Friday, May 10, 2013

Dear diary, I know that plagiarism is wrong.

I know that the "worst album cover" phenomenon is almost as old as the interweb itself, so please accept my humble apologies for doing what has already been done many, many times. But the thing is, I was so mad at that spotty, spying little youth Zuckerberg* this week that my keyboard is still smoking from what I've written about him, so I'm all out of fresh words.

You get the picture. I needed a little cheering up. And the true time-waster understands empowerment, see? You can't just accept other people's "best of" lists. You have to get off your lilywhites and go and find your own. So I did a little Google search of retro album covers and decided on the ones *I* liked best. Enjoy. From Pooh-Man to Peeing Millie, Heino "Norman Bates" Motherlover to Lonely Mr Dead Buddies and Cody the Feeling-Borrower...these guys are beyond words. So I'm just going to leave you with the pictures. (Click on the pics for larger versions.)




*Happy birthday, asshole. Yes, he turns 26 today. Someone stick his head in the cookie dough, please. Thanks.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Almost almost

I have been as silent as the grave, lost in the land technology forgot. Reception has been intermittent and internet non-existent. So I am going to do my best to tell all the most important details of the last week.

Firstly, I always suspected Henry Higgins was a bit of a twit, and this week I have proof, as i am now in a position to tell you that the rain in Spain does not fall mainly on the plain, but in fact in the mountains of Galicea and, more specifically, into my sleeping bag. Unfortunately it has not drowned the spider that made a meal of my legs for three days running and which I *cannot* find although I swear I have seen the little critter running around on my bag during the day. My thighs are covered in welts bigger than R5 coins and some of them are so swollen that my one pantleg is tight, and when the little bugger got hold of my face, I couldn´t open my right eye for two days. Of course, I am sure your mother told you that you should never scratch an itchy-bite, and she was right. Unfortunately hiking for 8 hours a day means chafing, which delivers very similar results to relentless scratching. I am. going. mad. with the itch. I went into a 24 hour pharmacy and had the pharmacist in stitches with my wordless impression of a spider biting a hiker, but the pharmacist got more value out of that visit than me. I have been slathering myself in crema alergica till the cows come home (and trust me, there are a lot of cows in this area) but to no avail. I still itch. And let me tell you, if that little miscreant takes ONE more bite out of me, so help me, I am revising my no-kill policy.

More on the rain: this area is weird. The scenery is very like the Western Cape, but the weather like Gauteng. It is (there is no English expression for this) BLOEDIG warm during the day but each afternoon, like clockwork, a thunderstorm comes down. Being a bit of a tardy starter in the mornings, and prone to leisurely lunches, I am often still on the road at this time but I don´t mind, because honestly, being caught in the rain is a welcome relief from the heat. The only time it was really a problem was when I was heading for Ponferrada, the last city on the Camino route before Santiago - and I had to stock up on food, airtime and toiletries. I also had to get there that day, because it was a Saturday and all the shops are closed on a Sunday. That was the day I visited the Iron Cross, and the scenery had been so beautiful that I cheerfully ignored the sounds of thunder heading in my direction from midday onwards. Denial can only get you so far, however, and I´m afraid even I paused for thought when it started hailing on me. I must have looked sufficiently wet and desperate when I got down to Molinaseca (a very, very beautiful village near Ponferrada) and I went to the nearest shop to see if I could get what I needed there instead. I couldn´t, but the shop owner was so, so lovely. He phoned a taxi from his mobile (because mine still had no credit on it) and explained what I needed so that I would not have to mime it all again in my awkward mixture of Spanish and charades. He then gave up his chair so I could sit out of the rain and went inside to make me a sandwich, which he refused to charge me for, and sent me on my way with the taxi driver, who took me to within a block of everything I needed and explained to me where to go.

Less kind was the reception I got last night, when I again got caught in the rain - and the village that I walked to had no accommodation left (the receptionist did not break the news gently either). Several km on, the hostel I wound up at was, not to put too fine a point on it, a hole, but I was too desperate to turn it down. I think these people rely a little too heavily on the ´any port in a storm´ philosophy, because goodness knows how else they make a living. They charged what the loveliest guesthouses on the route have charged me, but they were rude and snooty and the place was falling apart - for example, the cupboard door, which was no longer on the cupboard, was casually propped up against the bedroom wall and taking up most of the room; and I am pretty sure this troublesome arachnid crawled into my pants while I was there. The owners charged about double what any other place does for a breakfast that was - welll - toast, and asked me to leave the dining room before I was finished supper because, I quote, they wanted to clean the table and go to bed. They looked most put out when I explained that I wanted to finish what I had paid for. Incidentally, I arrived at this place dripping wet and carrying 13kg of luggage, but after I paid for the room the receptionist left me standing there, sopping and holding all my stuff, while she went for a cigarette. When I asked her to please show me my room she put out her cigarette with a terribly martyred air and all but threw the keys at me. Interestingly, the whole sorry bunch of them developed amazingly good manners when dealing with Spanish people. I bristled, and I´m afraid when I left this morning I gave them a good wholesome Afrikaans greeting like my dad taught me*. It was terribly satisfying. I do wonder, though, why in heaven´s name one goes into the hospitality industry if you do not like people. Surely if your disposition is sour and solitary you do what I did and choose a profession where you can lock yourself in your office and ignore everybody. It makes no sense to do otherwise.

Anyway. I don´t really want to dwell on them. With the exception of Hostel de Kaka, the main theme of the last week has been the kindness of strangers. I have met many lovely people and, as a sad testament to growing up in a city, have at first glance suspected every last one of them of being a serial killer. I have had to learn to trust, though, because more than once I have been helped out of a tight spot. The first was the shopkeeper in Molinaseca, but there were others. On a mountain outside Astorga a man named David had set up a stall with fresh fruit, nuts and juice which he gives to tired pilgrims for free - any donations are voluntary. I didn´t speak to him much, but a woman I met yesterday, named Danielle, told me he is part of an international society of people who want to create points of sharing all over the world, where people can pay if they can, but don´t have to if they can´t. I think this is both eccentric and wonderful.

In Astorga itself I got horribly, frighteningly lost. It´s a fair-sized town and my landlady had kindly dropped me off at the supermarket to get supplies. Unfortunately from Astorga to Ponferrada the waymarking on the camino is *terrible* and on my way back, I lost the route completely. I wandered for three hours. By ten pm I was frantic, all corners were starting to look the same, and my passport etc were all at the hostel, the name of which was about a foot long and in Spanish and which I could not remember. Naturally I did the sensible thing and sat down on the pavement, hauled out my shopping and ate my supper, reasoning that the middle of the road was as good a place as any and that being lost would probably feel better on a full stomach. It did. And what do you know, I felt in my pocket and found a crumpled receipt. I tried the details printed on it and, miraculously, it was not the week-old till slip I expected but the number of the hostel I´d checked into that day. The landlady kindly came to fetch me and took me back to the hostel (which, frustratingly, turned out to be only about 200m from where I had given up and phoned her) and then, as an extra treat, drove me to see the beautiful Astorga cathedral and take some photographs against the night sky (pictured in previous post).
In Villafranca being lost was weirder. Some of these hamlets are really eerie, like ghost towns really, with the buildings all but unchanged since medieval times. Often you can walk through an entire village and not see a single sign of life. Villafranca wasn´t quite that dead at first, but I went out for supper and by the time I had finished eating it was dark and the streets - which I was so sure I´d taken note of - just all looked identical. I walked and walked and walked - trust me, it is possible to walk for longer than you think in a village that is only 3cm wide - and the more I went in circles the more confused I got. I eventually sat down in a little heap and cried because I was SO tired and just wanted to go to bed, when out of nowhere three Alsatians came wandering up the lane and sat next to me. It was quite an eerie and beautiful moment, these three big dogs and the moon shining down on the grass and the river and the cobbles, and I just stayed with them a bit. After a while I saw a light come on in one of the streets nearby and I ran at speed to catch the only person in the whole town who seemed to be awake/alive, who saw dogs, tearful me, and the general signs of meltdown, and made me chamomile tea and patted my hair a lot while I tried to describe the hotel in increasingly pathetic Spanish. By this time it was nearly midnight but he walked me home and said I should not feel stupid, which was nice of him, all things considered.

The Iron Cross. I don´t really know what to say about this. Firstly, something I am learning is that everything anyone tells you about the Camino is a lie. This ranges from what you should pack to who you meet, how you should behave, how you should feel, how you should do it, what it costs and the road itself. People are weirdly prescriptive and like to tell you things as though they are gospel (many of which turn out to be nonsense, debatable or non-applicable). The Iron Cross represents the highest point on the whole journey, but really, there are steeper climbs before and after, and the cross itself is not really on a peak. So the height wasn´t what struck me, and nor was the climb. What is huge is the cairn of stones at its foot. People leave everything from bandanas to photographs to scarves to jewellery to letters and, of course, stones. Some of these stones have messages written on them, some nothing. One was just labelled ´Mom´ which I found unbearably sad. There are weathered teddy bears and blankets that I presume have been carried from someone´s childhood to that point. I would have liked to stay there for a long time, but it was hard to get a moment alone in-between the busloads of tourists who came tearing in just long enough to pose for a photo and then get back into their bus. I found this sad, too. Of all the people I saw there, I was the only one who left a stone, which I thought was nice, because maybe only people who have actually walked the route actually take the trouble to leave stones. Which let me think: every stone on this pile represents somebody´s life up to here. I left four for my family (two quartz for healing) and a necklace that had wound up in my possession during the camino - a story too long to tell here.

I have been thinking about the judgement on cyclists and bus travellers though, and interrogating the reasons for it (in myself also). Maybe I was only justifying my choice to take a taxi, but I am starting to think that Camino purists are really full of #@!# - the ones who think it´s sacrilege to take a bus for part of the way or to stay in a hostel instead of an albergue or whatever. Because I was thinking about it and realised that if a medieval pilgrim had been caught in the rain and passed some bloke on a horse who offered him a lift, he would not refuse it unless he really was an idiot. The same applies to more comfortable places to stay; it is only the luxury of our lives that allows us to insist on making martyrs of ourselves on holiday. A starving pilgrim in the year twelve-hundred-voetsek would not be in a position to turn up his nose at anything that might make his journey easier. Some of the guide books are terribly critical of the new government-sponsored senda pathways, which are called (among other things) ´soulless´ - in a way I understand this, because they lack the history of the older paths. But at the same time, the route is constantly evolving (that´s part of the point, isn´t it) and surely once upon a time the historic pathways were also new  - in fact, many of the guide books pay homage to those who sponsored the fixing and upgrading of the roads over the centuries. So it seems silly to turn up one´s nose at today´s government sponsorship, when in a hundred years it will amount to the same thing. Personally, I think it´s nice that the government is engaging.

Some more misinformation: the woman who first told me about the Camino told me that after the Iron Cross the path was all ´easy downhill into Santiago´. I am not sure how many vats of fine Spanish wine she put away before she came to that conclusion, because some of the hardest climbs - steeper than the Pyrenees and over longer distances - come after the Iron Cross, and one gains a great deal of altitude (there are also some *very* steep downhills, which I would not classify as ´easy´, owing to the probability of falling flat on one´s face every three steps). On the flip side, one is also rewarded with some of the most spectacular scenery. I could not believe my eyes - everywhere you look the mountain is covered in purple and yellow flowers, and there is just *nothing* around you except valley after valley after valley and peak after peak after peak - flowers up close, snow in the distance. It is *beautiful*. On the day I climbed to the Iron Cross and back, I passed three trotting horses and was watching the sun go down when a rock rabbit came bouncing across my path and stopped to eat a dandelion. It is at moments like this that it almost feels unreal - that it could even be possible to find so much unspoiled landscape in one place; it feels like a fairytale.

One last thing before I go - early yesterday I passed the 700km mark. This means about 50km left before Santiago, and then a further 100km to Finisterre. Oddly enough, when I passed the bollard that showed the kilometres, I realised for the first time what I had done and had a peculiar retrospective panic attack. It was as though I could not actually grasp the concept of walking several hundred kilometres until I had done it. And then when it sank in, I freaked out. I looked around me and realised - properly - that I was alone in the middle of absolutely nowhere with no reception and not the ghost of a town or in fact another living soul for miles; I thought about the distance and flipped. I was standing there frozen like a moron when it occurred to me that having done 700 of 900km it seemed a pity to waste it, and that having done it I obviously could; so I pulled myself together and kept walking. But it was daunting.

There is more to say. But I won´t exhaust you :) I´m starting to feel excited to come home and - I won´t lie - I look forward to a bath and clean clothes. I´m hoping to hit Santiago a day early, so that I can really explore it. 

* Visit to Paris in 1996, when he gave a restauranteur a benevolent smile and said ´Jou moer ook, Meneer.´

Wir haben unsere Rache

The Germans got me. Well, one in particular. I met a vomiting Fraulein in Caldazilla, made the mistake of spending some time with her explaining how to get to the health centre (her Spanish was even worse than mine) and for my sins have spent two days horizontal in Sahagun, chained to the loo. Today I decided I couldn´t waste more time and if I was going to go down I could at least go down in style and explore some other loos in the area, so took a taxi to the next stop, Mansilla de las Mulas (somethingorother of the mules).

I am doing better and am probably well enough to walk but was just a little worried because the guidebook warns that this is one of the most remote stretches of the Camino, with no town, no stop, no water fountain, NOTHING, for almost 30km, and I lost everything I ate for two days so wasn´t feeling hugely energetic. And I thought well, if I do get sick en route, that won´t be so much fun. So at least tomorrow if I walk to Leon and find I´m not doing so great, I can stop in one of the towns on the way. Nonetheless I do feel a little guilty and found myself crumpling a little when the taxi driver kindly wished me buen Camino and asked if I wanted to sleep in an albergue. I clung to my honour and, like a good martyr, insisted on paying for a hotel (on the plus side, the loo here really is very pretty. it has the smallest bathtub I have ever seen - the size of your average shower. an adult can more or less sit down in it).

Something I am finding is that as the Camino route goes on, it helps to be flexible about where you stay, and also where you stop. More and more pilgrims join the route at its later stages, which means that if you are following the standard 33 stages in the guide books, you are more than likely to find that entire towns are booked out without a single place to stay. So it helps either to stop at places that aren´t recommended, or to be willing to pay for anywhere that will give you a bed. That said, you should be careful how you phrase this last bit; I found out the hard way that it can be taken as an attempt at bribery.

Two towns ago I arrived fairly early nogal, and not only were the albergues all booked out, the town´s hostels were too. The third hostel I stopped at suggested an alternative hostel on the other end of town; I walked there and it, too, was full. So I wandered around until I found another hostel, where the receptionist took pity on me and said although they were full, she would phone around. So she did, found a place that have space gave me directions, I followed them...and ended up at the same jolly hostel that sent me away in the first place. I was livid. The receptionist again claimed they were full and I tried to get out of her why she then told the *other* receptionist on the phone that there was still space.

I then asked if there was anywhere else I could stay, explaining that I did not care what it cost; the receptionist seemed offended by this and said that I should ´please not say that, it is lowly.´ By this time I was so frustrated I sommer burst into tears and was THIS CLOSE to asking her how she would feel if someone lectured her about dignity after she´d walked 30km and been chased in circles for an hour, when in mid-tantrum, a woman came driving past who happened to offer private accommodation (she had another two exhausted-looking pilgrims in the back seat). I leaped into her car and it was the best thing I could have done. The accommodation turned out to be absolutely *gorgeous* self-catering apartments with everything that opens and shuts, fully equipped kitchen, lounge, balcony, the works, and *right* on the Camino route...for 30 euros per person. I danced a little jig all over the apartment and cooked and laundered till the cows came home.

Other random observations that need a home:

* There are literally hundreds of small worms on the Camino route. I have tried very hard not to step on them. This is because I find them weirdly poignant. It struck me early on that all these worms are walking horizontally *across* the Camino pathway, and that in worm-kilometres this means the poor little buggers are doing a Camino all of their own each day plus they have hundreds of enormous boots to avoid in the process, and that maybe it is important not to be careless with them.

* Less affection-inspiring are the millions of miggies that have a special talent for flying at speed into the exact place you do not want them, for example your mouth or, more painfully, your eye. The funny thing is that when you put sunglasses on, the same phenomenon occurs as when bugs hit the windshield, and the end of the day finds one wiping your glasses clean in the same way you would your car window after a long journey.

* The day the earthquake hit Spain, some old men in a one-horse village trod on my toes to check if they were real and actually did fill my boots, then debated animatedly how I had grown them so large. I was tempted to steal J´s joke and say, Look I have big feet okay, it´s not my fault I took my boots off and caused an earthquake. I *said* I was sorry.

* After tomorrow, I will officially no longer be in the back end of nowhere. This stretch of the Camino inspires some madness and a little sniggering in pilgrims and is known by some as ´the valley of death´ (or some similarly ominous name). Before I got the stomach bug, the great event of my day, 18km in, was when I passed a bench. The day before, at six, a horse whinnied. A Brit soldier I met said darkly: ´You were lucky to get that. We missed it.´

* Every time I travel, I am reminded that South Africans really do live in the most beautiful country on earth. No matter how beautiful the countryside in other places, I always love it the most when it reminds me of home.

* The Spanish are currently in the midst of an election drive. In practice, this means a giant party bus goes careening through the villages in the evenings, blaring carnival music and propaganda. Interestingly, the posters for the various parties all look identicial except for the face of the candidate (barring one adventurously branded hot pink party) - all in variations of red, grey and blue, looking solemn, dependable and reliable (except the pink party, which just looks gay). These rather dreary posters are not only almost impossible to differentiate, they are also in utterly bizarre contrast to the antics of the evening party bus. I´m telling you, someone needs to teach these fellows about branding.

* Speaking of careening. The bakers here could give our minibus taxi drivers a run for their money. In one particularly tiny town, where the streets are all narrower than in Obs, I was nearly run over by a spiky-haired man-lady-person whose hooter went bellowing through the streets. I was about to start swearing at him/her when doors in the neighbourhood started opening and little old ladies came pouring out in their droves. I risked a peek into the bus and saw - to my fascination and slight dismay - that it was piled chock-full of bread. I don´t mean the bread was wrapped and stacked neatly. I mean uncovered breads were bouncing around in the van and when I say they were lying everywhere I mean *everywhere*. Breads piled on the passenger seat, breads toppling over onto the floor. And all the little old ladies rush out, mingepla, and fondle the various breads to decide which to take. Leaving the losing breads in a lovely hygienic pile on the floor of the van.

* My experience of the history here is patchy. The guide books offer some insight, but despite being quite touristy, the Camino isn´t really geared towards people who don´t have a solid understanding of Spanish. All the signs and plaques are in Spanish only, except in Viana, where I had my first real experience of *feeling* the history of the place. This is partly because the village proudly announces its history in multiple languages, but also because the medieval quarter of the village itself is largely unchanged, and it shows. The albergue is an ancient, draughty monastery - you are literally staying where pilgrims have stayed for thousands of years before you (I did think drily that I could tell by the mattress).

As you wander through the village Viana, you become aware of a fierce pride that the area has in its association with the Borgias, announcing proudly that to this day, many of the faces of Jesus in artwork are modelled on the face of Cesar Borgia. This disturbed me a little, not least because as I remember it, the Borgias were a bunch of nasty bastards who ruled through a gruesome cocktail of bribery and poisoning their enemies, but also because I seem to remember that by his thirties, Cesar was severely disfigured by the scars of violence and numerous venereal diseases (not to mention strong suggestions that he murdered his brother and had an incestuous affair with his sister, who, like him, was the illegitimate child of Pope Alexander XI). Actually, the Borgias were a fascinating bunch - I also seem to remember, vaguely, that Alexander had a rather patchy allegiance to the laws of the Catholic Church, choosing, for example, to have two of his daughter´s husbands murdered because the Church frowned on divorce. I would have liked to explore Viana more if there had been time.

Now it is time for me to be off again. I met a fascinating hospitalera in Caldazilla (the same place I caught the stomach bug for my sins - or it *might* have been the egg sandwich I carried in my bag for two days...) who gave me a foot massage and diagnosed all my personality problems to three decimal places into the bargain. She said, among other things, that my feet indicate an unwillingness to go with my intuition, and that I try too hard to feel what I think I´m supposed to feel, instead of just feeling what I *actually* feel. This is true of most people, I think; we should all try to remember the lesson as, according to her, the flaw in feeling impacts our stability (literally and emotionally).

So, following my nose, I´m going to spend the afternoon exploring Mansilla de las Mulos. It is a small village, so this should not take very long. Ha ha.

From the hills of Piazza del Kaka sin Internetto

Well. I have been getting a bit lazy about updating. It is partly because I have just generally been feeling more and more solitary, and partly because everything does not seem so strange anymore, so I don´t feel that pressed to comment on it - I can save up my news. But it´s also because I´ve been heading through the back end of absolutely nowhere and internet access has been thin on the ground. Even in cities, because in the towns I´ve opted to stay in pensions or hostels rather than albergues, and these often don´t have internet access at all.


In the beginning I often stayed in pensions because they offered oneprivacy (and rooms without snorers) at prices not significantly higherthan those of the albergues (pilgrim dormitories). For a clean room of your own it will cost you about 20 euros, which is about twice tothree times the price of the albergues, but that is still not much andtrust me, it is worth it. In any case, one saves a lot of one´s budget if you are cooking your own food, like I am (the time came when I COULD NOT do another bocadillo - a kind of ever-present long white roll that comes with ham and cheese usually, only there is something different about the ham here. For starters, the Spanish seem to thinka roll with more bread than fat is a roll wasted, with the result that one day I ordered what I *thought* was a ham and cheese roll - the white layers I took to be nice calcium-enriched dairy were in fact layers of pig fat. I honestly gagged when I took my first bite. There is indulgent fat (chocolate, fudge) and then there is just plain gross fat. This was the latter kind.)

Anyway, most of the pilgrim hostels will charge you about 10 euros fora ´menu de peregrino´- a pilgrim meal, which firstly is only served at about 8 or 9pm, by which time I am ready to gnaw my own arms off, and which secondly just isn´t that good. There´s usually a bottle of good wine involved, but the food itself is usually deep-fried starch dipped in battered yummo de carb, topped with bottled ketchup and not a vegetable in sight. A good example is that you´ll be served a mountain of pasta with a blob of tomato sauce as your starter, and your´vegetable´ in the next course will be slap chips. I can make myself amuch tastier meal for much less - 10 euros can feed me for three days. The down side, of course, is that I have to lug a week´s groceries over the mountaintops, because shops only happen once in a while. But again, it is worth it. Carbo-loading is all well and good in its place, but I really don´t think one´s body can be expected to do its best for the most strenuous two months of its life without getting in a LITTLE protein and fresh greens. Surely?

One of the people who disagrees is a friend I made yesterday, anaffable Frenchman named Nicolas, whose backpack is so light that -seriously - I lifted it with one finger. (When he saw mine, he was so horrified he just shook his head and refused to pick it up, saying hedid not even want to know.) At first I was a little taken aback by himbecause I was walking out of Burgos by myself when he just fell into step with me and started telling me all about his shiny re-soled shoes and how happy they made him. At first I thought he was a bit odd but then I thought, ag, pots and kettles, and anyway he turned out to be very nice, so I walked with him for the whole afternoon - a good thing, in the end, because he speaks much more Spanish than me and was able to arrange an alternative place for us to stay when there was no more room at the town´s only albergue. As it happened, we were not the only people with this problem, and a further four stranded pilgrims turned up later. Unfortunately there were only six beds for seven people, and Nicolas had a fit of good manners and slept in the garden(I didn´t suffer the same urge and stuck to my bunk like chewing gum to hair). I felt sorry for him though; he spent the first month of his Camino camping and had been terribly excited to sleep in an actual bed. He walked from Le Puy and does about 40km per day, which meant that when he got to St Jean, where I started, he was already halfway.(Apparently at some stage when he was in the French mountainside his girlfriend took pity on him and came to see if he was ok. She washed his T-shirt seven times before pronouncing it too filthy to rescue, gave up and went home, though presumably it was the countryside, and not the T-shirt, that defeated her.)

I also ran into Manuela, the Belgian lady, and her autistic daughter whose name I can *not* remember for the life of me - and I don´t liketo ask again. I walked with them for a while, too, but they only do 10km a day and send their luggage with a bus service, so we weren´t together very long. Manuela is not really in this for the exercise so she has taken the bus more than once. The last time I saw her, she coughed voluptuously over a hand-rolled filterless cigarette and snorted that she was considering flying to Santiago. All things considered, I think this is not a bad idea. But her daughter is coping well and seems to be ok with all the people around her; when she said goodbye to me, she even gave me a hug, which I found very touching.

These are the only people whose names I actually remember. The painful racist Durbanite* has presumably walked all the way back to Durban by now and I don´t know the others´ names either. Conversation works differently here; people don´t ask your name and what you do. They ask where you walked from, how heavy your pack is, and how many kilometres you did that day. Interestingly, there are a lot of Koreans doing the Camino this year, and a lot of South Africans, and I swear there are more Germans here than in Germany. I met one young Japanese boy. And of course there are many Spanish - for many pilgrims it seems to be a family affair that they undertake together. What is humbling is thatt here are almost no young people - the overwhelming majority is madeup of retirees who, despite being twice my age, are also twice as hardy (and some are twice as fast). May we all grow older so
energetically...!

The albergues: at the moment I alternate between sleeping in dormitories and sleeping alone. I sleep better when I am in a private room, but I am also trying to avoid becoming too insular. I am already a bit over-solitary, so I am trying not to disappear into a space where I forget other people exist altogether. As the Camino goes on,more and more people join the route, but in the early stages, Isometimes went several days without seeing - or speaking to - a single living soul (barring to hand over money to the receptionist wherever I was staying) and I began to worry that I might start talking inTarzan-style grunts. The albergues are also good because there is usually a kitchen where one can cook and a washroom where you can do your day´s laundry (though I am sorry to say that after a certain amount of time on the road it just feels as though *nothing* gets clean anymore). But the one thing I cannot handle is the snorers. Yes, I-fall-asleep-standing-up-in-a-nightclub-listening-to-drum-and-bass person has found her Waterloo. The girl who can fall asleep in a plane, in a train, in a club, on a toilet seat cannot stand thesound of snoring. It does not matter how tightly I wedge in my earplugs or how faint the sound is. I hear it and I want to punch things. It is quite irrational. With the result that if I spend too much time in the albergues, my walking goes down the toilet owing tolack of sleep. So every few nights I indulge myself in a private room.

I don´t want this post to go on forever, so I will save the interesting titbits about the towns I have walked through for the next post (some of the history here is amazing - ranging from a walled town in Navarre where the fearsome Borgias are still commemorated on everycorner to a convent where the nuns cured skin diseases by meditating on love, and a medieval village built around a wine fountain, where the monks have obligingly pumped vino to the public since the 1100s).But all that can wait for next time. In the meantime, the last piece of news is that I am now on a flat stretch of land that will last about 10 days and will enable me to really pick up speed. I´m considering stepping up the pace and extending my hike to Finisterre, which is 100km beyond Santiago and literally means ´the end of the earth´. This is the coast where the medieval monks and pilgrims would go and burn their clothes and wash themselves clean in the sea, symbolising the end of their old life before their pilgrimage.Needless to say, the poetry of this appeals to me enormously and although it means I may have to sacrifice the visit to Madrid, I think it might be worth it. Turns out the sea pulls me more strongly than the original Guernica. (This leaves me both surprised and totally unsurprised.) Here, for anyone who´s interested, are some pictures of the point at Finisterre.

* A highly-strung, rather embarrassing woman I met a few towns ago,who is running the Camino as though it is a marathon and made me ashamed to be South African. She immediately attacked a perfectly harmless Korean man about gender equality in his country. I felt badfor him so said neutrally, well, things in South Africa aren´t allthat great either - domestic violence is rife. She looked at me nonplussed and said: ´Yes, but those are the blacks.´ This same woman is trying to race through the whole Camino in 29 days and works herself up into a froth over each moment she isn´t power-walking, andI *immediately* decided that if I have to crawl the whole route with a beer in each hand, I will NOT do it like her.

O eina nee

Oi vey! Today I did NOT want to get up. It was a rainy Sunday in Estella, I had my own room with a real bathroom, and I was stationed right opposite the first supermarket I have seen in two weeks, and call me a spoilt city brat but I just wasn´t in the mood to give up my creature comforts that fast. I pulled the duvets over my head until almost 10am and only got going at 10:30, which was optimistic considering that the day´s walk was budgeted to take about 6 - 7 hours. But I didn´t care. I was grumpy and also, for the first time, quite homesick and lonely. I think it had a lot to do with the weather; I felt like I should be eating something that wasn´t trail mix, drowning myself under a mountain of DVDs and drinking hot chocolate with someone who, if not family or a close friend, at the very minimum spoke English. (How my standards have dropped.) But I eventually got going and the day´s walk was BEAUTIFUL. It stopped raining but stayed blessedly cool and I walked past a town where I swear I want to live - I can´t remember its name, but there is a wine fountain in the middle of the town square. Yes, a wine fountain. Like other towns have water fountains. You go in, take your cup and fill it up with nice vino which is brewed 100% gratis en verniet by the dedicated town monks (clearly men with a good Christian conscience). They have been doing this since the 1100s, which shows more good sense than I would have suspected. The rest of us could learn something from them.

The rest of the day took me through farmlands and vineyards, and was mercifully a bit less hilly (read: mountainous) than the last week. It was really pretty. I also felt a bit more sociable so instead of running away every time I saw another pilgrim, I greeted them and chatted a bit. Of course, one has the advantage of conveniently being unable to speak the language when you start wanting to be alone. It´s a good system. Although I met one very nice woman in um dammit whatsitcalled, something with a C Menor??, anyway, not that it really matters. I met her; she was travelling with her 20-year-old daughter who is autistic, and she is doing it for two main reasons: firstly to spend some time alone with her daughter and see what they can learn from each other, and secondly because she´s been living with her older daughter in Belgium for a year to help raise her grandchildren, but now she´s decided to walk all over Europe - Spain, Portugal, sommer everywhere - to decide where she will live next. I think this is wonderful. The same lady was later propositioned by a very friendly gentleman in his sixties who bluntly asked her if she was going to sleep in his dorm that night. When she said no, she would be staying in the women´s dorm, he looked puzzled and suggested that she might prefer the garden. Ja-nee, the journey is more spiritual for some than others.

So tonight I am staying in an Austrian-run albergue, where being able to speak German helps. It´s not a bad place, but I am sharing with another 12 people tonight so please hold thumbs that they all know that one should never sleep on your back if you are prone to snoring (I feel like printing this on my T-shirt and showing every pilgrim I pass on the road). Tomorrow I am scheduled to walk 30km on the prescribed Camino route, but I think I would prefer to stay in Viana, which is just under 20km from here (Los Arcos) and is apparently a very interesting place. (Not to mention being 10km closer.)

Other news and learnings, in no particular order:

1. I have my first blister. I have no idea what to do about this. People always say you must ´treat´ blisters immediately but oddly no one actually mentions what you are supposed to do. It is under my foot so the plastic skin has not really changed anything. I may just ignore it till it goes away (it worked on the cows).

2. It is much, much, MUCH easier to walk when you do not have to keep your poor body going on flaky pastries. I went shopping last night and found that the sense of humour failure was far less acute on a belly full of good wholegrain bread, olives and carrots. On the down side, I also ate a tin of what I hope was not cat food. It had a very inviting picture of calamari on the front but I must say the contents looked ambiguous. I was desperate enough to try it and am clinging to the knowledge that it was not called ´El Kit-o Yum - muy bien!´ Anyway, I took one for the team and now the rest of you know. If you ever come to Spain, stay away from the tinned fish.

3. I can´t remember what 3 was. I have not showered yet and the knowledge is distracting. I am sure it wasn´t that important.

4. I am going to try not to rush so much and instead frolic in meadows or whatever it is one does (I am sure I will learn). I think I´ve been taking the whole journey too fast so far.

5. I am about 640km from Santiago, I think. Aluta continua!

Think of me in rainy chilly Spain (yesterday´s heat was just teasing, it seems).

A very unpoetic update

I am finding it progressively harder to send updates, partly because as one wanders through the countryside your words tend to dry up, but also because I am generally finding it progressively harder to do anything other than eat and sleep. Especially sleep. So today will be full of more prosaic news, I´m afraid. Some of the other pilgrims - actually most of them - go out in the evenings, they cook or braai or drink together, but I can barely keep my eyes open past 7pm. I have in fact only eaten an actual supper twice since I got to Spain, because food is only available after 7.30 or even 8.30 as a rule, and by then I have usually passed out face down on the nearest horizontal surface. In fact, I have only once actually stayed awake after dark, and that was last night - because I knew today was going to be a rest day. I sleep a lot even at home - throw in eight hours of exercise a day and I´m done for.

     So, despite packing away large volumes of food, I suspect I´m actually a bit undernourished, because owing to the need for sleep a.s.a.p., I need to eat whatever is available, which is usually nothing very nutritious (my highlights so far have been two-minute microwave paella-in-a-box and a vending machine waffle). Everybody is on blooming siesta until some ungodly hour, so *every single shop* is closed when one is hungriest. It has resulted in a) frequent sense of humour failure and b) my eating some peculiar combinations.  

     That said, I have never in my life been personally responsible for the death of so many whales and pigs (pork and chocolate). There is not a vegetable in sight here. The closest you get is a chilli on your bocadillo if you are lucky. Also, because the Spanish insist on waiting until practically midnight to eat food, they must be starving by the time it arrives, because I have never in my life seen such volumes, either. The first pilgrim meal I had was in a b&b in Roncesvalles, where I only got to have dinner at NINE after walking 30km up a mountain in the rain. (I was *not* amused - the barman had told me dinner would be served in my room, and i found out after 3 hours of desperate waiting that I had to go and get it downstairs in the restaurant. I am not a violent person, but I swear I nearly threw something at his head. So much for pìlgrimage making one peaceful.) Anyhow, I was handed a giant mountain of pasta - primi-piatti sized, say - plus an entire basket of bread. I did the best I could on it (and you all know I am not a girl of shy appetites) but had to confess defeat near the end. Turns out that was the starter!!! When the waitress came to collect my plate she asked whether I would like meat or fish. I explained that I was full and was met with a look of pitying disbelief and urged to ´try the small fish´. Not wanting to be rude, I said okay, thinking I could take a bite and send it back. She brought me AN ENTIRE FISH. A whole one. Plus a whole plate of chips. I was seated with a Spanish family all doing the pilgrimage and they all ate both courses plus dessert! And wine!

Another thing. There is a LOT of wine going down here. Last night I went down to the bar to eat and was asked if I wanted wine with my meal. I said okay, and they brought me a not a glass, but a bottle. This seems to be normal. You order something to eat and get a bottle of booze with it included in the price. It seems a terrible waste to me; I hope the waiters at least take my leftovers home and drink them or something. It´s good wine, mostly (the coffee is great also: most of the time it´s nice enough that I can drink it black). 

     Other things: nobody seems too fussed about gender divisions in the hostels. I alarmed the living daylights out of a poor middle-aged gentleman by making the fatal mistake of getting changed in my room. I didn´t realise it wasn´t a women-only dorm. The hapless chap walked in, found me stark naked, and was so alarmed he looked at his feet and tried to make small talk all at the same time. It was all very British and definitely one of my weirder interactions. The only thing that would have made it more uncomfortable would have been if he could only speak Japanese. I think he was more horrified than I was and ended up having to comfort him quite a lot. 

     Tonight I am staying in a wonderful hotel that has an albergue attached at the back. This means one gets to take advantage of hotel facilities at hostel prices (this includes a massage I booked for tonight). I´m sorry to say I was not above limping a little and asking the receptionist if I could stay another day, although most hostels do not allow this. I like to think she said yes out of pity because I looked sufficiently desperate. Mind you, I actually *was* sufficiently desperate. Yesterday was very tough; I´d got sunburnt the day before and had to walk for 7 hours with backpack chafing on the burnt bits. The day before had also been strenuous: 

              a) I took a wrong turn and mistakenly walked up an entire mountain before a nice farmer at the top shook his shears at me enthusiastically and told me to go back down (I nearly cried); 

              b) I walked a longer route than the specified one for the day and ended up doing about 7km more, which doesn´t sound like much until it´s you and you actually have to do it and it´s uphill and you ate all your lunch at 10am; 

              c) I had intended to stay in Pamplona but got so sidetracked I walked through the entire town and only realised what I´d done when I was halfway to the next town (by which time it seemed silly to waste it). 

     Tomorrow I am walking from Puente de la Reine to Estella, which was founded in the 11th century as a pilgrim town. I am really looking forward to it, although as a matter of interest, I think the Spanish need to review their definition of the word ´hill´. Every day so far I have been promised I would walk up at least one ´hill´ and the *smallest* of these ´hills´ so far has been the same height as Table Mountain. Tomorrow´s ´hill´ is a little over 500m, which is about 250m less than Table Mountain. This is progress.

     However, the views have been spectacular and I have used up about 2GB just on obsessively photographing the countryside. The canola fields are in full bloom and there are poppies and red cosmos everywhere. It´s beautiful. The weather has also improved and everything smells of spring and meadow. It is like wandering through a giant perfume factory (ja I´m sure I could have found a more poetic way to say that). So far it is quite amazing what your brain comes up with if you just let your thoughts run all day; I met another pilgrim who refers to hiking as ´emptying the bin´. It really is like that, although sometimes a little disappointing to find just how similar one´s brain actually *is* to a bin - and how un-profound your thoughts are. (In that spirit, the first of my self-discoveries was that I was afraid of cows. Mercifully, there are fewer of them in this section of the route.)

      Now I am off to see if I can find an open shop (I doubt it). I am really looking forward to tomorrow; today I was so grumpy and tired, but feel a lot better now after the day´s rest. One must remember this is a holiday. Note to self.

Me versus the Pyrenees

The good news: I kicked that mountain´s butt. The bad news: it kicked back. Hard. And it took two prisoners - the honourable soldiers Left Foot and Right Foot. It was bound to happen; this morning started out with some challenges. I overslept, having mistakenly set my alarm for 7am sometime next week (not that i´m incapable of sleeping that long...) and so merrily snored away until after 8. Whoops. Sparked out of the hostel at the speed of sound and about two feet outside the door fell flat on my face and *definitely* pulled something. However. I am used to falling flat on my face several times a day, so (reasonably) undaunted, I proceeded.

the first obstacle was that i´d been to the pilgrim office to get a detailed map and directions of my route the night before, but owing to bad weather the route was closed so I had to take a detour with rapidly descending fog that obscured a lot of the landmarks and followed mostly a) a bizarre winding disorienting mountain pass that constantly seems to zigzag over where one has *just* been and where cars drive as though their bottoms are on fire and b) mountain forest paths which were staggeringly beautiful and where I did not see one other living soul (given the conditions, i could hardly blame them for staying in though).

anyhow, the detour was somewhat longer than the standard route (although thankfully marginally less steep; though that is not to say there weren´t a number of hills thrown in for our grunting pleasure). i ended up walking in the rain for 9 hours, which oddly enough was more pleasant than it sounds. on the down side, the detour didn´t have any water fountains so i was practically walking with my mouth open to catch rain. by 6pm i was belting out ABBA songs just to keep myself going (´super trouper´ was particularly rousing).

when i FINALLY arrived in roncesvalles, i saw a very homey looking building with a pilgrim symbol on it and a wonderful crackling fire and a friendly barman who looked like the type to pour a girl a whisky, so i turned off the choirs of angels singing in my head, went in and booked a bed - only smelling a rat when said bed turned out to be in an enormous solo room with gorgeous oregon pine floors, a private bathroom and two heaters. i anxiously enquired after the cost and it turns out this is not in fact the roncesvalles albuerge (which boasts dormitories with 120 beds and costs about 2c per night) but by that time i honestly did not have the moral fibre to turn down a hot bath, so i coughed up. on the down side, they only serve dinner at 8:30, which i am trying to regard as a test of my strength of character. (so far i am not very strong.)

lastly, lessons of the day:

1. trekking poles are the most amazing things ever invented and are instrumental in preventing absolute sense of humour failure;
2. the average spaniard is perfectly qualified to drive a minibus taxi in SA;
3. Three litres of water lasts about three hours on an uphill journey. Thereafter one is obliged to lick tree bark and stick one´s head in rivers in desperation;
4. When people say you do not need to speak spanish to do the camino, they lie. never in my life have i been so grateful that i pick up languages quickly, smile a lot and am comfortable with making a fool of myself. the combination of these factors has kept me fed and sheltered for a week;
5. A heavy backpack is not that big a deal. Having a clean, dry jersey on tap is way more important.

Lots of love from freezing, wet, icy mountain spain.

Leaving Barcelona: Third time's a charm

Well. After the disaster that was yesterday morning, I got onto the right train this morning and ended up in Pamplona. Why the first information officer didn´t suggest this option is beyond me, as it is by far the fastest - the train all the way through to st jean takes 9 hours and involves four changes, and you can only book two of your four tickets in advance, with only 15 min between the other two to disembark, get a new ticket, check in your baggage and get onto the next train. and if you miss it...well then your other pre-booked ticket goes to waste. while the train to pamplona is just 4 hours with no changeovers, and then a further one hour to st jean. so all in all, it would have been much better just to take a direct train to pamplona in the first place, which is in any case part of the camino route itself.

so now i am in pamplona. it being easter weekend, there isn´t much going on in the way of public transport, so when i asked the taxi driver at the train station to bring me to the bus station, he shook his head emphatically several times, got very excited, and eventually got across to me that there was no bus to st jean (the rail information officer INSISTED there was. twice). well, according to the taxi driver, there was no bus to roncesvalles either, but he only scored 1 out of 2, because roncesvalles - which is your second stop on the camino and therefore about 20km from st jean - is mercifully on the schedule today, although st jean is not (ever). so i am taking a bus at four and will just kak en betaal a taxi for the last 20km. I am now gatvol and I swear I would actually just walk there if I thought it would do any good. Camino backwards, as it were.

This city (pamplona) is beautiful and just crawling with pilgrims (these two observations are unrelated). when i get here on foot i think i will take some time to explore the city, because it seems fascinating, but having found the bus station once, i am not about to leave until i am safely on my bus and then some. this bus station, i will say, is a bleak place. it is the station colour forgot - everything is grey and there is no window in sight and i just ate the WORST sandwich in the history of sandwiches. i think someone took a scoop out of a decomposing pig, drizzled it in plastic, stuck it on a styrofoam roll and hoped for the best. but, having slept through breakfast, i did not care and probably would have eaten the plate as well if i´d had half a chance.


yesterday turned out to be absolutely magical. i had spent the morning running around trying to cancel my wasted train ticket after I missed one of the four abovementioned trains. well, actually i first sat down on the floor of Sants train station and had a good cry (in situations like this one should always cry first). i was SO frustrated as i´d been on time for the train, but the station was terribly confusing and I misunderstood the instructions on the ticket and ended up on completely the wrong platform and in fact mistakenly going through baggage check twice (it got a bit circular i must say) and i missed my train while standing two feet away from it on the other side of the glass, tearing great chunks out of my hair. well, needless to say i was in a pretty foul mood by this time and spent the best part of the rest of the morning trying to change the ticket in my broken spanish and cursing the phrase book, which usefully includes sociable phrases like ´I want to make love to you tonight´ but not, for example, words like left, right, straight, up, down, north, south, here or there. 
so basically i would have been all set if i did not want to catch a train but instead fancied some sweet, sweet love from a sour-faced train conductor. (remind me to bear this in mind next time.) once I´d changed my ticket, the rest of the morning involved trying to find an open internet cafe - well nigh impossible on public holiday - and cancelling my booking at the bed and breakfast in st jean. this, too, was an adventure since i don´t speak any french and st jean is in france. (google translate, i love you.) anyhow, i muddled through with the help of a lovely girl called Daniela and i *think* there will be room at the inn tonight.

after i´d sorted everything out admin-wise, i felt very sorry for myself so spent what is traditionally lunchtime in my hotel room with the blankets over my head (this, too, is an important part of the ritual). anyway, once I´d sat like that for about an hour i pulled myself together and tried to find some things to do in barcelona. most things were closed owing to the public holiday, and exploring was a damp business because it started pouring with rain, but undaunted I decided to try my hand at map-reading and what do you know, I got to where i wanted to be without even getting lost once. i walked for about six hours in total; i covered about as much of that city as a human being can. i walked to catalunya plaza, the city centre, and drowned my sorrows in a chocolate croissant as big as my head and a giant ´farggipuccino´ - farggi is a super-trendy deli that i grew to love because they pour liberal amounts of liquor into one´s coffee and dish out free chocolates. and let me tell you, failure tastes better when it´s washed down with fat, sugar and liquor. you can quote me on that.

after that, i wandered down to la rumbla, the longest road in barcelona
(11km) which is tailor-made for tourists and sells useful things like gaudi-inspired plastic lizards and garish heart-shaped pillows with BARCELONA written on them in gold. the souvenir i really wanted was a t-shirt that said ´I AM LOST IN BARCELONA´but they didn´t have it in the right size. more´s the pity.

it was a magical night, actually. saturday is the day of barcelona´s patron saint, and the tradition is that all the women give the men books and all the men give the women roses (i think the men score here). to give you an idea of how seriously it´s taken, the population of barcelona is about 7 million and last year, over 5 million roses were sold. when i wandered down the streets they were littered with roses and there were flower stands every 100m with everyone celebrating and buying roses for people they loved. i stayed out until after nine (it only got dark then) and explored everywhere, all the way down to the harbour, where i climbed on stone lions and ate ice cream and took photos. 
walking down la rumbla i hit a massive crowd of people that made it impossible to walk; i climbed up a pole to see what was going on and it turns out i´d caught the easter parade, which involved several gloomy-looking fellows who closely resembled the ku klux klan, only they wore black; plus a number of floats covered in flowers and a giant life-size statue of the Virgin Mary. A huge marching band was playing music and it was terribly festive. i took a million photographs and climbed up a few more poles, and eventually when it was over, i walked to the gothic quarter, which is one of the oldest parts of barcelona and boasts some of its most historic relics. this was the most special part of my evening in the end; i wandered after the smell of hot waffles and instead found, right next to a gorgeous fresh food market, something much better: the santa maria del pi, a catalan gothic church dating back to the 1300s. 
i missed a concert of rodrigo´s works, performed by spain´s leading guitarist, but arrived there bang on time for easter mass, which was something incredibly special - beautiful, peaceful singing, prayers and such a feeling of quiet. near me, a grandmother was showing a little boy the saints, and the tombs of the church´s various patrons, and he was flitting up and down with great excitement and a little reverence for good measure. i knew just how he felt and, after the service, did some flitting myself.


now i am in pamplona, patting myself on the back for sorting out some internet problems at the station here - i tried to log in and found that my mail account had been hacked and i was locked out, with all the troubleshooting pages in spanish (oops). sorting it out was a rather laborious process involving a great deal of back-and-forth, but again, google translate, i love you. and now i am going to try and find something to drink that does not involve battery fluid. (there is not a lot of good coffee in pamplona station.)


i know i say this every day, but if i do get to st jean today, you *really* won´t hear from me for a while again. honest.