an Everest guide. Everest is the publishing company that puts out a great deal of material on the Camino, and theirs were the publications I saw most often. Their basic pilgrim's handbook contains a series of maps each representing about a day's walking, and each map is accompanied by a page of useful advice and five or six pages of background on the places you will be walking through. This guide comes out in several languages, is widely available at 2,000 pesetas, and has only one disadvantage: its size and weight. Most of us would gladly have traded away the glossy paper and colour photographs, if we could have got the same amount of detail in something smaller and lighter.
So I bought the Everest guide. My solution to the problem of its weight was each day to rip out the pages covering the territory I had covered, and in that way the book got lighter and lighter as I proceeded. And I made it my practice each evening to spy out the exit route in daylight, knowing that at 5 am the next morning it would be pitch black and no-one would be around to correct me if I took a wrong turning.
This was day five, its intended end point the town of Estella. I'd separated from the French pilgrims for the day, intending to spend it walking alone but in the event I spent a good part of it in the company of a Spanish pilgrim called Julio, a law student and a good walker. We found a way to converse in Castellano, for this is okay when you have all day for your conversation and can take the time to make your meaning clear despite your lack of skill and knowledge. So we chatted as we walked across the fields and down the hedgerows, not setting the world to rights but coming to a better understanding of each other, the Camino and ourselves. When I got to the end of my day's walking we parted company, for he had no particular wish to stop in Estella and went on instead to Los Arcos.
Though the guides are helpful, they get the distances all wrong. The distance we walked each day was significantly more than the book said. Perhaps the writers use a special elastic kilometre. Or it may be that the distances they record have been measured on a bike, and along the road. General opinion among walkers was that the guides under-estimate distances by about six per cent.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that those who paint the yellow arrows are committed to keeping walkers off the roads. There are places where a modern highway follows the old Camino, and it is not surprising that this should be so. In the attempt to keep us off the roads, in some places -- the last kilometres into Estella and into Burgos are but two examples -- the arrows point us along convoluted paths that make no sense at all.
In bypassing Estella, Julio might have known what he was doing, for on reaching the town we found it was fiesta day. Obviously fiestas were no novelty for Julio, but it was my first experience of one and the prospect excited me. Already the town was full of people in festive mood, most of them dressed in the white shirt and trousers with scarlet sash and neckerchief which constitutes the Basque national costume. It was a shock to me to see nearly the whole population so attired -- I'm more accustomed to folk whose determination to preserve their individuality would make such mass demonstrations of solidarity unthinkable.
My innocent enquiry about precisely which fiesta it was that was being celebrated at first drew incredulous response: "Es LA fiesta!" and this apparently was all that needed to be known. Somebody who apparently was more knowledgeable than most, told me with authority that it was Saint Andrew's day, but if this was so they must use a different calendar from ours, because we celebrate Saint Andrew on November 30. Anyway, LA fiesta had absorbed all the hotel accommodation in the town, which was bad news for me as I had intended to have a rest day there, and would not have the right to stay more than a single night in the refuge. When I got into the refuge at 4 pm, it turned out to be a former technical college, hardly modified (if at all) to the purpose of accommodating pilgrims. A single cubicle contained toilet, basin and shower for over sixty people of both sexes, which meant there was constantly a queue for those facilities. This wasn't a place I'd want to spend two nights in, nor even one if I could help it.
But I couldn't help it, and decided to enjoy the fiesta anyway. Solid barricades had been erected at all the intersections, and it turned out that these were for the bull run that would take place through the town, in the fashion of Pamplona but without the participation of the intrepid young men. There were flags and banners, and shopkeepers provided free food and drink on the pavement outside their premises. Huge papier-mâché figures representing legendary figures, paraded in the streets. In the evening, there was folk dancing and other celebrations in and around the town hall. Said celebrations were either disrupted or enhanced (according to your point of view) by the activities of the Basque separatists who used the occasion to show the flag, literally and figuratively.
And the bands were terrific. There is a Basque reed instrument, the gaita, which makes a distinctive sound and combines with trumpets, saxophones and so on -- and drums above all -- to play traditional songs which the locals sing and dance to. I've no idea how many of these bands there were in all, it might have been ten or twenty, but there seemed to be one at every street corner. They had considerable talent, and must have had considerable stamina also, for they played all night -- and for all I know, the entire four days of the fiesta -- for the singing and drinking and dancing that went on in the streets continuously.
It was the singing and drinking and dancing and fireworks and the clashes between separatist bands and officially sanctioned ones, that kept us awake in the refuge all that night. It was a poor preparation for the thirty-six kilometre haul to Viana the following day and it was still in full swing as we trudged out of town. We had a new f-word in our vocabulary: Fiesta.
After the dreadful night in Estella some of us pilgrims discussed sleeping out in the open as an option when refugios turned out to be unsuitable. The women expressed some reservations about the idea on the grounds of personal safety. We men agreed that if that was a problem we'd drop the idea, but we were rather less condescending when later we discovered that northern Spain is home to both snakes and scorpions, which I for one have no interest in sharing a sleeping bag with.
Between Estella and Viana there is a ravine you have to cross, called "mataburros". This means "the mule-killer", and it made us wonder if it killed mules, what would it do to mere pilgrims. The heat was terrific. Robin and Louella Hanbury-Tenison, who travelled the Camino in August 1989 (or maybe it was 1990) said that it was "as hot and as merciless as the Gobi desert", and they have been there so they would know. Interestingly, although the Hanbury-Tenisons come from the gentle climate of Cornwall, they did not suffer sunburn in the Spanish heat. No more did I, despite having arrived directly from the middle of the southern hemisphere winter. Though temperatures were getting regularly up above forty, the sun did not attack my skin with the ferocity that I regard as normal.
It was necessary nevertheless, to keep up our intake of water to avoid dehydration, not all that difficult since most villages have a drinking fountain or fuente as they call it. In one community I enquired of a woman who was sweeping her doorstep, whether there was a fuente nearby. She said yes there was, but it was down the hill a bit and would I wait a moment. She reappeared with a Coke bottle full of cold water straight from the fridge, and pressed it upon me with a wish for "buon Camino" Although people along the Way generally seem to ignore us pilgrims, in a case of need they are right with us.
Passing through Los Arcos that morning, I found that the village refuge was no longer functioning, so I wondered where Julio had spent the night. He may have stayed in a hostal, which is a kind of cheap hotel and often does a special rate for pilgrims. If that is what he did do, he would certainly have had a better night's sleep than we got in Estella.
Los Arcos treated me kindly, for it was there that excited pilgrims told me they had found something we had all been looking for days: a functioning post office. Well, almost functioning -- it was market day that day, and the man in charge was out buying his vegetables. Eventually he returned, burdened with an assortment of produce.
"Holá, ¿que quieres?" he cheerfully enquired what I wanted. "Sellos, por favor. Para estas." I'd written and addressed my postcards, which I put on the counter address uppermost. From a machine he drew electronically printed 108-peseta stamps (the uniform charge to all seriously distant places), stuck them on my cards and piled them on a corner of his desk. Then it occurred to me that if I could buy one of those cunning self-sealing boxes which post offices sell in some countries, I could send home some gear that I judged was surplus to requirement. "Señor, tiene paquetas para enviar ..." Vocabulary deserted me. I gestured a box and the action of filling it. "¿Como esta?" He produced the precise article and I proceeded to fill it with bits and pieces that I'd found to be of little use and whose weight I could do without. I thought long and hard whether I should put my woolen bush shirt and polypropylene singlet into that box, for in the extreme heat it seemed certain that they could be no use at all, dead weight merely. Fortunately in the light of later events, there was not enough room in the box and so I continued to carry this winter clothing for the rest of my journey.
I'd no idea how much the postage might be, but I didn't want to be lumbered with a huge cost for air mail. "Por correo ordinario, no por avión, ¿cuanto cuesta?" "¿En Nueva Zelanda?" This was a challenge for him, and he retired to a back room where I could see him flicking urgently through his procedure manual. Eventually, "¿Nueva Zelanda está en Oceania?" I assured him that it was so, and the cost turned out to be five hundred and fifty pesetas, not an unreasonable sum. I paid my money, he took the parcel and I wondered if I would ever see it again. An unjust doubt as things turned out, for this parcel and everything else I sent home from Spain, turned up shortly after my own return to New Zealand.
In Spain in August, they run their clocks two hours ahead of the sun, so it is directly overhead at 2pm. The hottest part of the day is from 1.30 to 4.30 pm, and this is when everybody knocks off for lunch and a siesta. Farm workers who are too far out in the fields to make it worth coming inside, find a bit of shade for theirs, and if you happen to be on the move in the country during siesta time, it is common to come across an unconscious body under a hedge or haystack. Only bars and restaurants are open, and they do a solid trade.
By this time I had disciplined myself to stop walking at 1 pm for lunch and a sleep. The best spots for doing so were on the shady sides of old buildings, and there was something satisfying about sitting in the shade of a fourteenth century church with your back against the old, cool stones waiting for the sun to lose its hammering force. But even after a siesta I arrived at Viana pretty well stonkered. The heat had taken a heavy toll of my resources and I just wanted to sleep and eat or alternatively, to eat and sleep.
To have neglected Viana's churches, however, would have been unjust, for there are two that caught my attention. One, Santa Maria, attracted me for its dramatic doorway, and I later learned that this was the burial place of the notorious Cesar Borgia. An older church, now ruined, stands alongside the pilgrim refuge and is a hangout for the local kids who were still shouting their stupid heads off next door when we fell into exhausted sleep.
It is another long walk from Viana to Nájera, but quite a lot of it is along the edge of the highway. On the tarseal it was possible to crack on the pace a bit and walk at a speed that was both fast and comfortable. We walked on the left of the road to face the oncoming cars, which often tooted to us by way of encouragement. About an hour of the time was spent trudging through the commercial outskirts of Logroño, a city of 120,000 people. This hour being from about seven to eight o'clock on a Sunday morning, we were not much troubled by traffic, but I got the impression that walking into large cities and out of them was going to be one of the less agreeable aspects of the Camino. And so it proved.
For some time I walked with a homosexual couple and had the opportunity to turn over my own thoughts about amorous relationships between people of the same sex. Being myself seriously heterosexual, I am conscious that my experience gives me no insight into theirs and that stands in the way of dialogue between us. It also occurs to me that a relationship between man and man or woman and woman requires each one to reveal themselves more personally to their partner than we heteros do. This is so because they cannot use gender stereotypes ("Just like a woman", "What else would you expect from a man?") to explain their actions or to hide behind. There may be more searing honesty in a homosexual relationship than a hetero one.
At Nájera, arriving at the early hour of half-past one, I was very much impressed by the accommodations and the organisation of the refuge run by the Franciscans at Santa Maria de la Real. They gave us a very fine welcome, not keeping us out until 4 pm as most refuges did, but taking us straight in and giving us a drink of water and an immediate bed to stretch out on. In my case it was a single bed -- perhaps a concession to my advancing years -- the only one I saw in any refuge.
At Nájera we were also given a free ticket to the municipal swimming pool and this should have been a boon since the weather was so hot. However, I was just too tired. The guide also says that there are important tombs in the monastery, but if I saw them I have no memory of it.
At twenty kilometres, the day's walk from Nájera to Santo Domingo de la Calzada was far less demanding than those that went before. Arriving before midday, I found another refuge that let pilgrims in when they arrived, so had plenty of time to catch up on stuff -- sleeping, eating, washing, buying film, sending postcards home. There even was a post office that stayed open until 2.30 pm! The town's orientation toward the Camino was evident everywhere. The very name of the place -- Saint Dominic of the Highway -- reflects its pilgrim orientation, Saint Dominic being an eleventh century hermit who devoted his life to making things easier for pilgrims to Santiago. The good, practical welcome that pilgrims receive today included a very comfortable refugio and in several restaurants, pilgrims' meals at 900 pesetas, really good value. Apart from the 550-peseta disaster at Roncesvalles, these were the cheapest we'd seen so far.
Psychologically even if not geographically, Santo Domingo is the middle point of the Camino Francés. By the time you arrive there you are a proper pilgrim, you know yourself and your mission well enough to have no illusions about what you've taken on and what personal resources you'll need to call on in order to get to Santiago.
By this stage it is dawning on you what is the real point of the pilgrimage to Santiago. It's not about getting to Santiago at all. The big thing -- the only thing that matters -- is the going on the journey. Walking has become your whole life. I walk, therefore I am. The true goal is not the goal at all but the process.
The Cathedral at Santo Domingo is quite a place, and in its old cloisters there is a large museum with a strong theme of the Camino. This is the church with the live cock and hen which celebrate the story of the "hung man unhung". We were told that the custom has varied over time, the present practice being that families in the town take it in turn to provide the white birds, on a monthly programme (a rooster roster?). The cock who was there at the time of my visit was an energetic and vocal individual, whose loud crowing during the pilgrims' mass gave the ritual a flavour all its own.
What about miracles, then? I can't get too excited about them. The miracle of creation is an incomparably larger matter than conjuring tricks that the Holy Spirit may turn on for a particular occasion. We do well to remember that it was the devil who is recorded having invited Jesus to do miracles. The Anglican view (and mine) is summed up by Bishop David Jenkins in his book, God, Miracles and the Church of England (London, 1987) when he says: "Miracles do evoke faith and indicate faith and develop faith but they do not compel faith in public and external ways. Miracles are gifts to faith and for faith, but not public and objective pressures into faith."
It also has a huge and highly detailed wall-like structure behind the altar (a retable) which is full of biblical carvings. In times gone by it would have served as a superb visual aid to teaching the bible stories, for they are depicted there in fine realistic detail. I had good luck here: at the time of my visit, the retable had been dismantled for refurbishing, and the bits were on display in the museum. That made the details far more visible than would have been the case when the retable was in its customary place behind the altar.
In the refugio there is an invitation for pilgrims from outside Spain to attend the daily pilgrims' mass and offer prayers in their own languages. So by arrangement with the priest in charge, my contribution was the Lord's Prayer chanted in Maori, and this was warmly received.
E to matou Matua i te rangi
Kia tapu tou ingoa
Kia tae mai tou rangatiratanga
Kia meatia tau e pai ai
ki runga i te whenua
kia rite ano ki tou te rangi.
Homai ki a matou aianei
He taro ma matou mo tenei ra.
Murua o matou hara
Me matou hoki e muru nei
i o te hunga e hara ana ki a matou.
Aua hoki matou e kawea kia whakawaia
Engari whakaorangia matou i te kino.
Nou hoki te rangatiratanga,
te kaha me te kororia,
Ake, ake, ake. Amine.
I was glad to have that opportunity, for it was very satisfying to let those ancient stones hear the words we use in our corner of the New World. Equally, I am grateful to the priest for his generous ecumenical spirit in allowing me, an Anglican, to undertake it. To do so he went further out on a limb than I realised, for as I would discover, Spanish Catholicism presents a narrower orthodoxy than we are accustomed to at home where Protestants and Catholics respect their differences but in general get along pretty well. Among the Maori community there is a clear understanding that denominational differences belong to another time and place: I habitually attend Maori church services where parts of the liturgy are conducted by Catholic, Mormon, Anglican and Methodist clergy. If there are ministers present from either of the indigenous denominations -- Ratana and Ringatu -- they are included too, for it is polite to invite any Christian minister present to contribute to the service. But we have to remember that in the Old World the wounds of the past have yet to heal and what is natural for us is radical for them.
There's a theory that the Camino is pre-Christian and that it has more to do with the Milky Way than with Saint James. There are many place names which recall the stars -- Estella and Compostela being only the most obvious -- and some of these names are of great antiquity. The observation has been made that the 'True Camino' lies between 42°30' and 42°50, parallel to the band of stars which make up our galaxy. Is it significant, therefore, that from Santo Domingo de la Calzada to Astorga, nearly the whole route that pilgrims follow today lies south of 42°30'? If so, and if the word dis-aster really does mean straying from the stars, some might think that that was sufficient reason why this section of the walk proved to be so awful.
By this stage of the pilgrimage, what dominates life is four things: the sun, water, socks and food. With the temperature going to forty degrees and beyond, even the locals complain. Fortunately, there is no shortage of good water.
Socks are vital. The first thing we do on reaching a refuge is to wash today's socks and check tomorrow's. Socks take a long time to dry -- perhaps the humidity is higher than it appears -- so I constantly have one pair hanging on the outside of my pack to catch the sun.
Food is the other thing. Because we set out each day before dawn, we do need to buy and carry enough food for about two meals on the track. This has to be organised the previous day, since the first shops won't open until about 9 am, even if at that hour we happened to be passing through a village that has any shops at all. So you eat what you've been able to buy, even if the resulting meal can be a bit bizarre.
Apples, bananas and pears are good because they provide moisture as well as energy -- because they're comparatively heavy you eat them early to get rid of the weight. Some people get milk, which they drink early for the same reason. A bocadillo, which literally means a mouthful, is half a long loaf split lengthwise and stuffed with meats and vegetables. For a pilgrim they will wrap it in aluminium foil, which makes it far better to carry in your pack. You can also buy the omnipresent tinned sardines, though you have to be careful to pick tins that have a decent opener attached. One morning I had to deal with one which not only had no opener but also was made of some semi-flexible steel which didn't have enough rigidity to provide purchase for a conventional tin-opener. My efforts to get at the tin's contents occupied me for a good half-hour using by turns all the tools on my Swiss army knife. What finally emerged through a hole in the tin was an extrusion of mashed sardine which anyone but a pilgrim would have turned their nose up at.
You also buy bread when you can, and quickly learn to ask in any village you may find yourself in during the morning: ¿Hay una panadería aquí? And if they say yes, there is a baker's shop, you go there and buy what we would call a French loaf, but actually is just as Spanish as it is French. You have to buy your bread daily because after twenty-four hours it goes "resilient", so what you really need is what you pray for: give us this day our daily bread, yesterday's won't do.
Energy is what you're after -- chocolate is worth having because it gives a quick burst, but milk chocolate is apt to finish up a molten mess at the bottom of your pack. I made an early discovery of chocolate familiar, which is apparently used for making drinking chocolate. (The packet doesn't enlighten you -- you're obviously expected to know already what it's used for.) Chocolate familiar stands up to the heat much more robustly and in my opinion also tastes much better than milk chocolate.
The first morning out of Santo Domingo was cooler than some I'd experienced, with the sun rising perceptibly later than when I'd started ten days previously. Just as well too, for the 32 kilometre stretch to Villafranca Montes de Oca was as much as I could manage. On arrival I searched for the refugio and could not believe what I found: a camping ground full of army tents with porta-loos and porta-showers. Some refuge! but I did get a tent to myself, and not even a donation was accepted by way of payment, so I had no real cause for complaint.
This Villafranca -- the name means French town and like the other Villafrancas along the Camino it was founded by French settlers in the eleventh century -- may have been where I encountered the smallest supermarket in the world. The Spanish bestow the word "supermercado" on shops even smaller than a corner dairy, and a corner dairy is pretty much what they are. But this one was so small as to be invisible -- it was set up in a sort of small cavern at the end of a bar, and you couldn't see it at all until you asked for it. Upon which the barkeeper's wife would turn on a switch and the cavern would light up to reveal shelves of groceries, and you could buy enough food to get by for another day.
It was the next day en route to Burgos and in another shop, that my morale got a boost when I was buying a bread for the day. I was having difficulty with the wretched pesetas, which come in two sorts and inconvenient sizes, and the lady behind the counter was puzzled at my puzzlement. Without hesitation I came out with, "No tengo mis gafas," I haven't got my glasses, which had the double advantage of being both a satisfactory explanation for my apparent stupidity, and also the literal truth. But what pleased me most was that I hadn't had to think out my answer at all, the words came out completely automatically. And that meant that some Castellano was indeed drilling itself into my skull at last. Good.
Some people's Castellano is more understandable than others'. Generally, women are easier to follow than men, because of the lightness of their voices and the fact that they talk more in the front of their mouths. The men I met -- with some exceptions -- were apt to speak from deep in their throats, so that "buonas días" came out as a kind of half strangled "bonus reece" In time, I learned to speak this way too, which can't have done much for my own comprehensibility.
While walking that day, I spent some time in company with a dapper gent about my own age who set a strong and rather determined pace. Being a bit determined myself, I set about matching his speed and found it none too easy. A similar thing had happened with the same chap the day before, and the day before that. We didn't talk much (I was in any case a bit short of breath) but I became more and more mystified about the fact that he was here walking the Camino, yet I'd never seen him in any of the refugios. Furthermore his backpack was tiny, and I could not see how anybody could live off what you could carry in that. It was when we called in to San Juan (St. John) de Ortega that the mystery was revealed, for here was the bloke's wife in the family car, waiting to give him his rations for the next three hours. She was acting as his support team while he was doing the daily walking, and at night they were staying in hotels. Mystery solved.
Quite a few people use bits of the Camino as ordinary walking tracks, and make no claims to being pilgrims. Then again, some real pilgrims walk to Santiago from places like Burgos or León, for there is no rule that says you have to start from St. Jean or Roncesvalles. Others again do a section of their pilgrimage each year, eventually doing the last bit into Santiago. Yet others walk the same portion of the Camino repeatedly. It's been said that no two people walk the same Camino, and nobody walks the same Camino twice. Taking both the physical and the spiritual sides into account, I reckon that would be right.
Before you go on the Camino, people give you advice on how to deal with the terrible Spanish dogs that you're going to meet in towns and countryside. You need, they say, either to carry a stick or to learn special Castellano words to intimidate these slavering beasts, -- "Tumbate!" is supposed to do the trick. My own view is that the general-purpose "Pissorf!" which works at home, will be effective anywhere in the world. Anyway, I cannot report on the success of these or any other methods for quieting nasty Spanish dogs because I never met any that I could honestly describe as dangerous. True, they were apt to bark loudly at anything that moved, but generally from a distance and they showed no inclination to follow up their barking with any form of action. To the contrary, the dogs we saw seemed anxious to give us a wide berth. Perhaps we smelled even worse than we knew.
Can it be that the problem lies in the minds of the walkers? One Englishman took the dogs so seriously that he worked out a special tactic with a hat. This involved holding the hat out to the approaching beast, which would sink its teeth into one side of the brim while its owner held the other and launched a kick at the animal's muzzle. The dog would bite its tongue and the pain would cause it to lose interest in attacking pilgrims. To take this seriously you'd need to be both highly athletic and seriously paranoid.
It makes sense, nevertheless, to reassure a guard dog that your presence does not threaten it or the property it protects. I talk quietly to the dog as I approach, letting it take a good look at me and a good sniff. It's not foolproof, but the only time I've ever been bitten it was by an overfed Labrador which hadn't seen me coming.
The Saint John for whom San Juan de Ortega is named was one of the disciples of Santo Domingo. Ortega means stinging nettle, and once this place was surrounded by scrub which the pilgrims were probably heartily sick of by the time they got there. It must once have been a thriving pilgrim centre with a monastery, convent and church. Today the village is just a shadow of its former self, but paradoxically neglect of the church has helped to preserve it. For a couple of hundred years it was used as a hay barn, which meant that the atmosphere was kept reasonably dry inside. The farmers, in keeping their hay dry, also kept the statuary and stone decoration dry. The result has been that the interior of the cathedral at San Juan is in extraordinarily good condition for a building a thousand years old.
The priest who ministers at San Juan de Ortega is one of the characters of the Camino. He warned us, "Your pilgrimage doesn't stop when you reach Santiago", and he knew what he was talking about. He also knew what he was talking about when he advised us to take an older route to Orbaneja than the one the guide recommended. His one passed through pleasanter country, and took in two villages, Villaval and Cardeñuela, which otherwise we would miss. This was better advice than we knew, for the two villages offer a nice sello, one of the most handsome in my credencial.
Burgos, when I arrived there, was quite a disappointment. I don't like big cities anyway, and the way into Burgos is awful. Once inside the city limits, you can follow the yellow arrows for a while -- they twist and turn unnecessarily and then peter out entirely -- after which you tramp the pavements of the city for seven or eight kilometres, asking as you go for directions to the albergue. Naturally it turns out to be at the far (western) end of the city. The albergue, when you get there, is inadequate for the numbers of pilgrims arriving. Not to put too fine a point on it, the albergue is a credit to the energetic Amigos del Camino but a disgrace to the city fathers of Burgos. Far smaller communities support refugios of far greater size and comfort. This one had been described by a pilgrim as "a barrack-like set of huts in a large park, with outside cold showers and medieval music at 7 am", and that is a how I found it too. Over seventy people slept in the same room in the usual acoustic bunks, and for some reason the door had to be locked at night. To go to the loo which was outside, you had to find the key and unlock the door, repeating the process in reverse when you came back into the dormitory. I wondered what would happen if we had a fire in the night.
Burgos' cathedral, however, is world famous and so I visited it twice the following day. Like so many of the big churches I saw, it was in the process of restoration and quite a lot of the outside was surrounded by scaffolding. Inside, with almost nobody around, it gave me the dry horrors. I think this was because without people, the artwork became a reminder of the futile aspirations of generations gone by, and I felt a cold depression encompass me with a stifling atmosphere of death and decay. Later on and in other empty churches I would feel this same depression, but I never once experienced it when people were using the church for their worship.
Church buildings -- do they assist our Christian worship and prayer, or do they get in the way? Do we do better religion in a beautiful building or an ugly one? Or no building at all?
Why do people renovate old churches? Once you get rid of rhetoric about "preserving the legacy of the past" and so forth, it comes down to this: we need a weatherproof place where for some hours each week several dozen of us can display the symbols of our faith, can talk and sing and move and pray in passable comfort. If the building looks nice, well and good, but niceness is not a specifically Christian virtue. G.K. Chesterton said the best place to pray was in a railway carriage. Having recently been inside some of the "best" old religious buildings in the world, I still think he was right.
This day in Burgos was supposed to be a rest day., but at about eleven I got itchy feet and decided to get on the Camino again. Clearly, the walking was becoming an addiction, and without my daily fix I could not rest. Other pilgrims told me they had experienced the same thing, and that it was quite general among walkers. So I set off in the direction of Castrojeríz, 39 kilometres away.
It's a funny thing about rest days. They are a real good idea until you come to take them. Then you find you don't want to. You've become addicted to the walking, and that's what you'd most prefer be doing. Many pilgrims report the same feeling. In fact, I never met a pilgrim who'd actually taken a rest day (Though in view of the fact that I never stopped myself, this may be a self-proving proposition.) Everything is geared to encourage you to keep moving on toward Santiago.
I had no particular intention of getting as far as Castrojeríz that same day, and in the event I fell in with some congenial people, two Spanish fellows and two German girls. Along the way we called in at a new refuge at Hornillos del Camino and thought about staying there as it looked comfortable and the alberguo was very welcoming. In the event, we decided to press on to the hamlet of Hontanas, which we reached as evening was falling. We decided to stay in a little private albergue which had a nice kitchen and (glory be!) bunks that did not squeak. And to my surprise, Hontanas, this tiny village, had a municipal swimming pool of Olympic dimensions. Better yet, this pool had a bar alongside, so we repaired there as quickly as possible, to cool ourselves off both internally and externally. Luxury indeed, we felt almost as though we're breaking some pilgrim rule.
Really I should not have been so surprised to find the pool at Hontanas. The name, after all, is "really" Fontanas, fountains. In the same way, Hornillos is Fornillos, little stoves. From the twelfth century pilgrims were provided at Hornillos with a last meal before tackling the dreadful plain (actually a plateau) of Castille which constitutes the next stage of their journey.
After a good night's sleep we set off the following morning in the direction of Castrojeríz with Frómista as our ultimate destination. Before reaching Castrojeríz, we passed through the ruins of the Hospital de San Antón, where pilgrims had been looked after from the twelfth to the eighteenth century (they specialised, naturally, in the cure of the rash called Saint Anthony's Fire), so we felt it was important to people like us. But our group was starting to break up. The girls had been glad to see me because they liked to speak English, but I think I was a little in the way of a developing romance. Anyway they travelled a bit slowly for my liking, so I wasn't too worried about quietly detaching myself from the group.
If you're serious about the walking you may not converse much anyway, and this will be especially true on those days that you are in reflective mood. Some days you decide to do without the company of others entirely, and just have a solitary day with your thoughts, the sun, the Camino and God.
Anyone who believed the theory that straying south of 42°30' was bad luck, would expect ill fortune in Frómista, for it is the most southerly town on the entire Camino. For me the day I was there was certainly inauspicious, for back home on this day my friend Ron died. He had a longer journey to make than mine, and a greater adventure to undertake.
Not that I knew about it at the time. What was occupying my mind was my financial situation, for I was getting desperately short of cash, not having seen a money machine since Burgos. Arriving in Frómista, I found that there were banks all right, but it was Friday afternoon, they were all closed and none of them had a hole-in-the-wall. Getting a bit distraught, I searched the village for a restaurant or bar that accepted credit cards, but although several had the Visa sign outside, they told be when I inquired that they were not interested in credit cards of any sort. I imagine that by common consent the shopkeepers had decided not to cooperate with credit cards, and they had thereby created one of those places on the planet where plastic will get you nowhere. In the end I was able to get a meal, at THE most expensive restaurant in town, but the only one that would take my card. Happily, the food was good and I was not charged outrageously for the very fine meal I had there.
It was a shame that I was preoccupied by money -- or my lack of it -- while I was in Frómista, for San Martín's church there is a greatly admired example of Romanesque church building. I visited it of course, but would have gained more from the encounter had I had a more tranquil mind. Frómista is also famous as the birthplace of Saint Elmo, he of the famous electric discharges and the patron saint of sailors.
When you ask Spanish people to tell you about what is significant for them, they are most likely to tell you about the glories of their past, and most especially the significant old buildings in their vicinity. They set great store by their old buildings. I bought a Spanish video about the Camino, and there's hardly a human being in it, just buildings and more buildings. This strikes curiously on the consciousness of a new-worlder, for whom the future is the most interesting time and people the most interesting feature of any landscape.
But I was still no further ahead in my search for cash, and the prospect of the weekend looming gave me no comfort whatever. Early the following morning I set off in the hope that Carrión de los Condes, twenty-two kilometres along the way, would have a money machine. But at Carrión the story was the same as at Frómista: several banks, all shut, for now it was Saturday morning. Desperate, I asked for help at a photo shop, my reasoning being that it is people who have some commitment to high technology who are most likely to know about such things. And my reasoning was correct: The photo shop's proprietor took me through a labyrinth of tiny streets to the town's only Telebank machine, which I would never have discovered unaided in a million years.
Financial once more, I stocked up on food and water. Pat's book had said it was IMPORTANT (her capitals) to do so before leaving Carrión and she was exactly right, for what immediately followed was twenty two kilometres of the hottest, driest, dustiest, most exposed walking I ever hope to undertake. Apart from a single bend the track was dead straight and almost completely devoid of trees. Having come twenty-two kilometres already, I was not in the very best shape to tackle this stretch, but at eleven o'clock, carrying five litres of bottled water, I started on it with grim determination.
Carrión was only the halfway point of my travels that day, for I would cover another twenty-three kilometres before nightfall and it would be the longest, most depressing day of the entire Camino. My notes say, "This is the worst. I cannot believe how bad this is." About midday I saw a tree and recall thinking that if only it were a bit further away it would have provided some nice shade for my siesta. Well, an hour and a half later I still hadn't reached that tree, and siesta time was well and truly upon me. By now the tree had become an obsession, and sure enough, a little before two I reached it and plonked myself down in its shade. I ate some of my food and slept for a while, then got up and looked around. I could clearly see a village in the middle distance. That was when I got seriously worried, for that I knew the village could not be there. Sure enough, when I looked again, it had disappeared. Had I been a tenth-century pilgrim, I would doubtless have attributed this to a vision of the Holy City: but being instead a twentieth-century pilgrim, I concluded that the heat was causing me to hallucinate.
From light-headedness I switched to pig-headedness. In the circumstances, it would have been good sense to stop at the nice refuge at Calzadilla de la Cueza. But no: I had to do six extra kilometres and get on to Terradillos de los Templarios. I think I had some idea that there was merit in staying there because it had been on my original plan, but since I was already two days ahead of that plan, it didn't make a lot of sense. Anyhow, after what seemed more like ten kilometres than six, I lurched into Terradillos. The guide had said there was no refugio in the tiny village, but that accommodation might be found, though Pat's book said, "Not recommended for women travelling alone."
I found a confusing sign in the village which seemed to promise some kind of hospitality, and followed the direction it appeared to be indicating -- a building that could easily have been a bar or a shop or indeed a private dwelling. Past caring what it was, I found a door and pushed aside the bead curtain that covered it. Inside I found what appeared to be someone's front room, and asleep on the sofa was a character who might have come straight off the set of "Treasure Island". The noise I made brought this piratical gent to life. He did not actually have a wooden leg and a parrot on his shoulder, but he inspired me with less than no confidence and I believed I could see the point of Pat's warning. Sleepily he demanded to know what I wanted. There was no need to answer him in words, my body language was explicit: I wanted a cold beer, probably a second and perhaps a third. There are some things that men do not need to be told in words, and this was three of them.
The power of speech restored, I enquired whether camas (beds) might be had there, and this launched the pirate into a little song and dance designed no doubt to impress on me the difficulty -- indeed the impossibility -- of finding even one bed that night. He might have saved himself the trouble -- there was no way I was going anywhere until I had food and sleep. Eventually he capitulated and showed me into a quite reasonable room containing four beds and with toilet facilities attached. Gratefully I paid my thousand pesetas, claimed one of the beds and quickly fell into a deep sleep.
An hour of this was enough to revive me substantially, and I strolled out into the garden where mine host was seated enjoying a beer, and he invited me to join him. There could be no harm, I thought, in accepting his invitation, intoxication probably cures hallucination. By this time he had been joined by a younger man and woman, whom I hypothesised to be his son and daughter-in-law. At any rate we had an extensive conversation in Castellano, ranging over a broad spectrum of topics, and I discovered that the pirate was no pirate at all but a kindly person and a good bloke. The son gave him a considerable amount of cheek, to which he replied with vigour and wit, and we passed a pleasant hour until the daughter-in-law produced dinner. By this time a couple of cyclists had arrived to occupy two of the remaining beds, and after dinner we all hit the sack pretty quickly.
Alcohol is a definite aid to linguistic performance. Or at least it seems that way -- maybe the objective fact is that we become less critical as the liquor takes effect.
I did not sleep much that night, for the abuse I'd given my body that terrible day returned to my muscles in aching waves. But each time I woke, there was a definite feeling that the pain was draining away, and by five in the morning I was ready to face another day. Rising and putting on my pack, I headed toward the exit door, only to discover that the light was already on and my pirate was waiting to speed me on my way with a huge glass of hot coffee.
The Templarios, Knights Templar, for whom Terradillos de los Templarios is named ("terradillos" seems to mean "noggins") were a bunch of medieval louts who would make the average bikie gang look like a wimps' tea party. Taking their name from the temple at Jerusalem which they vowed to protect, they involved themselves in bloody fighting in the Holy Land, the details of which make revolting reading today. Sustaining themselves by a harsh celibate discipline and a special interpretation of the commandment "thou shalt not kill", they gained great financial support for their early Crusades and accumulated vast wealth and power. They called themselves the Knights of Saint James, and the cross-like emblem on the pilgrim's shell is not a cross at all but a blood-soaked Templar dagger.
That morning there was a good moon, as there had been every morning for the week past, and now it was a whisker past the full. It was bright enough to see the Way itself, and even the yellow arrows. Travelling always west, in the early morning you head toward the setting moon and away from where the sun will eventually rise.
Passing through Sahagún in the early morning, I stopped only long enough to eat my breakfast, take some photos and collect a sello at the refugio which hadn't yet shut for the day. On the way out of town, I met up with a French-speaking Swiss by the name of Antonio, and we continued at a good pace along the track, which now was a beautiful flat trail surfaced with crushed limestone. A fair number of cyclists took advantage of the beautiful path to get off the road while still having a good surface on which to travel.
Cyclists on the Camino aren't a problem. All the ones I encountered were courteous trail users. It would be a good thing if bells for bikes came back into fashion, because I would seldom hear cyclists coming up behind me needing some room on the track. An old-fashioned bell would have been a convenient way for them to make their presence known. That apart, I had no difficulty with cyclists at all. Even a couple of trail bikes -- the petrol-driven kind -- slowed right down for a considerable distance after they'd passed us, so as not to create a cloud of dust.
But cyclists are quite unlike us walkers. They are more concerned with the Camino as something to achieve, where we are involved with it at the level simply of day-to-day existence. A cyclist seems to hold the thought of Santiago as an objective clearly in view, whereas a walker pushes it into the background, having enough to cope with the process of just reaching this day's objective. Cyclists are mad keen on getting as many stamps as possible in their little books, pulling up hard at albergue or church, demanding their "sello" and shooting off again. Walkers by contrast are casual about the stamps, knowing that blisters and sweat are their own credentials. Perhaps that explains why a goodly number of former cyclists return to undertake the Camino on foot and get the authentic experience.
Moving at a good rate, Antonio and I made El Burgo Raneros at twelve o'clock, just as the villagers were coming out from Sunday Mass. The refugio, fortunately open at that hour, was very comfortable but not enough to tempt Antonio to stop the night, so he walked off while I stayed, did my washing and waited for whatever other pilgrims would turn up.
Most of the old churches I saw are still in regular use. Quite where the people come from I'm not sure, for even on a weeknight there was generally a pretty fair congregation for evening mass. Considering that the congregation would come just from the surrounding village -- perhaps a hundred houses -- it made me think that their attitude to churchgoing must be very different from ours.
It's a common criticism of the Church in countries like Spain that it (the Church) has used resources to erect buildings when those resources more properly should have gone to the people themselves. But I came to realise that the resources had gone to the people after all, for the village church really did belong to them, it was theirs in a very personal way.
And if that's true, then it justifies the lavish decoration you find when you go inside these old churches. For by it, a twelfth-century peasant, say, who could not dream of personally owning any piece of fine craftsmanship, shared in the ownership of many beautiful things, and could experience the pleasure of them any time at all. The humblest person thus became a corporate owner of the finest things the culture had to offer.
Uncommonly, among those who did come to the refugio at El Burgo Raneros were three who spoke English. These were a Spanish-Australian, a Belgian, and an authentic Oxford student. With the Belgian I got into a theological discussion fairly early, and he revealed that he had undergone training for the Benedictine order but had left the cloistered life some years previously. Our discussion continued over lunch in the nearby restaurant, surrounded by most of the villagers from the church. The combination of theology and good red wine eventually proved too much for us, and we retired to the refugio to sleep it off.
In the refugios, pilgrims are expected to clean up after themselves. A shower stall will generally contain a mop and bucket, which you're expected to use after your shower to clean up before the next user. (It must be effective, for athlete's foot doesn't seem to be a problem in the refugios.) None of this is organised in any special way -- there are no set duties or rosters It would in any case be too difficult to do, given the lack of a common language and the deep tiredness which deprives pilgrims of any intelligence they might once have had. In addition, everything gets a sluice down between 8 am and 4 pm when the refugio is empty.
Checking up on the next day's walking, I realised that it would be yet another day on the awful plain of León, and I knew I could not face the sight of it any more. Give up and go home? Catch a bus to Santiago? Then it struck me that there was another answer -- to do my walking when the awful plain was not visible, in the black of night. So I rose at 4 am and set out into the darkness. Even the night was inhospitable -- the constellations of the northern hemisphere were all strange to me and the friendly Southern Cross was nowhere to be seen. All that broke the night was the stars, a few meteors and the lights of an occasional night train passing by en route to Madrid.
When the pre-dawn came, and eventually the sun, I pulled off my pack to say my morning prayers, as I'd done every day along the Camino. It's a good time to do it, not just because dawn is the most hopeful time of the day but because daylight arriving means the way will be easy to see. On days that I was walking with somebody else I would quietly detach myself from them for this purpose, and they no doubt thought I was looking for a quiet spot to relieve myself.
Being anxious and frightened and far from home, I naturally prayed in Maori. But there was more to it than that -- watching the sun rise in that unfamiliar sky I knew that at home at that precise moment, my Maori colleagues were seeing that same sun set and saying their evening prayers and using the same words that I was. The energy I got from that was terrific. Some pilgrims say that they feel Saint James pulling them to Santiago. In my case it was the opposite -- the people back home were pushing.
And I walked some more and I sang. Long before this, I had started singing out loud to keep my spirits up. Corny though it sounds, I sang John Bunyan's "Who would true valour see" and found there was sense in it. Though Bunyan never himself undertook a physical pilgrimage, he was a soldier and must have done his share of marching. He knew that a tune with the right sort of ryhthm enables a walker to swing along at a good pace despite tiredness, pain and the demoralisation that comes from walking too far for too long.
"Who would true valour see, let him come hither -- One here will constant be, come wind come weather ..." Bunyan knew that pilgrims are not half as humble as they like to appear; they've got a healthy good opinion of themselves that comes from realising that every day's walking makes them a bit more special, a bit more different from what they'd have been if they'd stayed at home. Okay, so pride's a sin -- but it's a sin that Bunyan understood and built into the words of his hymn.
"Hobgoblin nor foul fiend can daunt his spirit ..." This bit is wide of the mark, Mister Bunyan. All it takes to daunt a pilgrim's spirit is too much sun, too much heat and too little variety in the diet. And the unchanging flat brown landscape. This pilgrim needed any sort of cheering up he could get, so I'd got into this habit as I walked, of bellowing out Bunyan's familiar lines and other selections from Hymns Ancient and Modern, the pop music of the Victorian age. Some of them I hadn't sung in years. Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise ... Ye Choirs Of New Jerusalem ... Crown Him With Many Crowns ... anything that had a good strong pom-pom-pom sort of rythm and energy in the tune and words that were not too mawkish..
The singing was a bit lunatic I suppose, but a pilgrim is by definition a
certifiable loony, as everyone along the Camino knows. In any case, there was
no-one to hear me except the occasional bird or lizard, which presumably didn't
understamd English anyway. I made up my own lyrics to some of them, and was
both pleased and encouraged bythe words I found for a new ending for that
quasi-religious tear-jerker, You'll Never Walk Alone -- "...Walk on, walk on,
walk on through the dust,
Through your blisters, sweat and pain;
Walk on, walk on, walk on if you must -- as for me,
I'll never walk
Again."
As I walked and sang, sang and walked, I knew I was heading towards a highlight of the Camino, the city of León. Nevertheless, I'm unenthusiastic about cities in general, and León has the usual horrible outer suburbs which have to be negotiated. It seemed to take for ever, worse because there were plenty of bus stops along the way and these sparked an almost irresistible temptation to climb on one of the buses and ride into the city instead of walking. With some difficulty I located the Cathedral, and from this landmark was able to work out the rest of the city. Here in León I took a hotel room for the first time. Amazing to sleep between sheets, and to soak my poor abused legs in a bath. Even to watch television! (It was bullfighting, which to my surprise I was able to watch without revulsion, indeed without any emotional reaction whatever.)
The cathedral was big and impressive, of course. While I was there -- it was Monday -- a wedding took place in the main body of the church (the sermon was too long) while tourists continued to mill around the walkways down the sides and behind the altar. Aha, I thought, this is what they mean by separating the nave from the ambulatory, and a good thing too. The next day, at the Basilica San Isodoro, I joined the worshippers in the middle at Mass and later the same day at San Marco I almost got involved in a Mass again by accident.
(Saint Isidoro has some passing significance for New Zealanders -- he was one of the first of the Latin clerics to acknowledge that there was such a place as the antipodes, and that there might be people there walking about with their feet 'up' and their heads 'down'. Naturally he could not know that the antipodes of which he spoke was New Zealand, or that at the time he wrote, nobody would have been doing much walking around. Not long previously Taupo had erupted with more than nuclear force, putting a layer of volcanic ash over most of the North Island.)
This particular day, Monday August 14, was significant because my wife Gail was supposed by now to have arrived in Spain and to be installed at the University of Salamanca. She had been given a Spanish Government award to study there, and by good fortune her dates coincided with mine at their end points, so that we could both arrive in Santiago on the same day, she by bus and I on foot. To find out whether she'd arrived safely, I sent her a fax from the hotel, hoping to get a reply before I left León.
As I later learned, she did not receive the fax until several days later. We had encountered the problem of Spanish nomenclature. The name Gail is hard for Spanish people to say, so at the university she was known as Patricia, a name they know, can pronounce and are happy to use. There's another complication: Spanish people habitually create double-barreled surnames by appending their mother's name after their father's. So it was not so surprising that my fax addressed simply to Gail Spence should fail to reach her.
And even if it had been correctly addressed, she wouldn't have received it that day because the Tuesday once again was bloody FIESTA! This one was a real biggie, the festival of Saint Mary the Mother of Jesus. It took me by surprise, for in Léon the previous evening I'd been down to the post office and sent off some mail, checking as I did that it would open again at 8.30 the next morning. But it didn't, and neither did much else. Fiesta sickness was pretty general and all the way from León to Villadangos del Paramo there weren't any shops open, only restaurants and bars.
What frankness they had in naming this place Villadangos del Paramo, Small Town on a Bleak Plateau. Arriving there, I checked in at the town's very nice refugio and took the advice of another pilgrim to seek out a particular restaurant for a really good meal. Having located it, I found a table and sat down intending to order, as usual, the set menu of the day.
This strategy of simplicity. had generally served me well, but came unstuck in the restaurant at Villadangos. My waitress was a tiny girl perhaps eight years old with an equally tiny voice which failed entirely to compete with the television set thundering away in the corner of the room. All I could make out on the first try was the phrase, "No hay menu del día," there is no set menu. She followed this up with a detailed description -- in the same sub-audible tones -- of a string of dishes I'm sure I would not have recognised even if I had been able to hear their names. The little girl was doing her best, but we were getting nowhere. Finally I asked for a written menu, and pointed to some likely candidates. It must have made sense, for the meal turned out to be delicious.
Incidentally, it was with this excellent meal that I was offered the only truly undrinkable wine I experienced in my entire time in Spain. It was an alleged white, but its yellow colour suggested that it might have been "passed by the management", and it tasted that way too. I left all but one mouthful in the bottle.
Fiesta had also got in the way of one of those visits that pilgrims prefer not to make, but most eventually have to -- to a community health centre. I was having a problem with both my feet, though in neither case was the problem that of blisters. (In fact, I never had a blister while on the Camino, and the reason was that I had had them all beforehand during the six months of training.) In the left foot, strain was building up around the base of the big toe, and this was a known problem that I'd encountered before in training. Having already taken the problem to my GP at home and had the tests, I knew that there was no stress fracture involved, and that probably the only cure would be to stop walking. This being not even worth thinking about, I knew I just had to grin and bear it.
The problem with the right foot was different: a kind of open wound that came from no obvious cause. It appeared to originate under the skin rather than on the surface, and this was mysterious indeed. The first indications had come at Roncesvalles, and by the time I'd reached León it was bad enough that I thought, fiesta or no fiesta, it should be seen by someone who knew what they were looking at. Fortunately in the big city there had been a pharmacy open, and there I'd taken my foot and its mysterious wound. The following dialogue had taken place.
"Buenos días Señora" The pharmacist was female. She regarded me but did not
reply.
"Señora, ¿Puede ayudarme? (the most useful phrase in the pilgrim's vocabulary.)
Tengo una problema con mi pie."
"Ah. Ampollas." Reasonable that she should think of blisters. She waved at a
rack of treatments for that ailment.
"No Señora, no son ampollas. Es otra cosa. Puede mirar, por favor."
Unenthusiastically she kitted up in anti-HIV gear and proceeded to look at the
foot. It took her a few moments to make her diagnosis.
"Ah -- es una bena."
Bena? Bena? What was a bena? In my mind's eye I reviewed the medical page of my Spanish phrasebook. No "bena" there. Then I realised that what the lady was talking about was "una vena", only like most Spanish people, her vees were more like bees. Once I'd cottoned on, I agreed enthusiastically. "Ah, Sisisisisisisi. Comprendo. Una bena baricosa". I'd suffered with varicose veins all my life. One of these had burst -- which would explain why the wound seemed to originate beneath the skin, and why it had not become infected. Now quite affable, she swabbed the wound with antiseptic and bound it with a gauze bandage, refusing my offer of payment for the service. We agreed, though, that as soon as fiesta was over, I should go to a doctor in community medical centre of whatever village I would happen to be in, and get some treatment that would close the thing up.
And that is what actually happened at Astorga, which I reached the day after Villadangos, a day when no fiesta was in progress. Astorga is where three pilgrim routes come together -- the Camino Francés, which I was following, the Camino de Portugal, and the Via de la Plata (Silver Way) tracing up through Extremadura, Salamanca and Zamora, which was used by pilgrims coming from territories held by the Moors.
Astorga also has an important cathedral, but I was more directly interested in what lay behind it: the medical centre at the hospital. Presenting myself in some uncertainty to the staff there (do they only treat Spanish nationals? do foreigners have to pay?) I found them helpful indeed. The doctor even spoke English quite well, having studied in England. He confidently diagnosed the problem and gave me not only advice on treatment but also a list of supplies to buy from a pharmacy. He then handed me over to two nurses who would, he said, dress my wound to start the treatment. This they did all right, but used totally different dressings than the ones the doctor had recommended, and gave me their own counsel which was contrary to his in most details. Given the two sets of advice, I elected to follow the doctor's.
The tee-shirts that most people wear are interesting. You would get the idea that English was widely spoken, because with few exceptions that is the language of the witty sayings that you see emblazoned on the (generally good-looking) chests. When you realise just how few people do have any English, you wonder what the wearers make of the words.
The champion tee-shirt that I saw was worn by a cowherd in Galicia and I regret that I did not photograph it. It bore a picture of a white-clad sportsman giving a cricket bat a lusty swing, and this was a surprise in itself, for cricket is not a Spanish sport. The slogan was even more breathtaking: "Criquet New Zealand." Our country's fortunes on the cricket field being just then at very low ebb, I could think of no reason why clothing manufacturers half a world away would want to celebrate us as a cricketing nation. Perhaps the implication was that we were so bad we couldn't even spell the name right. Or maybe the shirt was supposed to celebrate New Zealand's croquet, a sport in which our champions enjoy much greater success in international competition.
The building that struck me most in Astorga was the Bishop's palace. Because no bishop actually occupied it, the building is known more widely as the Gaudí palace after the architect who built it, the same Gaudí who worked on La Familia Sagrada in Barcelona. The palace in Astorga is a pleasant building both inside and out, and I enjoyed visiting it.
One pilgrim outside the refuge in Astorga was a chap I'd met on the outskirts of León. Realising that we have the usual wait for the refuge to open, we got into conversation. Me: "¿A que hora se abierta el albergue?" When does the refuge open? -- as though by now I didn't know the answer.
He: "A las cuatro." At four o'clock. "Yo, voy a comer." I'm going to get
something to eat.
Me: "Y yo tambien. ¿Donde podemos poner nuestras mochilllas?" I too wanted a
feed but I wished there was somewhere we could leave our packs.
He replied that conveniently, there was. "Puedes ponerlo al centro de
minusválidos." You can leave your pack at a home for the handicapped.
Was he pulling my leg? Pilgrims aren't too bright, but all the same ... Well, he was correct. If you knew where to look for it -- and he did -- you could locate the place and gain entry by the rather intimidating front door. A number of the residents greeted us and we them, and eventually we located some of the medical staff who not only agreed to look after our packs but also stamped our pilgrim records with the town's official sello. I was impressed by this pilgrim who seemed so full of local knowledge. We had a meal and a drink, and resumed our conversation:
"The way out of Astorga seems rather complicated." I'd been studying the guide.
"Yes, you have to be careful or you'll get lost. And what the guide says isn't
the best way."
Oho, a self appointed expert. Careful, now. "Not the best way?"
"No, the best way is ..." and he proceeded to describe it in detail.
"You seem to know the Camino very well."
"I should do. I walk it every August. This is my sixth time."
My scepticism evaporated at once. I resolved to stick to this fellow like a limpet, for he clearly knew all the twists and turns and would never waste time hunting for arrows or following false trails. And so it proved. Things at last were looking up.
That Wednesday in Astorga was a good day all round, for as well as all the other positive things that happened, I succeeded in getting through to Gail in Salamanca by phone for the first time since she had left New Zealand. It was great to hear her voice and to know that she was safely installed at the university there, well and happy. She told me she was speaking more German than Castellano, since most of the students on her course were German nationals. She was surprised to hear me calling from Astorga, which according to her copy of my programme, I was not supposed to reach for another five days. Three days of the leeway had been made up by not taking my planned rest days at Estella, Burgos and León. So we talked about revising my walking programme, enabling me to reach Santiago on August 29th rather than the 31st as originally planned. In the event, I got there on the 27th.
The next objective after Astorga was Rabanal del Camino. Rabanal was the one place along the Camino that I simply had to visit. The refuge there has been developed and is maintained by the English Confraternity of Saint James, and very much Pat Quaife's baby. As a Confraternity member and as Pat's friend I was particularly keen to see the place. Getting there was pleasanter than recent walking had been, for the country had become more varied than the dreadful plains of León, with rolling hills, trees and heather. There were mountains to be seen, and even clouds!
The refuge at Rabanal exceeded all expectations. The genuinely hot showers -- the first we'd seen for some time -- were just the beginning. There were beds that were beds. The English couple who were doing their month's stint as live-in supervisors were very cordial, inviting us to share their meal with them. The next morning, they would turn on breakfast for all the departing pilgrims as well. To have a casual conversation in English was another luxury.
The village itself is tiny, with a permanent population of only forty-two. Most of these people appeared in the evening, ostensibly to inspect the refuge, but we suspected that really it was the pilgrims who were under observation, a sort of constantly changing zoo for the edification of the locals.
There was another incident which had its own humour. Having heard that one of the bars in Rabanal served a special soup, "sopa del peregrino", we were disappointed to find that it was off the menu. So, having some time to kill until the refuge opened, I decided to wash my socks. From my pack I took the aluminium billy I always carry and sought some water for the purpose. Water is not plentiful in Rabanal -- there are two "fountains" but both deliver a mere trickle -- and seeing me with my billy a kind lady invited me into her house to fill up from her kitchen tap. The water from this tap, she explained as I filled the billy, was both refreshing and healthy and she was sure I would enjoy the flavour. I hadn't the heart to tell her I only wanted to wash socks, but the other pilgrims enjoyed the situation and declared that my sock-washing water was the true sopa del peregrino. This was my one and only contribution to Camino cuisine.
So from the splendid refuge we set out in splendid weather -- splendid in this case meaning cool and with the sun hidden by mountain mist. The mountain walking too, is quite unlike the dreadful grinding over the Camino's straight and level sections. This country is like the easier bits of our own Ruahines with tussock and pines which might easily have been radiata, the predominant species in New Zealand. In the deserted village of Manjarín there is a refuge which claims to be the highest in the whole Camino. Next to the one at St Jean, it may also be the smallest. As each pilgrim approaches, the albergo -- who is, it appears, a priest of some order outside mainstream Catholicism and connected with the Templars -- rings a bell vigorously and welcomes them in for coffee and bread. Gregorian chant plays continuously on a ghetto blaster.
Further on is the Cruz de Ferro with its mound of stones. There is a tradition once pagan but now Christian which says that each pilgrim who passes that way should bring a stone to add to the heap. The stone I threw on had come a considerable distance -- from New Zealand's Southern Alps. Before setting out from home, I had made a trip into those mountains to locate a particular spot, the exact antipodean point to Santiago d Compostela. From this place near Arthur's Pass, I had brought two pebbles to carry with me on the Camino. One of these two now rests in the pile at the base of the Cruz de Ferro.
Through the villages in this region, the usually reliable yellow arrows become a bit of a problem. Full of the spirit of private enterprise, bar keepers have added their own arrows to the true ones, in the hope of diverting thirsty pilgrims past -- or rather into -- their establishments. In places you are confronted by arrows going left, right, and straight up in the air. At one village the confusion was bad enough that I ended up at the town dump. There was nothing for it but to double back and re-discover the authentic Camino.
A pilgrimage is not really a good metaphor for life. True, life is a journey of sorts, but not one you undertake by choice. You do not start life by your own volition, and you are not told at the outset how far you have to go. Only the life of a suicide has an intentional end point, even. Life is an open-ended adventure, the Camino is finite.
Molinaseca, the stopping place for the next night, was not very memorable. It did have a supermercado which was monumental in its inefficiency, run by a husband and wife who between them managed to bring trade almost to a standstill. There had been handbills advertising this shop for miles before Molinaseca, so I suppose they did understand something about the promotional side of business. But they overcharged us for the supplies we did manage to buy there, so their pricing strategy was either very bad or very good. Ho hum. The refuge, which is beyond (west of) the town, is lined throughout in black marble which is very practical and clean but rather gloomy. We were however allowed to enter immediately we arrived, and then discovered to our pleasure an al fresco bar operating beneath the refuge's verandah.
Leaving Molinaseca the next morning early, there was enough mist to completely conceal the moon, so finding the way involved more work with the torch than hitherto. It was still dark when I reached the large town of Ponferrada, described in Pat's book as a 'confusing' city, and by her personally as a place to avoid. With my dislike of cities generally, this was advice I could comprehend and act upon, but it would be easier to do so in daylight. So I sat down on a suburban kerbside, made and ate my breakfast, and watched a night club empty itself of the evening's patrons.
Breakfast finished, I walked to see the great Templar castle which is the town's principal monument. This assembly of turrets, staircases, crenellations would out-Disney Disneyland. It is one of the remnants that was left behind when the Templars were suppressed in 1312 by methods as brutal as their own. I didn't linger long there, but there are people who make a deep study of the twelve sided edifice, trying to extract some secret meaning from its peculiar geometry as though from the Great Pyramid. I had no difficulty moving along once the light was adequate -- Ponferrada is far better waymarked than the other cities along the Way. In places the Camino appears to divide in two, both halves presumably equally well waymarked. But like the other cities I was glad to be out of it.
En route to Villafranca del Bierzo I passed through Cacabelos. On the outskirts of the town I came upon a little church and put my head round the door to see if the interior was interesting. It looked unremarkable enough until I encountered the priest -- or perhaps it was the verger --- preparing for a wedding later that day. He turned on the lights and suddenly the place was beautiful. The space behind the altar is stepped back in deep niches at various depths, and fitted with hundreds of candle style lamps which when lit, emphasise the three-dimensional effect in a most striking way. It's not a style that appeals to me personally, but it was very well done.
We came to the refuge at Villafranca, finding it to be quirky in the extreme. Named Fénix after the legendary bird the phoenix, it is made of plastic sheets stretched over timber framing. We were told that this is a temporary habitation while a new refuge is being built, but apparently it's been like this for years now and is popularly known as the Tent of Jesús. (Not the Jesus -- Jesús is a common Spanish name and this tent was erected by Jesús Jato, a local farmer.) Everything is very cheerful and seemingly disorganised. Some pilgrims turned up their noses at this riotous establishment and walked on to other accommodations of a more conventional character.
The showers at Fénix have two unusual features. One is some rude but expertly drawn cartoons on the doors. The other is solar heating, which means the hot water really is hot. There's a bar and restaurant where they seem to sell almost anything a pilgrim might want. Including a most unusual service -- for three hundred pesetas they will convey packs to Cebreiro, the next major staging post on the Camino.
Everybody warned us that the day from Villafranca to Cebreiro would be especially hard, on a par with the first day out from Saint Jean to Roncesvalles. This turned out to be something of an overstatement. It is true that the last eight kilometres just before Cebreiro is steady uphill grinding -- some village artisan had capitalised on geography by selling "authentic" pilgrim staffs at the beginning of this stretch -- nevertheless this day still wasn't as hard as Day One had been. Also, there was cloud and mist all the way, which made walking easier though it must have hidden some pretty nice mountain views as well -- Pat describes the walk as "very beautiful."
Walking sticks are greatly favoured in Europe, it appears, and most pilgrims had them. Some were just plain sticks, others were elaborate affairs made of modern materials and in some cases, telescopic. There were people who walked with two sticks, one in each hand, like cross-country skiers. It looked pretty awkward to me, but then I was no stick man at all, having had one on Day One but thrown it away at Roncesvalles. The "authentic" pilgrim staff, according to received wisdom, is tall with a hook at the top a little like a shepherd's crook or a bishop's crozier. It is also supposed to have one or two little gourds strung on it. I never saw any of the long-distance walkers with such a stick, "authentic" though it might have been. Those who undertake the Camino seriously are concerned with covering the distance, not with looking picturesque.
On the way we passed through Herrerías, which by its name (Ferrerías, if you prefer) must once have been an iron founding town. While there, drinking at the Fuente de Quiñones, we were accosted by a gentleman who found us interesting. We talked with him for a bit and asked after the Hospital Inglés, which Pat had told me was at the end of the village. He confirmed that it was the last few houses, and that there was "una chica que escribe" there. This, presumably, was Laurie Dennett whom Pat had spoken of the previous Christmas, and who I later learned had written A Hug for the Apostle, the account of her walk from Chartres to Santiago in 1986. Later still, I found out that Laurie is Canadian, and had I known that at the time I would have made an effort to seek her out, for I would have valued the opportunity to discuss the Camino with someone who like me is a new worlder and a Commonwealth citizen. There are important understandings which people from the old colonies share, which transcend language but are important to us. At the same time, as recent descendants of settler folk, our view of history is different from Europeans' -- including the Brits -- in that we see the future, rather than the past, as being the most interesting time.
Coming suddenly upon Cebreiro out of the mist at half-past midday, we encountered the local people emerging from Mass and heading toward the restaurant for Sunday dinner. The air by now was quite cold, and I dug into my pack for my polypropylene singlet and bush shirt, both of which I'd carried dubiously through temperatures of forty degrees and higher, seriously doubting whether they justified their weight. Now warm clothes were indeed valuable, and those pilgrims who hadn't brought any were in for a cold time at Cebreiro. For once we all slept inside our sleeping bags rather than on top of them.
Cebreiro was the home of one of the priests who battled to have the pilgrimage's importance recognised by the modern world, Don Elias Valiña Sampredo. He is buried inside the church, and outside stands a bronze bust of him. Also outside are plaques placed there by the various European societies supporting the Camino: Les Amis du Chemin de Saint Jaques, Kathkirchenmende Sankt Jakob, Confraternita de S. Jacopo, and so on. To my surprise the English Confraternity of Saint James is not among them. Surely this is an oversight, but an unfortunate one.
Depending on where you look, the name Cebreiro appears as either El Cebreiro or O Cebreiro. This was the first serious case I met of the conflict between the Castillian and Galician languages. Galicia in pre-Roman times was Celtic, and this Celtic heritage is being reasserted. The theme keeps cropping up in place names, for example La Coruña, which in Galician is written and pronounced A Coruña. Much of the graffiti we saw was aimed at "correcting" road signs which perpetuated the hated Castellano.
At Cebreiro they celebrate the miracle which happened one winter's day in the fourteenth century when the sacramental bread and wine turned literally into the flesh and blood of Christ. It was interesting to me that in a Catholic country this was regarded as a remarkable event, for my understanding was that is what happens at every Mass. But I was wide of the mark, for the words of the doctrine (transubstantiation) state that the tangible aspects of the materials remain unaltered while their underlying nature -- their "substance" -- changes in a special way. It is like God turning a hamburger into a cheeseburger by switching the filling while leaving the bun undisturbed. Transmuting material substances is no big deal to twentieth-century people, accustomed as we are to applauding scientists who have been doing it for sixty years. But converting the eucharistic elements so that they participate at one and the same time in the reality of this world and the reality of the other world -- that is a true miracle, a gift to faith for faith. What was special about the Mass that day at Cebreiro, was that the elements changed not only their inward nature but also their outward appearance.
The action of the Holy Spirit changing the priest's bread and wine into the real body and blood of Christ is a difficult doctrine for some. Notwithstanding the direct opposition betwen what the Catholic Council of Trent said in 1551 on the one hand, and Article twenty-eight of the Church of England (1662) on the other, modern New Zealand Anglicans accommodate this in a natural way. We confidently assert that "we are the body of Christ" and if we are serious about that, then the bread really does become Christ's body. Our understandings about the precise manner of the change may differ from that taught in Catholic tradition, but we share with them in asserting that it is real all right.
What's harder to come to terms with, is what do we mean by "real"? In my youth, reality meant the same thing as objectivity. But modern physicists say that there is no such thing as objectivity -- the nearest we come to it is shared subjectivity. So in the late twentieth century, what is reality is a question whose difficulty we are willing to acknowledge. Being in Spain provides further fuel for reflection, for "real", as in Calle Real, Plaza Real and so on, means royal, perhaps a little less than the ultimate fabric of the universe. My Vicar and I conduct a long-running dialogue about reality, each of us suspecting that the other is a little confused on the subject. We catch ourselves using phrases like, "not just real, but really real." My background in mathematics brought me into early contact with numbers both "real" and "imaginary." Anyone might be forgiven for thinking that all numbers are a bit unreal, for if we talk about five rabbits, it is the rabbits that are real, not the number five. It get worse, though, for if we ask the question, how many rabbits should multiply with how many rabbits to produce five (square) rabbits, the answer is a number that is impossible to write down, even though it is known to be more than two and less than three. This curious number is called, even more curiously, a "real" number.
It was my practice throughout the pilgrimage, to avoid getting too closely allied to any particular group of walkers. Nevertheless, by this stage I was enjoying the regular company of Vicent, a Catalonian teacher of Castellano about my own age, and Robert, a true-blue Oxford undergraduate. We called ourselves the Three Musketeers for a bit, but a cleverer name was the Five O'clock Shadows, since at every refuge we took our departure at five am in the shadowy darkness of that hour.
Vicent had developed severe tendonitis, and wisely had taken the opportunity to have his pack conveyed for him to Cebreiro by truck. We other two did what we could for him but apart from helping him maintain his morale, there wasn't much that was practical that we could do. He was repeatedly advised to give up and go home, but had reached that point of stubbornness that we all had, which did not admit for a moment the possibility of not getting to Santiago somehow. With the best will in the world, things were getting a bit tense all round. We were all deeply tired by this stage and our social skills were wearing thin. The best thing, it seemed to me, was for us to loosen up our little group and agree to walk all three at our own pace. We'd see what happened. This we did, and it was interesting that Vicent coped much better without his two solicitous friends than with. Left to go his own way, he actually reached Santiago ahead of Robert and me, despite our superior fitness. It was a valuable lesson in allowing people to solve their own problems.
On the Camino, people come and people go. You find interesting and congenial folk, but they are not necessarily good to walk with A walking buddy's fitness is more important than their personality. By the same token, when circumstances alter, a group that worked well before no longer does so. It takes courage to acknowledge when this happens and allow the group to break up so that new groupings can come into being. In theory everybody understands how things are, but our social instinct is to try to keep groups together, so the sensible thing can be difficult to do in practice.
First light at Cebreiro didn't arrive until 6.40 am, and it was a good idea to wait until that hour before heading out the next morning. Mist added to dark made it just too hard to start pathfinding, and anyway the day's distance was only twenty kilometres, mostly downhill. The original plan had called for a rest day at Cebreiro, but this one went the same way as the others. Robert set off at a strong pace while I walked along with the disabled Vicent, happy to take it easy and enjoy the pleasant mountain views that abounded in this countryside. The dreadful plains of León now seemed so far away as to belong to a different world.
Tired and sore but cheerful at the thought that there were only six days of walking before us, Vicent and I trotted along quietly. Along the way, we encountered a remarkable group of young men wearing the uniform of the Scouts de Europe. Accustomed to scouting of the British and Kiwi variety, I was astonished to see these fifteen and sixteen year olds marching along singing, not only wearing full dress uniform but also carrying a large troop flag before them.. The flag-bearer even had to wear white gloves! To me it all smacked too much of triumphalism to match my idea of a pilgrim walk. But the young men were French and friendly, and like us were heading to Triacastela that day. When Vicent and I got there Robert was waiting for us, considerably more cheerful having had the opportunity to go at his own pace without us.
The refuge at Triacastela was like all the others in Galicia, punctilious about not opening before 4 pm, but like the one in Cebreiro offered us small bedrooms with only four beds per room instead of the usual twenty or more. We hadn't had much of this treatment, and relished it, for larger rooms mean more snorers, and we could do with less. Something else we could do with less of, we discovered, was Scouts de Europe. We couldn't quite believe these guys -- every time they stopped they had hymns and prayers, and whenever they overnighted they took over the local church and their own padre, who was walking with them, conducted Mass. We were told that the Scouts de Europe are under the moral patronage of the Catholic church and it sure looked like it. What got us down was not these fellows' hymn-singing, even in the early hours, nor their other expressions of ostentatious piety. It was the large impact they had on a refuge when they descended upon it en masse wanting beds. Memories of Scouts camping out in tents returned to us, and we darkly suggested that it was a practice they might like to resurrect.
From Triacastella the guide recommends a route to Sarría by way of Montán and Calvor where I planned to spend the night. Vicent, however, persuaded Robert and me to take a different way through Samos because there was a monastery there that he wanted to visit. Considering the delicate state of Vicent's tendon and the fact that the Samos option added five kilometres to the journey, we guessed he must have known what he was talking about. I had my own reasons for wanting to visit such a place, for the pictures I'd seen of Samos were strongly reminiscent of its brother institution in Italy, at Monte Cassino. The Benedictine monastery at Cassino is branded on the memory of the many New Zealanders who endured four terrible battles beneath its walls during World War Two. Robert wasn't against the idea, so the three of us ignored the guide and went to Samos.
It turned out to be a good decision to go that way. The monastery, a Benedictine one, is huge. It was, however, shut off from the world and it took persistent enquiries on our part to get in. Eventually we were invited to come back at ten o'clock, still an hour and a half away. Poking around the tiny village, we were surprised to come upon a miniscule stone chapel in a clump of trees. This, it turned out, was the original church from which the present huge complex developed. The contrast between this simple chapel and the grandiose edifice it gave birth to was most striking, and of the two the smaller, older building was the one I'd have chosen as a place in which to worship God.
When the appointed hour arrived for our return to the present-day establishment, it was like another world entirely. We were hospitably welcomed and given a guided tour. Then the pilgrims present were invited to join the monks at Lauds which was followed by Mass. This was an interesting addition to my liturgical experience, and I was also enlightened to discover that about half the monks were priests and half were not.
On emerging from the service, I was greeted warmly by a man who had heard that there was a New Zealander in the congregation, since he himself had a New Zealand connection. He explained enthusiastically to all present that New Zealand was precisely on the opposite side of the world from where they stood, and that it was a fine and pleasant place. This man's son, it appeared, had spent a couple of years in our country working in Auckland. He insisted that being the most distant pilgrim they would ever see, I should write something substantial in the visitor's book so that they could put it on display. I trust that the words of the Grace which I left them in English and Maori, met their expectations.
From Samos the route goes to the nearest sizable town, Sarría, and this is where the guide suggests that you stay. We however though we knew better, and pushed on to Barbadelo, eight kilometres further on. So unfortunately did a lot of other people -- including the wretched Scouts -- and the twenty-two beds the refuge offers were placed under extreme pressure. Barbadelo itself was a severe disappointment to us, having neither a bar nor a bordello. Nor even a drinking fountain, which we could really have done with when we arrived at two in the afternoon and were faced with the usual wait until four.
We had used up all our food and lacked even water to drink. We contemplated using Barbadello's solitary public telephone to call a taxi and go back to Sarría to get supplies. In the end Robert and I being the fittest present, we two set off on behalf of all assembled for the next village along the way. It rejoiced in the name Mercado, which ought to mean market, perhaps even supermarket. What we actually found was a triumph of the entrepreneurial spirit, a most unlikely bar in what appeared to be a peasant couple's domestic kitchen. It was the pirate's den in Terradillos all over again. The proprietors took an intense (proprietary!) interest in everything that took place, questioning and commenting on it all. So when Robert and I on entering asked for five beers, we had to explain that we were acting on behalf of others as well as ourselves, and then when we ordered a meal -- which was cooked before our very eyes on a domestic stove in the corner of the room -- we had to undergo an inquisition on who we were and why. Robert's Castellano being much superior to mine, he got most of the questions and had to answer on my behalf as well as his own: how old was I, was I married, how could a married man become a priest and so on and so on. By the time we left, Robert was glad to escape.
In case this all sounds too uniformly negative, I should record that Barbadello has a little Romanesque church of Santiago which is much admired. But that is all, for the village that once surrounded it has long since been depopulated. I photographed some of the family burial-boxes in the small churchyard, which resemble marble filing cabinets and are common in northern Spain.
Getting away from Barbadelo we calculated that before the day was out we would be within a hundred kilometres of Santiago. Sure enough, we came upon the waymarker for Kilometre One Hundred by breakfast time and planned to make use of that occasion to have a little ceremony to mark the moment. So much for our hopes -- the unspeakable Scouts were there before us, surrounding the marker while they conducted morning prayers with the usual palaver. To give them time to finish, we took off our packs and made our breakfast so that they could do what they had to and move on. Then we sat down and ate what we'd prepared, but they continued so long that in the end we gave up and moved on ourselves. How long they went on we cannot guess, but we consoled ourselves by doing our thing at Kilometre Ninety Nine and persuaded ourselves that this was the more significant place because it was the first mark with double figures.
Vicent went his own way this day, though we did share lunch together at Portomarín, the next sizeable town on the journey. Robert and I stayed the night there, while Vicent carried on with a revised plan; we did not see him again until Santiago. Our time in Portomarín was comfortably long, for we crossed the bridge into the town at half past ten and left our packs at the town hall until the refuge would open at four. That left plenty of time for beer, coffee, lunch, looking at the church, buying postcards, more coffee and more beer. Robert cashed some travellers' cheques at the bank -- this transaction taking a mere sixty minutes -- and I, spotting a post office that was actually open, posted some mail.
Some English people told us that in going to Barbadelo the previous night, we had made even more of a mistake than we realised. That same night, the huge refuge in nearby Sarría had hosted just four pilgrims.
When Portomarín's refuge did open, us old hands moved like the experts we had become. Our routine ran like this. Making sure we were there early enough to be first in the queue when the superintendent arrived, we then headed directly for the beds we knew we wanted, claimed them in the scrum and made a beeline for the showers. If we were lucky, there would be hot water there and we would get some of it before it ran cold again. Next after the shower, we washed socks and other clothes, then headed off out in search of some shade and a drink. Ideally, we would be clear of the refuge by twenty past four and would return when the confusion had died down a bit.
It didn't quite work that way in Portomarín, though, for although the refuge was comfortable and well appointed, there was nowhere that we were allowed to wash our clothes. Instead we were directed to the lavadero público a couple of blocks away. We felt as if we'd been transported backwards in time and couldn't quite believe it. Robert, who has a strong sense of the ridiculous, claimed that when in Astorga he had seen a sign pointing to "San Feliz de las Lavaderas", which he insisted meant Saint Happy of the Washerwomen and claimed to be the spiritual descendant of that important divine. I'm unconvinced, though -- I reckon it was washing machines the saint was so happy about, and I would have been too.
In Portomarín I was particularly taken by the parish church, which had been moved when the old Portomarín was drowned by the formation of a new reservoir. Something similar happened in New Zealand with the town of Cromwell, and in Egypt at Abu Simbel. The problem was solved at Portomarín in the same way as at Abu Simbel, moving the building stone by stone from its original position, and the numbers used in that operation can still be seen on the stones.
The castle-like exterior of the church was interesting, as was the sculpture over the doorway depicting a medieval orchestra jamming away happily. Three memories of the interior stay with me too. The first is the walls where, like Pamplona cathedral, paintings had been removed to reveal the stone underneath. The second is the very public arrangements for the confessional -- the priest sat inside the box while an elderly black clad woman knelt outside to unburden herself of her sins. Anyone who was minded to eavesdrop would have had no trouble in doing so, and this contrasts markedly with our Anglican approach to personal confession which is very private indeed. Finally, there were the electronic votive candles. Thirty or forty of these, oversized versions of Christmas tree lights, were arranged in a glass-covered case with a slot for coins on the front. You put in your money -- almost any Spanish coin would work -- and a certain number of candles would illuminate for a certain period of time, depending on the value of the donation. It's an idea that might serve a purpose in New Zealand, where our churches are wooden and prone to fire.
Being now only four days from Santiago, or three for anyone who wanted to push themselves, we all had "getting there" very much in our minds. Some reacted to this with excitement, some with irritability, some with wit. A good number of pilgrims -- including Julio, whom I had apparently been tracking for eighteen days without knowing it -- gathered in a bar in the town that evening looking not only for food but also for lively disputation. When conversation turned to the merits and demerits of lay and/or married clergy, the evening's debate had found its topic. I found myself in the position both of protagonist and expert witness, enjoying it more and more as liquor lent fluency to my Castellano. I even made little jokes, though some came a bit unstuck, for example when I said (or thought I said) that being married "es mi disciplina," it's my form of spiritual discipline, an alternative to wearing a hair shirt. This remark apparently came across wrong, for the other pilgrims came to understand that "she is one of my disciples," I was having it away with a devoted student.
As the wine and argument flowed, an interesting spectrum of opinion revealed itself among the almost entirely Catholic pilgrim body. When we finally rolled off to the refuge for the night we had concluded (I think) that the ministry of lay and even married priests was a very good thing -- though perhaps not in Spain and certainly not in the lifetime of any present.
Palas do Rey, which we reached the next day, is a town with a rather vague history, since nobody seems to know which Rey had the Palas. But the refuge was even better than the one at Portomarín and I was particularly tired, so it was Palas enough for me. Unlike many of the refuges we stayed in, this one seemed to have been constructed expressly for the purpose of housing pilgrims. There was plenty of space, a good common room and plenty of loos and showers. This pleasant little town would do well to rename itself Palas do Peregrino.
Obviously an important staging post of the Camino, the town of Palas do Rey is short on ancient architecture but has convenient bars and shops for the modern pilgrim. These include a men's hairdresser's, and my hair being decidedly shaggy after a month on the road, I took the chance to get it seen to. Not without some trepidation, for I did not think my Castellano was equal to giving instructions for a haircut. However the proprietor was, it appeared a member of the glorious company of Uncommunicative Barbers, for which, Good Lord, much thanks. When I emerged I had to put up with a certain amount of barracking from fellow pilgrims who pretended not to recognise me, but I was feeling good, both cooler and tidier.
Passing through the main street we could see buses labelled "Santiago" stopping frequently in the town to pick up passengers. The buses were large, comfortable and air conditioned. With sixty-five kilometres left to go, was this the final temptation?
Before I reached Arzúa, twenty-eight kilometres on, I would gladly have climbed on one of those buses. My left Achilles tendon, for thirty years a source of trouble, was playing up as so often before. The varicose ulcer on my right foot had not yet healed. I could no longer feel the toes of my left foot either, and to make matters worse I seemed to be getting a chest cold in spite of the hot weather. When I phoned Gail in Salamanca that afternoon she remarked on the fatigue she detected in my voice. I was paying the price for rest days not taken earlier along the Camino, and now so close to the goal I really needed to give in and take one. But there were only thirty-six kilometres to cover, two pushes would do the job and each would be only eighteen kilometres, so once again determination triumphed over prudence.
My call to Gail was the last time before she would head for Santiago. We had long since arranged to meet at noon on the steps of Santiago cathedral, though the planned date had changed -- the original plan set it on Thursday August 31, now with the time savings made along the way it would be Sunday the 27th instead. My notes for that day say, "I'm really look forward to seeing Gail again -- Saint James will have to wait his turn."
From Arzúa, some pilgrims planned to go the next day to Montes de Gozo, the mountains of joy. These are the heights outside Santiago from which the cathedral can be seen, and old accounts tell of the upsurge of emotion that pilgrims are apt to experience on gaining this first glimpse of their objective. Since 1993 there has been an enormous refuge there, capable of housing thousands of pilgrims. It seemed to me that to stay the night so close to Santiago without going there, would be more of a frustration than a pleasure. So I opted instead to spend the final night at Arca, eighteen kilometres away from the city. With a bit of luck and an early start from Arca, we ought to be crossing Montes de Gozo close to that magic moment when the rising sun would first strike the cathedral.
It was a good move, as I later learned from pilgrims who stayed the night at Montes de Gozo. The refuge is like a military barracks and the view disappointing It's an uninspiring way to spend your last night of the pilgrimage. Nor is that the only unsatisfactory thing about the Camino this close to its end. The new city airport has been plonked down across the old route and the detour is poorly waymarked. Robert and I actually got lost in a wood while making this detour and thought it was a pretty poor show. When we did cross Montes de Gozo our timing was perfect but the view was not much, mostly the industrial and residential suburbs of greater Santiago. The sky was cloudy with a cold wind, making it necessary to put on cold weather gear for the second time on the journey. What we had was all Montes and no Gozo.
As in the other big towns, we had to trudge through Santiago's outer suburbs on the way to the city centre and the cathedral. For some reason, in Santiago the six kilometres of city streets didn't seem as bad as other cities. We got our first sight of the Cathedral itself when between two modern buildings we spotted the baroque towers -- add-ons from the eighteenth century which signalled the tenth century Romanesque church beneath. Not long after we got to the Cathedral square and found the pilgrims' office with about seventy other pilgrims waiting for it to open. Most of the walkers were known to us, so we had a sociable time as we waited. Finally the office did open, and we queued up the stairs with our credencial to receive our Compostela, the certificate which records on paper what your body already knows, that you have walked the Way to Santiago. As each pilgrim emerged from the office with theirs, those waiting sent up a cheer and demanded a song. Once I had my Compostela I didn't hang about, for I had an appointment to keep and by then it was eleven thirty. Saint James was waiting.
Not only Saint James, but closer to my heart, Gail. And sure enough there she was, on the balcony at the top of the cathedral steps. So were a few hundred other people waiting for the midday mass, theoretically a pilgrims' mass but also attended by large numbers of Santiago citizens. This was Sunday after all. Many of us pilgrims were unable to find seats inside, so we propped ourselves up against pillars and confessional boxes, and watched the proceedings through glazed eyes. Some even slept, and I too may have nodded off, standing though I was, for a few minutes.
From somewhere in the fog I have a memory -- whether is was before the Mass or after I'm not certain, but I'm confident it wasn't during -- of going up the stairs behind the altar to give the statue of Saint James the pilgrim's hug from behind. There was a constant stream of people doing this, even during services, and for the worshippers in the nave it can be a bit distracting. We also touched the tree of life at the other end of the cathedral, and while doing so knocked foreheads with another statue of Saint James. A pilgrim told us that the correct place to knock one's forehead was actually on the opposite side of the pillar, so we did that side as well. The person on this other side is Master Mateo, the master mason in charge of building the Cathedral, and by banging foreheads with him you can receive his wisdom.
Then out into the sun again. A crowd of us pilgrims got into a restaurant and throwing economy to the winds, ordered huge platters of mariscos -- assorted seafoods, the great Santiago delicacy. We shared this delicious food with a good deal of hilarity as the realisation dawned upon us that we actually were in Santiago, that the walking was over, the goal so long dreamed of had been achieved. Gail's memory of that day is probably clearer than mine. "Various companions, mostly Spanish, joined us as we ate, walked in the streets, occupied seats in cafés. The companionship and banter was stimulating. After twenty-eight days on the Camino, Richard's fluency in Spanish [sic] was impressive."
It needed to be. After the Mass I was asked to return to the pilgrim office, where a reporter from the Santiago paper El Coreo Gallego was waiting for me. She talked to me for an hour -- or rather allowed me to rattle on, which thanks to the aforementioned fluency I was able to do.
This reporter was interested in New Zealand and the fact that the Camino, so well known in Europe, was practically unheard of at home. She quizzed me about my own motives for taking it on. She wanted to know about Anglicanism and whether its theology and rituals resembled Catholic though and practice. I revealed my wish to chant the Lord's Prayer in Maori (I had to explain about Maori) some time in the cathedral, so that the old stones could hear a prayer from half a world away. A photographer took a photo, and sure enough quite a long and uncommonly accurate article appeared the following day. El Coreo Gallego is unique in that it publishes two versions daily, one in Castellano and one in Galician. I never saw the Galician version of the article, but presumably it said the same things.
Then back to the hotel Gail had located, for the second bath in a month and the second sojourn in a bed with sheets. For Gail, the experience in Santiago served to round off the training she had received at the university in Salamanca, for she records, "The Castellano was coming. My tongue was loosening. We had local contacts. Three. A friend of a friend, Señor Suso,, of the bar and hostelry of the same name. brought out book after book of postcards and clippings, sequenced by country, from those who had experienced the Camino. The Señor in the Tourism Office plied us with posters. A Rotary contact led us to meet Carmen, a fast-talking warm-hearted Galician and husband José. Through their efforts we were whisked to La Coruña, around the western bays and coast, even past the bemused doorman of the Hotel de los Reyes Católicos adjacent to the towering cathedral."
The dignified gentleman in the Tourism Office, Señor Balisteros, could not possibly have done more for us. The beautiful posters he gave us of Galicia in general and the Camino in particular are treasures. Rolling them up carefully for us to take away, he appeared to say, "I want a condom" -- but surely I'd misheard? Well as it turned out I'd heard him correctly, for a few seconds later a colleague handed him a long thin plastic bag nearly a metre in length and perhaps twlve centimetres in diameter. Into this he slid the rolled up posters, and for this purpose the "condom" was ideal.. I did not dare look at Gail for fear that we would both burst out laughing, and that would have been difficult to explain to the courteous Señor.
I'd had an earlier experience which might suggest that Spanish people are a bit less straight-laced about sexual language than are the Anglo-Saxons. In the Refuge at Portomarín my English friend had been accosted by a Spanish pilgrim who had some English and wanted to try it out on a real Englishman. Almost his first conversational gambit was, "You fucked me," which startling proposition made Robert and me sit up with a start. There was no doubt that he was trying to say exactly what he sounded like saying, and that he could see nothing exceptional in it. We later established that the phrase he meant to use was, "you fucked me up", meaning you put me crook, you led me astray, but that didn't make matters much better. Not knowing the Castellano equivalents didn't help us in our efforts to explain to him that this wasn't acceptable English conversation, but we did our best. We never found out whence he had obtained his English sexual vocabulary, but we're fairly sure it wasn't at school.. Then again, perhaps that's exactly the place he did get it from.
You can't presume upon this breadth of vocabulary, though. Later on, in conversation with a fellow-guest (female) at a wedding, the talk got round to the variety of Christian denominations. The Spanish do have some religious nutters, and these include the Jehovah's Witnesses who are as wrong-headed in Spain as they are elsewhere. "Oh," I heard her say, "me dan tanto mierda." -- they hand me so much shit. Even I thought this was putting things a bit strong, and said so, only to discover that her actual words had been, "me dan tanto miedo", they give me so much cause for concern. In extenuation for this social gaffe, I can only plead that thanks to the grafitists of northern Spain, mierda is a word kept constantly within the pilgrim's field of vision and the ear hears what the eye is used to seeing.
There is a large refuge in Santiago for pilgrims, but few of the people we associated with made use of it, preferring like us to stay in one of the many reasonably-priced hotels in the town. Another tradition we departed from was that of the free meals at the Hotel de los Reyes Católicos, which ten pilgrims a day get to eat. In principle each pilgrim is entitled to three meals, but the meals are not reputed to be worth the trouble of claiming. Consequently I did not meet anybody who had availed themselves of this ancient pilgrim's privilege.
Some pilgrims are a little disappointed that their arrival in Santiago seems a bit of an anti-climax. Jack Hitt's reaction was: "Part of me wants to jump up, stuff my fist in the air, and scream, 'I made it! I did it!' ... I had expected a purity, a clarifying wind of revelation." But Jack is honest enough, humorist enough, pilgrim enough to doubt his own reaction: "This clenched face and furrowed brow now bowing before the statue of James -- is this mine, a performance, or both?"
I don't think it matters. The point of the pilgrimage is the doing, not the finishing. The true goal is not the goal at all but the process. So the old priest at San Juan de Ortega was right -- you get to Santiago, but the pilgrimage still goes on.
The second morning after arriving in Santiago, I returned to the cathedral with the strong desire to make good my stated intention of chanting the paternoster, Te Inoi a te Ariki. Locating the sacristy, I hung around for a bit, then diffidently entered and spoke with a lay official who fetched the priest in charge for me. This cleric turned out to be the man in charge of pilgrims, the Secretarius Capitularis, whose signature appears on each pilgrim's Compostela. Confidently I put my request to him, expecting the same encouraging response that I had had in the cathedral of Santo Domingo de la Calzada.
But this was not the cathedral of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, nor was this a priest of the same ecumenical views. My Anglicanism, I was told, made me a Protestant, and that made it impossible for me to do any such thing. I explained that any time would do, I wasn't asking to do it during a Mass -- but still the answer was no. The dreadful voice of Protestantism would not be heard in that cathedral.
The theology and ritual of New Zealand Anglicanism are so close to those of New Zealand Catholicism that at home we have little difficulty with each other. Anglicans have, it is true, a structure that does not place the Pope or any other human figure at its head, not even (for us New Zealanders) the British monarch or the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is true that while Anglicans recognise Catholic priests as competent to preside at the Eucharist, Catholics do not extend the same recognition to Anglican clergy. But in matters of faith and practice there is more variation within the two denominations than there is between them.
However I persisted, and after a bit he told me to wait while he disappeared for a time. I took the opportunity to slip out myself into the body of the cathedral to where Gail was waiting for me, and suggested she return to our hotel. It seemed to me that if being an Anglican clergyman was going to make things difficult, being a married Anglican clergyman would torpedo me entirely. Having got rid of the incriminating evidence of a wife, I awaited the priest's return and in due course he did arrive in somewhat more helpful mood. Was there some other prayer would like to use, he asked. Disappointed -- for the Lord's Prayer is the very symbol of Christian unity -- I ran my mind through the liturgy searching for a fragment that would mean something to most Christians. What about the Grace? No, for those words, too, feature in the Mass and so were out of bounds for me. Finally we negotiated that I would compose an intercessory prayer in Maori and would be permitted to intone this during the mass.
And so it was. Two other pilgrims were with me, one Spanish and one German, and they prayed in their languages. My prayer, not surprisingly considering the circumstances, was neither particularly profound nor beautifully expressed. It thanked God for the Camino, for the pilgrims on it and for the strength we had received to complete our journey. It prayed for our country with particular con#ern for young people, and for all the nations of the world the unity and peace of Christ:
E te Atua, he whakawhetai ki a koe
Mo te huarahi, mo te kaha, mo te ora,
mo nga hoa o te mahi nei.
Kia tau ki a ratou te ora nui
Me ki o ratou iwi te rangimarie o te Karaiti.
Homai ki a Aotearoa he ora nui
Homai ki nga tangata katoa te whiwhingatahitanga.
Ki te Rangatahi, hoatu tau mohiotanga
I roto i te oranga
Ki nga iwi katoa o tenei to ao
To aroha nui ki a ratou. Oremos al Señor.
This prayer, which had been thoroughly vetted and which during the process of composition had been translated into Castellano in bits and in its entirety, apparently met some criteria which allowed it to be uttered in the cathedral without actually bringing it crashing down. To do the man justice, he had taken notes and did provide that congregation with a translation of the prayer -- though if either of my suggestions had been followed, that would have been unnecessary. And when we came to the point in the service where the Lord's Prayer is said, he encouraged all present to pray in their own language, whatever it may be. Not a bad outcome finally, but I found it a difficult and somewhat painful process getting there. A little Camino by itself, perhaps?
Are there lessons for us to learn from the Camino, as Anglicans entering the 21st century? Could be: I've got much to think about on this and a hundred other matters. People who know about the pilgrimage have been asking me what it was like. Mostly, I've been putting them off because the experience was too large and engaged too much of my spiritual and physical being to talk about yet. I find I've still got a lot of work to do on it myself before I am in a position to share the experience properly with other people. Apparently this is a common experience for pilgrims.
Later, it occurs to me that it's faulty thinking to expect that the miracles or events or insights that belong the Camino necessarily occur between the time you leave St Jean and when you arrive at Santiago. The time before and after belongs to the Camino too, as do the thoughts it inspires when the body is physically back home.