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...!
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.
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