If you start me up,
If you start me up, I’ll never stop
Never stop
It had, until a couple of weeks
ago, been my intention to hike the Pyrenees via a combination of the Haute Route and the Spanish GR11 but at the
last minute I changed my mind. I did so for a number of reasons, some physical,
some logistical, but what really swung it was the realisation that I wouldn’t
be able to complete the walk from end to end, from the start to the finish.
With ‘only’ 40 days to walk and a
lack of physical preparation, I was never going to be able to hike from the
Atlantic to the Mediterranean. At first that didn’t faze me, I’m walking the
breadth of Spain from Cape to Finisterre next summer so it shouldn’t have
mattered. But I still needed a start and an end, even if the thought of ending
a walk brings on an attack of the screaming abdabs – the longer the hike, the
more difficult it becomes to bring it to an end. And you can’t just pluck any
old random place to begin or end; it must be a place imbued with meaning –
personally and/or spiritually ‘sacred’.
So I chose to begin in
Roncevalles for the obvious Camino de
Santiago connotations. I’d been there in May 2012, there was a link, it
joined up some dots (and boy, do I have an almost obsessive desire to join up
dots). The final tour de force was to be the summit of Canigou in French Catalunya.
For the Catalans, Canigou is a sacred mountain and I share their veneration; its
alluring contours always hold my gaze whether from the train from Paris to
Barcelona or the foothills of the Spanish Pyrenees. Many years ago my father
and I set out to climb Canigou but got lost nowhere near the summit, defeated
by the heat and poor map-reading skills (on my part, I wasn’t a geography tutor
back then). I made another attempt about fifteen years ago but this time storms
held me back. Once again, I vowed to return.
But Canigou will remain unclimbed
and Roncevalles will not be revisited. Not this year, anyway. I changed my
mind, decided, at Irun, to turn right instead of left. My inner Catalan would
be disappointed but my inner Basque would be in seventh heaven. Like Ultravox’s
Vienna, until 2012 Irun meant nothing to me but subsequent visits – or rather,
subsequent ‘passing throughs’ – have transformed it into a place with
accumulated meaning. In 2012, having completed the Camino Francés, I took the train from Santiago to Irun and, whilst
killing a few hours waiting for the bus to Paris, came across a sign pointing
towards the starting point of the Camino del
Norte. You don’t know how close I came to tearing up my bus ticket and
setting out for Santiago all over again. It would have dealt with the ‘problem’
that’s had me at its beck and call ever since, what we might call, somewhat
pertinently, the ‘Rolling Stone syndrome’ – if you start me, up I’ll never
stop. To do so, of course, might have set in train an infinite hiking loop
which had a permanent destination but was utterly without end – until
impairment or death intervened. Every time I arrived in Santiago, I’d start all
over again. From another point of origin, along another camino de Santiago, hiking into infinity and beyond.
I was back last year, a night
stopover en route from Oviedo to London
(by train, of course); I chose a ropey hotel with a hideously orange room but
somehow that only served to cement Irun’s presence in my psyche as a
‘significant’ place. Irun is, of course, a frontier town, and even in these
days of Schengen these borderlands still retain a curious allure; landscapes of
transience and ephemerality. I’m a rootless creature with an inherent mistrust
of allegiance and fidelity; if I belong anywhere it’s in these always
in-between places.
So, that’s start point but where
to end? Hiking the Pyrenees one has a choice of routes and it’s perfectly
feasible to switch from one to the other depending on one’s mood and preference.
There are no such well-defined, ‘official’ trails across the Cordillera
Cantabrica. The network of Gran Recorridos (GRs) offers possibilities, a
combination of these will take me as far as the Somiedo National Park and Pico
El Cornón.
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| Pico El Cornón |
From Pico El Cornón it is, as the crow flies, about 60 km to Pedrafita do
Cebreiro, another border town, straddling the frontier between Galicia and
Leon. It’s my intention to end the hike here, another dot to join, another
landscape loaded with personal meaning. In June 2012, after four weeks of
hiking the Camino Francés I
practically skipped up to O Cebreiro, the ‘Gateway to Galicia’.
O Cebreiro might be just another mountain pass (though all mountain
passes should be celebrated for their individual character and personality)
were it not for the pilgrims’ way. Maybe it’s the effort required to gain the
1293 metre pass that lays the hiker/pilgrim open – perhaps even vulnerable – to
emotional turbulence but on that warm June morning I was pommelled from all
sides. In the church is a beautiful but simple statue of the Virgin and Child
but outside, at the summit of the pass, an exquisite and, quite frankly,
dangerous vista of the Cordillera
Cantabrica unfolds at one’s feet.
Dangerous? The Camino Francés by-passes
the mountains until the very last minute, when it has no option if it’s to get
to Santiago. It crosses the meseta on
a trajectory that it crushingly flat and without curves, the pilgrim’s inner
hiker’s gaze is drawn north to the horizon. At night, tossing and turning in
the noisy albergue, her dreams are full of mountain scenes that are almost
erotically charged; the chaste pilgrim channels her sexual desire to the ridges,
precipices and lofty peaks. The spirit is willing but the flesh is not quite as
weak as she imagined, she sticks to the camino,
the mountains will come later.
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| Basque Mountain Porn: Anboto in the Montes Vascos http://mariannebarrosa.blogspot.co.uk/p/httpwww.html |
At O Cebreiro I burst into tears. Looking east, across the sierras
stretching back to the horizon, it suddenly dawned on me how far I’d walked and
for a several seconds I struggled to come to terms with the emotion. I was
joined by an Irish family, a father and his two twentysomething daughters; it
soon became apparent that he’d recently lost a wife and they’d recently lost a
mother, like so many pilgrims they were walking not to escape absence but to
come to terms with it: we walk into the sunset but we don’t run away. You don’t
have to be a cognitive behavioural therapist to imagine how much their
overheard conversation racked up the emotions. O Cebreiro etched itself deeper
into my memory, like a groove on a vinyl record from the Good Old Days; it
became another dot that would need to be joined up whenever I returned to hike
in Northern Spain. Talk about having an
inner anal-retentive! Must all dots be joined up, belong to a network of
emotion and affect? Can they not exist in splendid isolation? A place to pass
through which leaves no trace of itself in the psyche? Let’s come back to that
later.
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| The Camino del Norte from Irun to Bilbao. It joins the GR123 near Markina-Xemein http://caminayrevientaseis.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/bilbao-portugalete.html |
The first few days of the hike will follow the Camino del Norte from Irun
to San Sebastian/Donostia along the coast to Deba. Here I intend to join GR123 –
La
Vuelta a Bizkai; this trail will take me into the Basque Mountains in a
southerly meander and, in a roundabout way, lead me to the start of the GR74 – the
Corredor Oriental de Cantabria.
But there are a
lot of ifs and buts to be addressed, as well as dots to be crossed. Unlike the
Camino de Santiago, the route is littered with uncertainties. And no yellow
arrows, replaced by flashes of red and white.
 | |
| The GR123 Vuelta a Vizcaya. I hope to follow the southern, inland route, against the arrows, from Ondarroa to Concha http://bicipoli.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/gr-123-vuelta-bizkaia-pie.html |
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| The GR 123, GR 74 and GR71 through Cantabria to Potes. http://www.euro-senders.com/web_eng/Espanya/cantabria.htm |
I’m catching the
first Eurostar out of St Pancras next Monday morning, it leaves at 05:40 so I
have no option but to catch a train from Letchworth Garden City on Sunday evening.
Rather than hang around waiting for the station to open I thought I might walk
from a random place – if there exists such a concept as random place – through north London in the late night and early
morning. The plan is to take the train to Gordon Hill – a place with which I
have no known association – and head off on foot from there.
Hang on. Didn’t
Gordon Hill play for Manchester United in the seventies? Doh!
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