Anyone
who’s walked the Camino Frances will recognise the scene: between five and six
o’clock in the morning in the crowded dormitory of an albergue. It starts with
the flashing of a torch or headlight which is soon accompanied by a fumbled
rustling as the guilty parties try to smother the sound of their packing. In
doing so, of course, they only manage to exacerbate the situation, it’s a
comedy ‘shush’ that merely serves to waken anybody who hadn’t already been
disturbed by this madragudal fracas. If I were to draw up a top-ten list of the
things I really hate about the Camino
Francés – to be honest, I’d struggle to find more than five – this would be
probably be number one. It’s not a fucking race!
Really?
The way I hacked along the penultimate 50k to Santiago two years ago you’d have
been forgiven for thinking it was the Galician marathon.
But
there’s none of that malarkey this time around, mostly because on the Ruta del Ebro there aren’t any
albergues. The only one I came across was fully booked which means
I’ve been ‘forced’ to stay in pensiones, hotels and hostales;
it’s a cross I’m learning to bear, with great sufferance, obviously.
Needless
to say it brings out the gyrovague in me. You enter your room and as soon as
the door’s safely shut you overturn your rucksack and tip its contents onto the
floor. Bliss! Yes, I know full well what the Bible says, that cleanliness is
next to godliness but I’m a feminist, postmodern, queer theologian and I
operate under a hermeneutic of suspicion so anything goes. Well, more or less.
In
the borderlands of Catalunya and Aragon, hotels and pensions are cheap but
they’re also thin on the ground; in Fabara there were precisely none, the Pension Ca Oliver having given up the
ghost and closed down. You can hardly blame Oliver, if, indeed, that was the proprietor’s
name; Fabara’s not quite a one horse town, there’s two bars, a supermercado and a dancing school but
that’s about it. Apart from the pigs.
Over
breakfast Sofía, a vet from Zaragoza, tells me that the area’s economy – and probably
her job – is based on pig-rearing. Teresa has the only rooms for rent in town,
but at 20€ a night including breakfast it’s exceptional value. Travelling vets
and pilgrims walking in the midday sun, we’re all itinerants under the skin,
and we rely on the likes of Teresa to keep us nourished and safe from the
elements.
Five
days later and everything has changed. Same country – just about – but a
different camino and a different climate: España verde, green Spain. Here it rains, de vez en cuando – from time to time; the forecast for the next few
days isn’t great, and I’m supposed to be heading into the mountains. I didn’t
time that very well, did I?
But
for the moment, in the well-to-do seaside resort of Comillas, on the Cantabrian
coast, I’ve thrown in my lot with my fellow pilgrims. I didn’t really mean it
to happen, a week of isolation on the Camino
del Ebro where I didn’t meet another pilgrim and then a gentle immersion
into the more convivial ambience of the Camino
del Norte. In Santander I came across my first pilgrims – I suppose I
really should say fellow pilgrims – loitering outside the FEVE station,
since then my integration back into the curious social oeuvre of the
contemporary pilgrim has been gentle and pleasant.
A
curious social oeuvre, a world of its own, a culture to itself. A culture that
exists only in albergues – little towers of Babel – and the paths inbetween; not
just multilingual by default but multilingual by desire. On the Camino del Norte there are far fewer
pilgrims than on the Camino Francés so
this multicultural, multilingual hubris is, paradoxically, at the same time
more intense and relaxed.
Tuesday 24 June
What do you know? Twenty
kilometres along the coast, in the village of Serdio, to precise, and I’m
shacked up in the municipal albergue ready for tomorrow’s foray along the Camino Liebana/Camino de Santo Toribo.
Doesn’t take long for a dozen of the pilgrims I met yesterday to turn up. The
beginnings of a Camino ‘family’ are already in place, maybe most of them’ll
stick together till Santiago but that’s still 400km away. It’s at moments like
these that I regret having only three weeks to walk, and at times I wish my itinerary
wasn’t dictated by academic requirements. It’s at times like these that I just
want to walk for the sake of walking, without having to analyse ever step I
make and every footprint I leave behind.
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