Pilgrim 2003

We have just walked four hundred miles from Pamplona in Navarra, north Spain, to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. When we arrived in Bilbao we took the bus to Pamplona. We found the hotel we’d booked and then sought out the old-fashioned Café Irún in the main square where we had chocolate and churros.

The next day, we woke at five thirty and were let out of the hotel by the night porter at six. The city was in darkness, the pavements picked out by spherical white lights. One or two vans drove along the roads. There were no pedestrians. We had our rucksacks on our backs. There was something final about the way in which the hotel door was locked behind us.

We walked round the park and followed roads through elegant suburbs, past the university and out of town. Once we’d crossed the ring-road we found ourselves in deep countryside. The light was a pale grey-yellow, like a wagtail. The path climbed gently but firmly. Ahead of us, miles away, was the ridge we had to climb. Along the ridge, from left to right, was an elegant line of white wind turbines.

There are dozens of pilgrim routes across Europe to Santiago. The French will tell you that the path begins at the tower of S. Jacques in Paris or at Vezelay or at Le Puy. Some may even concede that it begins at St Jean Pied de Port on the French side of the western Pyrenees. The Spanish will tell you about the choices you have to make between the French route, the Aragonese route, across the plains of Aragón, and the Cantabrian route, along the north coast. They will also tell you about the silver road from Seville. The Portuguese have their own route, and so, according to the history books, do the English. The English route involves taking a boat across the Bay of Biscay right to El Ferrol, which is only a short way north of Santiago. Then you walk or ride the rest of the way.

When we look back now, though, we realise that we were pilgrims the moment we put our rucksacks in the back of the car and set off for Portsmouth. We’d been pilgrims all the way. There are thousands of pilgrim routes across Europe to Santiago because everyone starts from home.

The pilgrim road, the camino, is not as old as the hills, but it is older than any of the buildings it passes. Its route has inevitably been modernised into tarmac roads and motorways. You can drive all the way and never really deviate from the medieval path, though modern pilgrims are re-routed sensitively to avoid hours of roadside trekking. The path crosses hillsides and farmland, woods and vineyards. It climbs steep hills and follows farm tracks for winding miles through valleys. All the time, there are stylised yellow arrows, on barn walls, on trees, on concrete marker posts, on kerbsides and roadsigns, keeping the pilgrim to the path in darkness and in light.

The route heads westward. For many pilgrims, it continues beyond Santiago for another three days, reaching Finisterre on the Galician coast: the end of our known world until 1492, the final sunset. Indeed, by the time we reached Vigo on the far Galician coast, to catch our night train back to Barcelona, far away now and on the shores of another sea, we were so set on our westward route that the eastward trajectory of the journey was utterly, and literally, disorientating.

After just two or three days on the road, our lives slipped into a new kind of routine. We would wake at five-thirty, and slip away from the albergue before six, without breakfast. We would have shared just a large bottle of mineral water, forcing it down, gulp after gulp, before leaving. Then we’d swing off into the dark. At the start of the walk, in the east, it began to get light almost straight away, and the sun appeared before six-thirty. At the end, a month later and hundreds of miles further west, the darkness persisted for an extra hour, the sun rising around seven thirty, after a period of cold grey light which drained the colour out of everything.

After a couple of hours we’d stop for breakfast. We found ourselves aiming to cover five kilometres in an hour. Spanish bars open early, especially those on the camino, and only the smallest villagers are without them. On most days, and especially along the second half of the way, we knew that before nine o’clock we’d find strong, hot coffee and fresh pastries.

Then, after breakfast, it was off for another two hours. One of the worst moments on a long walk is replacing a heavy rucksack on a back wet with sweat after a short break. Everything feels too clammy and too wet. Horrible.

At first, in the dark, the air had been cool, sometimes to the point of being cold. Sudden light gusts would tingle our arms and legs. Occasionally, we would walk past a clay-brick wall or a sandy bank where yesterday’s heat had been stored. We could feel the mixture of hot and cold air, its discrete parts, eddying around us.

We knew that by one o’clock walking would be impossible. The heatwave across Europe had pushed temperatures in Spain to record highs. As we approached León, for example, on the high flat meseta, we experienced fifty degrees. We felt as if we were squeezing through hot, solid air. Every day, until we reached the relative cool of Galicia, we knew the heat was coming, and that we had almost to race it to continue.

Two hours would see us well on the way to our planned destination, and there would be time to stop in another bar for a drink and maybe a cheese roll or a slice of tortilla. We soon learned that this was not the time to enjoy a beer.

Sometimes we’d reach our night stop, usually at a pilgrims’ hostel or albergue, before twelve. Other days, we’d not get there till two o’clock, having spent an hour in the siesta heat. Once we’d reached our albergue, we’d shower and change into our afternoon clothes. We’d wash our walking clothes and set them out to dry in the hot sun. Everyone would be doing the same. By three o’clock the washing lines would be full. We carried our own pegs.

Sometimes there’d be a bar nearby for a snack and a drink. Often there would be a restaurant with a menú, which we came to prefer, or a shop with enough stuff available to prepare a decent salad in the albergue kitchen. After such a meal, and a bottle of wine, we’d be ready for our siesta, and we’d join the others in the dormitories, snoozing through the heat until between five and six o’clock. Some pilgrims would write up their days then in small, light-weight notebooks, as we did. Others would sit around and chat. Small groups might organise evening feasts. We’d eaten enough. We would change into our sandals and stroll around whatever village we had found ourselves in, appraising the small vegetable gardens and the views and the church. We’d scout out the start of tomorrow’s path. Sometimes, a river would have been dammed with sticks or with municipal concrete, and the villagers would be in swimwear, basking in the late afternoon heat. Usually there was at least a green or a park with plenty of shade, where the pilgrims would congregate: drowsing, chatting, reading or writing.

In many villages there would be a pilgrim Mass at eight. An ordinary Mass, of course, but with a special, and short, pilgrim blessing at the end. We were almost always surprised by the high number of pilgrims who attended. When called forward by the priest we’d shuffle up in our rather grubby outward-bound casual wear and our sloppy sandals, leaving the old men in their crisp trousers and short-sleeved shirts, and the old women in their print frocks to watch.

A significant number of the churches on the way were dedicated to Mary Magdalene. The guidebooks take a tough line on this. The saint is a symbol of the kind of penitence which has called us to join the pilgrimage, the sinner reformed. We came to disagree. Walking through vineyards, past fig-trees and wells whose cold water refreshed us from time to time; greeting goat-herds black with the sun, watching outsize crickets flicking across the path, and so on, underlined everyday a biblical theme to the adventure. But nothing was so sensuous as our nightly massage of each other’s feet. In León, we found the Body Shop and splashed out, as it were, on a pot of foot ointment which smelt cleanly of peppermint. Working the cream firmly into heel and sole, and into the triangular slices between the tarsals was heavenly. Nothing we could imagine would be more glorious than a young woman massaging our feet after a day on the road, with expensive oils and what have you. Rightly or wrongly, and scriptural experts disagree about all this, we came to identify the Magdalena not with penitence but with luxury and generosity and love. Her churches celebrated the walk.

By the end of Mass, the sun was close to setting and it was time for bed. Not everyone shared the same timetable: we were the early risers. At first it was hard to get to sleep with twilight still quite bright outside and with the hubbub of cooking and socialising filling the albergue, but we soon became used to all that and were able to doze off in the midst of such activity.

We noticed that there was something monastic about the discipline of our days: the early rising, the stopping and starting, the final compline where we reviewed our day, writing it up before dinner and bed. And there was something monastic, too, about the way the norms of privacy were reversed. During the day, when normally we’d be at work, with colleagues and e-mails and telephones, we’d been alone with our thoughts, following in our imaginations the rhythm of our footsteps, silently. Then, in the evening and during the night, when we’d normally expect a modicum of privacy, in the loo, for example, in the bathroom, in bed, we found ourselves in the close company of complete strangers, who were naked with us in the showers, and who snored and farted in their sleep.

Some albergues were better than others. The guidebooks we were using, a Spanish one and an English one, gave clear distances between albergues, and details about them, and we planned our days to reach specific ones. Our target distance was between twenty-two and twenty-five kilometres. Usually, there would be an albergue within these parameters. Sometimes, we had to press on a little further, or settle for a shorter day. We found we were much happier pressing on.

At the beginning of the journey, there was a quiet and almost solemn air to the hostels. There was a long way to go. We had all embarked, for all our different reasons, on this long journey, but for almost all of us, we had only scratched the surface of the distance we had to cover. Several of these albergues, the ones in Navarra and La Rioja, were explicitly spiritual. In Grañon, the albergue was run by the parish priest, Don José Ignatio, and was situated in the walls of the huge stone church. On the ground floor was a large, clean room with a pile of thin mats, for pilgrims who wanted to leave early; upstairs was a similar room for later departures. In between, on a middle storey, was a communal lounge and dining room, along with a kitchen and a bathroom area with fairly luxurious showers.

You washed your clothes in a special area in the church tower and hung them to dry higher up, so that from a distance you could see my West Ham shirt flapping the breeze, right up there in one of those unglazed open windows on the side of the tower.

From the dormitory at Grañon there was door which opened directly on to the coro in the church itself, what you might call the organ loft, but for the fact that there was no organ, just seats for the choir and a big wooden turntable lectern for the music books, all empty now. After the evening communal meal, there were prayers in the coro and then a quiet settling down to sleep.

Only a handful of the albergues offered communal meals. Here, at Grañon, and at its sister albergue in Tosantos, food was prepared and served for the pilgrims who were asked to make a donation if they wished. At Grañon, there was a tray of money with a notice: leave what you can, take what you need. At Tosantos, there was a tin box to put money in.

All the communal meals were memorable. The food was well judged for a band of walkers: thick and flavoursome, plenty of carbohydrates, very little salt. The bread and wine were local and cheap. The conversation was friendly and easy. Not everyone could speak Spanish. Most pilgrims were Spanish or French, so there was a lot of French, and there was a lot of English, which became the lingua franca for all pilgrims who had come from countries beyond France and Spain. We met pilgrims from Denmark, Sweden, Japan, the Czech republic, Cuba, the United States and Ireland. In high summer, there were very few other English pilgrims. There seemed to be something authentic about these shared meals.

There were ordinary miracles. One day, leaving a dark village in La Rioja, we followed the track through stubble fields under a dark, starry sky. Just Mars high to our left, the south-west, shining with any power. We plodded on, with the gruff sound of the stony path beneath our feet. We heard the tractor approaching and then, behind us, saw its bright lights. There was nothing else moving anywhere in the huge expanse of land before us. After a while the tractor came up behind us. It slowed to a stop. The driver explained we’d missed the turn; we had to go back and take a path to the right. This proved to be the only time on the whole walk we lost the way. The tractor driver moved off, on his way across the landscape. We turned back. There was no sign of a yellow arrow at the next turn. We got out the torch and spun its light across the scrub at the end of a farm track which led off into the night. Finally, in the shadows beneath the bushes we found it, a metal spike with a yellow arrow at its head, knocked over and half-buried. We set it right and went on our way.

In one village, we were looking for food to make a lunch at the albergue. We had some cheese and fruit with us. There seemed to be no shop, and the woman at the one bar offered neither snacks nor meals. Yet as we walked around we saw maybe a dozen villagers with bags and loaves of bread. Eventually, we plucked up courage and asked: Where was the bakery? Could we buy a loaf there? But there was no bakery, just a van which came each day, and which, of course, had just left. But she had more bread than she needed, said the woman, and she gave us one of her two loaves. Big, thick country baguettes. She would accept no money.

And so on. In Galicia, we ended up walking an extra twenty-two kilometres one day in order to find a pharmacy which might do something about Caroline’s horse-fly bite, which had turned her lower arm into something between a sausage and a balloon. There had been nowhere for lunch and we hadn’t eaten since our usual breakfast. We pressed on. In a muddy Galician hamlet - just a rough collection of farmsteads - a woman popped out of her house and greeted us. “I know just what you need,” she said, though we had said nothing. She returned with a plate of pancakes and a sugar shaker. We ate them with our fingers. For her, it was just a way of getting a few euros out of the passing pilgrim trade; for us it was a godsend which kept us on our feet. But it was the sugar shaker, for me, which lifted the whole thing out of the humble and the mundane into the slightly more fantastic and the slightly more unreal.

The villages changed as we headed west, and also the relationship of the camino to the residents. In Navarra and La Rioja, the villages were gentle and brown. There were ordered streets, in neat straight lines as often as not, with compact little centres and neat squares. Out in the countryside, you could still sense such a tight plan lay under the surface, but the surface was often muddy and rather worn round the edges. Agricultural machinery lay here and thereabouts, sometimes parked on the football field, sometimes apparently just abandoned on a rough bit of ground at the end of a lane. In these smaller villages, there were few services, sometimes no more than a small bar and maybe a bakery. Where there was a bar, it was clear that it was the money of the passing pilgrims which kept it viable. In Azofra, a tiny village with fewer than fifty residents, there were two bars, two albergues, two neat and helpful shops. Such services could not be warranted by the residents alone. The pilgrims help the village maintain these facilities, which partly explains why the locals value the camino as they do.

In the meseta, villages take on a different feel. The landscape is harsh. It is flat, with few features. Temperatures soar in the summer (and drop to freezing chill in the winter). The camino treads a weary route across this wasteland, through bleak settlements. In many of these, the heart appears to have gone. There are many derelict houses. Fast, straight highways carry traffic on new routes now, away from these ancient villages, which shimmer and tremble in the heat. What towns there are, like Frómista and Sahagún, have a desolate feel. The bars are bleak, with few regulars. Men sit on chairs at their doors, watching the silence, waiting for something to happen. There are few shops. The guidebooks are exact about the whereabouts of fountains and about the quality of water you can expect. You are advised to carry provisions. Huge fields lie open to the sun. They are stagnant at this time of year, the huge fields, between the grain harvest and the autumn ploughing. Cones of fresh grain lie here and there on the edge of the villages. Finches pick at them in small agitated flocks. The pale yellow of the grain and the routine browns of the clay now glare in the afternoon sun.

Trees have been planted on the south side of the path, but they are young. Several have died in the arid conditions. No-one would walk here for simple pleasure. There is landscape, but there is very little scenery.

West of Carrión de los Condes the camino continues unbroken for over seventeen kilometres in a perfect straight line on a rough gravelly causeway. There are few features. Our feet ached with the monotony of it and with the evil sharpness of the stones which burned through the soles of our boots. Yet we appeared to be making no progress at all. There was nothing with which we could gauge our progress except a distant TV mast and the shape of the clouds.

Eventually, we dropped suddenly into a fold in the plain where a village lurked, like a child hiding from its parents. A bar welcomed us with food and drink, and an internet connexion for emails (and an update on the West Ham managerial crisis). Then it was back to the badlands. The next village, in a similar dip, had no services except the albergue which was run also as a bar and a village shop by an enterprising couple. In this village, and the next, and the one after that, all the houses were made of mud. Adobe houses with the straw showing through. In Reliegos, the hospitalero at the albergue bragged about how good his mud-house was. Cool even in these terrible temperatures, he claimed. It was nearly fifty Celsius outside. We saw Spanish lads poking their fingers into the adobe walls, like doubting Thomases who could not believe that bricks and concrete were unfashionable here. Swallows nested happily in the cracks.

At Reliegos, we climbed the small sandstone knoll where the church stood. The knoll itself was honeycombed with tunnels, each with a queerly grand entrance, and steps leading down into the hillside. Huge thunder clouds gathered to the south and the air became purple. The storm was intense and the rainfall heavy. The electricity flickered and went off.

Even at Mansilla, where the old path meets the main road, it is easy to be distracted by the picturesque shabbiness of the place, and by the wistful grandeur of its huge town walls.

The mountain villages of León seemed more familiar. Here the lanes were tight and rural and the houses closely packed. They had long balconies which thrust forward on medieval jetties. Many houses had been tidied up significantly and had cars with Madrid or Barcelona plates. There were cobbled alleys and the smell of cows. Similar villages can be found across the northern mountains, in Asturias, for example, and Cantabria.

However, once we had crossed the Galician border, after a satisfyingly stiff climb up to the mountain village of O Cebreiro, the villages changed completely. If the mountain villages of León reminded me of 1960s Devon - which they did - then these Galician mountain farms were Wales. There were muddy, grey farmyards. Families lived in long barn-like houses with gloomy slate roofs, with the cattle housed beneath and the living quarters established above. Rain was expected daily. One day, we watched a helicopter fetching water from what must have been a reservoir, out of sight to the north, to extinguish a forest fire, whose smoke was drifting over the hillside in front of us. But the clouds gathered, and a ten-minute downpour put out the flames.

Here in Galicia, too, the social rules had changed. Up to now, each village, all but the smallest, offered at least one bar around which secular village life revolved. In Galicia, bars were few and far between. Where they did exist, they were outside the villages, on scraps of ground, and as often as not, in some thrown-together hut which looked ugly and offered few amenities. These bars were not patronised by the locals. The cold drinks were provided by big, chilled machines; the coffee was instant, unheard of elsewhere. Many Spaniards join the camino in Galicia, and the impression grew that the locals had wearied of the numbers. We were rarely greeted in Galicia as we had been elsewhere. There were just too many of us by now to make an individual interesting.

Galicia is not like ‘Spain’, not like anywhere in Castilla or León. It is as different a country as Wales is to England, or more so, and its village life is organised differently. It also grows far more cabbages. It is hard to imagine a community which needs quite so many cabbages. Enormous, walking-stick cabbages, up to eight-feet high, and exotic. Out here, in the Galician mountains, the cabbage is king.

The modern pilgrim may be very different from the medieval. The technology of modern walking equipment is impressive, communications and banking are easier even than twenty years ago. And consider what happens when Santiago is reached. After four days in the city, four days punctuated by greeting pilgrims we’d met on the way, we caught our train to Vigo and then our sleeper to Barcelona. For the medieval pilgrim, of course, there was no quick way home. They had to turn tail and simply walk - or ride - back. For them, the shell of St James, collected from the shores of Galicia or from the markets of Santiago, meant they had arrived. It meant that they were returning. Today, it has become the badge of the pilgrims as they make their way west.

Needs became simpler. Whether or not there was cold water to drink, whether there was hot water to shower and to wash clothes. We did not read a newspaper or watch tv for days.

We learned to find our way by smell, and to walk in the dark. In the dark hour before dawn, we rarely stumbled. The path almost glowed, as if back-lit. Now and again we would flicker the torch for a clue, a pointed, a yellow arrow: the soft geometry of distance.

From almost the first day, the situation was perfect for connoisseurs of smell. Especially, in fact, during the early morning, when the apparatus is most effective, just as a photographer’s talents are most effective when the light is available in slices. We noticed, at that time of day, how much the butchers’ smelt of blood, how the night-bakeries, already open, smelt of heat; how after a shower, the ditches smelt of herbs, how the path itself seemed to smell of concrete and plasticine, a little sour. One day, I smelt the goats before I saw the herd, almost a mile away. Straw being turned in the sun smelt distinctly of fish. Hundred of miles later, in Galician farmyards, their spectrum of smells carried me right back to holidays in Devon, to the days before motorways, when the family would break the drive from London with a bed and breakfast stop near Bere Regis.

So, after all this, León came as rather a shock. There’s noise, of course, and the cathedral is a revelation, like some kind of computer-generated graphics package. Not just the polychrome harmonies of the famous windows, but also the pure darkness in between. After the monotonous adobe brown of the badlands, this was gourmet. The sheer thrill of it.

The camino guidebooks pay too little attention to geology. Beneath the rolling wheat-lands were distinct limestone shelves, occasionally broken away to reveal white, glistening quartz, run through with tiny seams of what was obviously not actually gold. Now and again, elsewhere, pilgrims had re-arranged rocks beside the path, maybe into balanced heaps, maybe into arrows and lettering. Sometimes, huge boulders had become foundations for enormous cairns. At a wood-chipper’s by a motorway, a thousand simple crosses were threaded in the fence.

I wore football shirts. They are designed, these days, to cope with sweat and effort; they breathe well; they keep their colour; they wash easily and dry quickly. Perfect. They are almost worth the fabulous sums they cost.

I was surprised not to meet more pilgrims in football shirts. I met two, a couple from Madrid who were wearing German national football shirts.

I did not buy new shirts. I chose my favourite West Ham shirt - bought during a hiatus between sponsors when they sold a shirt without an advert on it, very classy - and my Spain shirt from the World Cup before last when I thought they were going to win it. They didn’t. They lack the will. The Spanish team - the selección - only gets a lukewarm following from the Spanish because the Basques want a Basque team and the Galicians want a Galician team and the Catalans want a Catalan team.

I alternated shirts. The West Ham one for me, for where I’d come from, as it were, and the Spain shirt for Spain.

But it wasn’t as simple as that. When the German-shirt-wearing Spaniards came up to me in my Spain shirt, they said, ‘Are you German?’, I said, no, I was English. Were they Spanish? And, yes, they were. We needed a German in a David Beckham shirt to make any swap work out or to complete the matrix. We soon moved on to sharing our views on the extreme practicality of football shirts. The Spanish couple had only one shirt each: they relied on being able to wash and dry them each night as they wore their afternoon clothes, and that they’d be ready to wear the next day.

They liked the Spain shirt. The man in Viana, in Navarra, didn’t. He shouted ‘You Spanish whore!’ at me until I approached him and asked him what the problem was.

They didn’t like the shirt in Galicia, either. I tried to buy a Celta Vigo shirt in Sarria, and I tried again in Arzúa. They had no shirts except Real Madrid in Sarria, and they only had one Vigo shirt in Arzúa and that wasn’t in my size. I quite wanted a Vigo shirt, because it has St James’ red cross on the crest and that seemed right for a pilgrim. But it really wasn’t my size. The shop had one Vigo shirt; the rest were all Real Madrid.

In Arzúa we stayed in an old-fashioned hotel with a bar and a dining-room on the ground floor, and a washing line outside the window. In the evening after Mass - in our afternoon clothes- we went down to the bar for a drink. Young white wine was decanted into plain glass bottles from one of four huge barrels and then served in small, white ceramic cups - tazas - which you sipped and gulped at. Four big men were drinking noisily at the bar. It was a Saturday night. They sang songs, told long, rude stories and short jokes. The barman was laughing and the two prim women at the bar’s one table were frowning but then ordering more wine and staying put.

We praised the wine, and one of the boozing men said that barrel number two was the best, and he organised it for us to have some of that. The barman filled a bottle with it, and then emptied the bottle at random by moving along the bar filling any tazas which were visible.

At the end, we tried to pay. The barman - whose wife ran the hotel and the dining-room - painstakingly explained the situation. The first four rounds were on the house; this gentleman had paid for our last two rounds. We owed nothing. We thanked everyone and shook hands and went, rather woozily, to bed. They wished us good night in German.

Next morning, at six o’clock, we left the hotel and crossed the town. We had decided, for a change, to take breakfast in the square where the bar would be open. We had a shortish day ahead of us, and we were getting close to Santiago now. In the breakfast bar were the four boozy drinkers. I asked them if they’d had any sleep at all. No, they said: drinking. They did a gesture with their thumb shaped like a porro and a throwing back of the head. Drinking.

Then they noticed the Spain shirt. One of them cried out that we were not in Spain, and started a song with a big tune and a lyric which was just a list of Galician place names: Vigo, Pontevedra, A Coruña and so on. Another got out his cigarette lighter, lit it and held it two centimetres from the Juan Carlos crest on my chest and said he wanted to burn the shirt there and then.

I was not fazed. I told them it was their fault. You couldn’t buy a Galician shirt in their shops. Why were there so many Real Madrid shirts and so few Vigo shirts?

They knew the answer to this. Because Real Madrid was the best team in the world.

So I abandoned that line of reasoning, and asked which country it was that I was in; was it Portugal, then? There was a rather horrid silence, and the lighter was lit again. No, this was not Portugal, it was Galicia. I was just about to ask about whether Franco - born in Galicia - had been a Galician or a Spaniard, when one of them ordered my breakfast for me and offered to pay for it. This time I didn’t let him.

Quite the opposite with the West Ham shirt, by the way. Lots of people from all sorts of countries took the opportunity to tell me what a wretched season West Ham had had last year, and a man in Molinaseca cried out, ‘Bobby Moore, Bobby Moore!’ When he came up to me, he recited the names of the team which had won the World Cup in 1966. And it was a lot more comfortable, too, the West Ham shirt, looser under the arms. It was the West Ham shirt I was wearing as I entered Santiago.

We completed the camino on the 18th of August, 2003.

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