Saints and Cynics Day 10: Puente de la Reina to Estella

Puente de la Reina to Estella 22km (223 km cumulative)

It's Sunday 24th July, it's day 10, and I'm walking to Estella from Puente la Reina, started off about 08:30 this morning. I'm about an hour away, I suppose [no you weren't, it was more like two]. I can see the cathedral, behind it I can see a mountain rising up to the left and then a very small, conical hill, straight ahead of me which is, I think Villamayor de Montjardin. Over to the right, to the north-west are the Basque mountains and in a sense this Camino is a Camino with mountains always on the horizon, untouchable. In the Pyrenees, now in the hills of Navarra and of course, most tantalisingly, across the Meseta when you ca see the Cordillera Cantabrica to the north; that's a real bummer. 
The weather is very pleasant, sunny; very small cumulus clouds, ooccasional shade. There's a nice wind, it's a lot less hot than it was a week ago when I limped, dehydrated, into St Palais. And I've become a laggard, as such it's relatively quiet from Lorca into Estella.

I'm just so relaxed; so laid back. This is fantastic walking; again, I'm almost at the point of tears. It's as if I haven't fell like this for a long, long time; indeed, I probably haven't felt like this for a long, long time. I probably haven't felt like this since the summer of 2012 [when I walked the Camino Frances for the first time] or maybe 2014 on the Camino de San Salvador. The emotions are stronger, the intensity of tranquility, if that's not an oxymoron. 

To what extent is the landscape involved? This landscape - I don't remember it from last time; it all seems new, even though it's only four and but years since I was last here. I don't remember the hills, I don't remember the Basque mountains being on the fringes of the landscape though that's probably because I'm now more obsessed with the Basque mountains and because I've visited them.

I'm much more aware of the context of the Camino within the whole Spanish/Basque landscape; the Basqueland, the Basquescape.

Cirauqui - classic hill-top town

It feels emotional, it feels ... comfortable ... no, not comfortable, it feels like a landscape which I feel very part of. I feel more at home, more attuned to this landscape than I would, now, to landscape in the UK, even in my beloved Wessex. And part of this Camino is about being on the run, the sense of being a refugee ... I'm always on the move and when I wasn't on the move in Pamplona on Friday I was a grumpy git. 

I just wanted to record this to show how the landscape is having this affect ... it's difficult to describe how I feel. It's almost ecstatic but in an way that isn't ecstatic - can one be calmly ecstatic? it feels perfect - just rolling along, dwelling in this landscape.

The path is always the centre of attention, the focus of the visual and embodied gaze

I was thinking about yesterday's hike down from the Alto del Perdon to Puente de Reina, how you begin to get this procession of villages and from there the path. Not just this path but lots of paths; it's a landscape full of ways, a landscape full of routes, full of possibilities. One dwells in it, one walks through it, one follows a very clear path defined by its yellow arrows but that's not all one sees.

I wanted to think about becoming. This is Day 10, it's the ninth day of walking. One is constantly becoming, one never does become, one never gets to the 'ser' [essence], one is always 'estar' [transitional state]. But what I feel today is that I'm becoming part of the landscape, that a particular spell cast by the landscape is beginning to work, possibly helped by the weather, and it's becoming very strong.

The distant Sierra de Loquiz from the Camino near Estella

I do intensely feel part of this landscape and if somebody were to come along and try pluck me away from this I would get physically violent. The only way I would leave this Camino now would be in a coffin, even if I were to sustain an injury I'd still hang around. This is where I belong, there's nowhere else I need to be. it's a bit like the day of my operation [twenty years ago]; I remember thinking then, looking out of the window of my hospital room, there's nowhere else I want to be. All sorts of things could have going on elsewhere, I wanted to be there. it's the same feeling, which is a little bit weird, I suppose, but maybe that's significant.

 

Saints and Cynics Day 5: St Jean-Pied-de-Port to Burguete

St Jean-Pied-de-Port to Burguete 27km (138km cumulative)

Imagine, if you will, the mighty Europe pitching up at your local bar to run through a selection of their finest works of rock 'n' roll. I know, as fantasies go it doesn't get any better than this so you nudge yourself, very politely, to the front of the crowd to place yourself within a plectrum's-toss of the god-like Joey Tempest. 

You know every song: word-by-word, note-by-note, and you know that from the off Sweden's finest contribution to bubble-haired poodle-rock will carefully and cleverly up the tempo to finish the two-hour show (yes, I know, they could go on for much, much longer) with the national anthem of the 1980s, The Final Countdown.

So you're standing there, all agog, when a familiar riff kicks in. Surely ... it can't be? But it is. Joey takes to the stages, locks flickering in the spotlights and utters those immortal words: We're heading for Venus/but still we stand tall ...

Tell me about it! I'm still having nightmares even though I know it'll never, ever happen. But if it did, it would resemble closely the repertoire of the Camino Frances from its starting point in St Jean, including the encore to Finisterre. The first stage, up and over the Pyrenees is The Final Countdown of European pilgrimage; I doubt whether it can be bettered.

The starting point: Port de Espagne. I don't know whether it was the pent-up excitement, exacerbated by four days along the Via Podiensis, or concerns about the heat, but I didn't sleep well and whenever I drifted off into subconsciousness my dreams encountered unfamiliar themes. So I was awake at 05:00 and off at first light; I wasn't, of course alone

Pilgrims at a fountain on the lower slopes. The hike up and over the Pyrenees via the Col de Lepoeder is, without doubt, a huge Day One task for pilgrims, many of whom are not prepared physically, emotionally or materially. But the 1400m ascent is more laborious than life-threatening, and most is on asphalted roads. There's even, about halfway up, a refuge and bar where one can get a bed for the night. Given the predicted temperatures of 35 degrees plus I briefly considered it but as I arrived there before ten and a strong (but a very warm) breeze had blown up there seemed no point in dallying.

The Virgin of Biakorri,1100m. In a sense, this was is where the project was born, on a fine and clear morning in May, back in 2012. It was my first day and I'd arrived at the start of the Camino with precious little preparation, armed only with the ubiquitous John Brierly guidebook I had no idea what to expect so the sudden 'apparition' of the Virgin seemed quite miraculous. With a backdrop extending eastwards towards the higher, still-snowcapped peaks of the Pyrenees, the Virgin is perfectly placed to elicit all manner of responses. The scenery is stunning in itself, in almost literally taking-one's-breath-away manner, but for me, at least, the presence of the Virgin makes the landscape perform in a way which might be considered generally religious and more specifically Catholic. When I stopped here in 2012, the Virgin and her presence in the landscape moved me to tears, this time around it was equally emotional. I could have stayed here all day.

Offerings left in a small hollow beneath the Virgin of Biakorri

Feels like heaven ...

'You're just too good to be true/I can't take my eyes off you/You'd be like heaven to touch/I wanna hold you so much'

The last hundred metres or so towards the summit of the Col de Lepoeder, coming towards the end of the day, can be a test of endurance. I knew it was coming, otherwise I'd have been hurling abuse at the pernicious cruelty of the path. But at every turn the landscape cranks it up another notch, holds you in its thrall. I stopped here, unloosed my rucksack and threw myself down onto and into the grass, to put my body in as much contact as possible with the earth beneath, to feel it pulsing through my veins. An elemental affect; up here, the land and me, we are one and the same thing.

This is how I recorded it at the time: 'So I'm just about 500m from the Col de Lepoeder and it's absolutely stunning. 'It' has happened here, not at the Virgin of Biakorri. The landscape is absolutely stunning but what's different from last time is that I have a greater sense of where things are, I'm more 'in place'. It's not just an arbitrary landscape into which I've walked without any preparation. The second thing is that I also have a very strong awareness of the path itself, the path in the landscape. I can look back and see it, as it climbs up ... the path that comes up from the road, you can see how it winds around pretty much level, around the valley, past the fountain of Roland. Over to the east you can see the Pic d'Orhy and right in the background you've got the high peaks of the Pyrenees and in the foreground an almost pefect 'v'-shaped valley. I know where I am.

Roncevalles, the end of the stage for most pilgrims who stay at the abbey's modern albergue. Your correspondent, however, continued further 3km to Burguete

Saints and Cynics Day 1: Artix to Maslacq

The Via Podiensis, alternatively known as the Voie du Puy and, more secularly and less prosaically, the GR65, is one of the four principal pilgrimage routes in France, setting out from Le Puy-en-Velay, famous for its Cathedral and Virgin. 

 

Via Podiensis from Le Puy to St Jean Pied de Port

The route heads south-west for 721km to Ostabat where it is joined by the Via Turonensis (from Tours) and Via Lemovicensis (from Vezelay). Together, as the Camino Frances, all three paths cross the Pyrenees and continue across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela.

 At the outset, it had been my intention to hike the entire length of the Via Podiensis; indeed, for a brief while I entertained the idea of setting out from Cluny until the call of Canigou put the kybosh on that project so setting out from Arthez de Bearn, 635 from Le Puy, was a bit of damp squib as compromises go. Still, it offered four days of hiking in the French Basque Country and would put me in better shape for tacking the Col Leopoeder through the Pyrenees and I'd I've four days of hiking in isolation before joining the crowds at St Jean Pied de Port. 

The Spanish Caminos I am, either directly or through research, familiar with. In the case of the Camino Frances you might say far too over-familiar. When it comes to the French caminos, however, I'm a complete and utter virgin; by the time I'd finished today's stage I dearly wished I'd stuck with my original plan and started from Le Puy. Still, there's always 2018.

 

08:39 from Orthez to Artix, just 15 minutes down the line

Artix Station. Glamorous starting point.

 

The first task was to hike 10 out of Artix to join the Via Podiensis just before the town of Arthez de Bearn. As I climbed gently along a minor road through fields of maize and sunflowers, the snow-capped Pyrenees began to loom to the south. It's the 'snow-capped' that does it, I'd barely walked an hour before having to fight off the desire to get off the Camino and into the mountains. This, I feel, will be a recurring theme.

Joyous meeting with the Camino. Ain't never seen no hikers or pilgrims desport themselves like that before. Maybe we should!

The minor road from Artix met the Via Podiensis at the Chapelle Caubin and here, barely a couple of hours into my Camino, was a example of what my PhD supervisor, Paul Cloke, might call the 'piligrmness' of pilgrim routes. An array of religious paraphernalia which gave what was an otherwise pleasant, pastoral landscape, a 'spiritual' turn, enchanting it, oozing affect. I was, of course, in the right frame of mind for this affect to take effect and the presence of the Virgin Mary played right into its hands. It's worth looking at the scene and trying to identify what aspects of the landscape - what spiritual/religious incursions - upped the ante in terms of religious/spiritual landscape experience. Would the landscape without these accoutrements be any less spiritual/religious? Would it still 'perform' in the way that it did this morning? This is what I came looking for and I encountered it straight away - but maybe because I wanted to!

 

12th Century Chapelle de Caubin

Back with the yellow and blue, the colours of Europe. In some respects this is a walk of mourning.

 

Sign in Arthez de Bearn. According to my calculations it's 876km to Santiago

The sacred and the profane co-exist on the Via Podiensis

I encountered a couple of examples of random acts of kindness on today's stage. This was a small shelter and rest area with table exclusively for pilgrims, a kilometre before there'd been a sign offering free drinks and conservation and both touched me deeply. It made the camino feel intimate and deeply presonal. I've come across similar phenomenon on other, less-frequented caminos apart but I don't expect to find anything like it on the now heavily commercialised Camino Frances.

 

The path, which had mostly followed asphalted roads with little-to-no traffic, now became a cart-track and descended gently to the valley whence I'd started, albeit several kilometres to the west. Back through maize fields in a gentle, pleasant heat over the river, the railways and motorway to the charming village of Maslocq and my hotel. I'd pretty much chewed up the 21km and spat 'em out, but first days are always like that, are they not. Tomorrow another gentle stage, 22km to Naverrenx. Perfect walking, like a drug.

 

The Kids are Alright

The premise of my PhD research, for what it's worth, is that landscape possesses the capacity to affect those who engage with it, whether by dwelling, passing through, working and so on. As the (apparently ubiquitous) Nigel Thrift notes, affect has no stable defintion. Obviously, this ordinance from upon high hasn't prevented the usual suspects from trying to find one. This we have Massumi (2009): a processual logic of transitions that take place during spatially and temporally distributed encounters in which each transition is accompanied by a variation in the capacity ...'

No, me neither, though for once the Chuckle Brothers themselves, Deleuze and Guattari, manage to make more sense, describing affect as 'a mixture of two bodies, one body which is said to act on another, and the other receives traces of the first'. 

 

Melvin and Wilson: These kids really were alright

So here we are in Guatemala. One body, your correspondent, clad in hiking boots, spandex trousers and now relieved of much excess weight watching the other a frequently-erupting strato-volcano which is exerting a curious hold over her, from her vantage point on the summit of the adjacent Acatenango. Not so much affect, or even casting a spell. We might say that Volcán de Fuego has cast a hex, got a hold on her; beguiled and entranced and every time it coughs ash and cinders, with a throaty roar, your correspondent shifts itchily on her arse like an excited child. It's December 23rd but Christmas has come already. 

Volcan de Atitlan from slopes of Acatenango

So I'm not even going to attempt to define affect, just say what it does. 

Wednesday 23 December; Antigua, Guatemala

Wake up 02:00. Despite the hour and the darkness the friendly owner of the Hotel Camino de Santiago (no prizes for guessing why I chose it) has made coffee. I'm getting used to ridiculously early starts, for Santiagüito we set out at 12 midnight, a race against the clouds arriving and obscuring the view, which tends to happen around lunchtime. The driver (this is, after all, a private tour and I'll have my own guide - or rather guides) arrives at 03:00 and after an hour's drive to Soledad where the trail begins. here i meet my guides, Melvin and Wilson, aged 12 and 14. After hiking with three guides the right side of 35 I'm a little nonplussed but the kids have pedigree; dad, grandad and uncle are all guides though I can't help noticing the lack of any women in the profession. Melvin and Wilson will escort me 1500m up to the summit of Acatenango then 1500m down again. In between times we shall spend twenty minutes or so watching Volcán de Fuego perform. No offence to Acatenango, which is truly a beautiful mountain, but we've come to see fire, if not play with it. 

It's a long way to the top ...

The first 1000 metres of ascent are relatively straight foward and when the night lifts there are stunning views out towards the volcanoes around Lake Atitlan and over to nearby Volcán Agua, which I climbed back in 1989. But we're not here for those sort of views, are we? We've come to see what is, arguably, the world's most active volcano and we are single-minded - perhaps even marrow-minded - in pursuit of our goal. 

It seems to me that Melvin and Wilson have been thoroughly-briefed and are taking their responsbility - i.e. me - extremely seriously. They don't so much guide as herd, patrol even: always one in front of me behind me. There are times when I feel I'm being frogmarched to an impending doom and at first light I shall be no more. This shouldn't be read as a criticism of my guides, who stuck to their task assidiously; I am used to hiking alone and with my previous guides I was given my space. Melvin and Wilson don't cramp my style but I do feel like the child-adult roles have been reversed.

All the more so about 300m below the summit when your correspondent, aged 50-and-a-half throws her toys out the pram. The path has become a slippery slope of volcanic sand and ash - classic three steps forward, two steps back territory - and I just can't get a grip. I begin to swear and curse, quite loudly and then, when I really am getting nowhere fast, I lash out. Not at Melvin and Wilson, I hasten to add, but at the earth beneath my feet. I kick at it, hard, sending plumes of dust flying out into the wind. Estoy muy enojada  I try to tell the kids: I'm angry. But they just look on, a little bemused and concerned. When they try to show me the technique for climbing on this kind of surface I throw a tantrum and tell them I just can't do it. 

Like a glittering prize ...

Doesn't look like we're going to get to the top - so near and yet so far. Thank the good Lord for Wilson and Melvin who are almost English in their stoicism - talk about role reversal. Suitably chastened I edge onwards and upwards and, as demonstrated by a couple of teenagers, it really isn't that difficult. 

Acatenango summit

The summit of Acatenango is a shallow grater of grey stone and ash but we immediately see our glittering prize; within a couple of minutes, Fuego performs and continues to do so, sometimes for several minutes, continuously. Melvin and Wilson leave me to indulge myself and when they say it's time to go I jump to my feet and do as I'm told. We descend, very quickly, via another route, skidding and sliding over loose rocks. Five hours up, three back down. Apparently I was too slow in ascent and not as quick as I might have been in descent. Cheeky buggers ... here's a little tip, kids; it's a good idea to pander to your clients' egos and, if you really don't know what that flower with the white petals is, just make it up. I do it all the time and it's not as if I'm going to know any different. That's the problem with young people nowadays, too honest.

Volcan de Agua from Acatenango

Back at my hotel, I shower, lie on my bed and burst into tears. Now that, dear reader, is affect.

 

Fuego struts its stuff