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.´