Time, I think, for an account of
this summer’s six-week hike before I start to focus on this winter’s
#FireintheBlood volcano hiking project; someday I’ll get into the habit of
writing up the day’s events at the time of walking, as opposed to two-and-half
months later. What was intended as a
‘guerrilla’ camino from Irun on the French/Spanish border to Santiago, loosely
following the Camino del Norte, the GR121/123 and then Mike Salazar’s Alta Ruta Cantabrica ended up a bit of a
curate’s egg as the customary gravitation towards the yellow arrows of the camino de Santiago network set in. Even
so, I might have made a compromise by following the Viejo Camino from the
Basque Country all the way through to the Camino
Francés at Villafranca del Bierzo then on to Santiago until I allowed
myself to become distracted by inconsistent waymarking, a lack of maps and the
lure of the Picos de Europa. And whilst I’m rummaging around for excuses I
might as well bung in the weather and a crucial faux pas vis-à-vis preparation. But on to the nitty-gritty of the
trail, here divided into stages.
1. Irun to Deba – Camino
del Norte
The first cut is the
deepest, the first stage is the cruellest; especially if, like me, you’ve been
sitting on your fat arse for the past four months, filling the heads of your
‘A’ level students full of geography and willing them to pass so hard the veins
in your forehead bulge with blood.
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| All roads lead to Santiago |
For the uninitiated –
which’ll be most of you not as obsessed with the Camino de Santiago as I am -
the Camino del Norte follows the
Atlantic Coast of Spain as far as the Galicia/Cantabria border from where it
deviates inland towards the Holy Grail that is Santiago de Compostela. I say follow, sometimes it wanders inland and
on several stretches one can lose sight of the sea for hours on end. And
because it’s a coast path the Camino del Norte, like the British South West
Coast Path, goes up and down in a seemingly infinite series of disniveles. On day one, from Irun to
Donostia/San Sebastián, I fell victim to the trail’s first trick – lulling the
hiker into a false sense of security. After an initial sharp 200m ascent the
going is good and I’m trundling along like a Weeble on speed only to realise
later that energy generated from jouissance isn’t sustainable; after
14 ‘easy’ kilometres the camino plunges almost vertiginously back down to sea
level at Passai Donibane. Here, a purist such as Nick Crane would be faced with
their first ambulatory dilemma, either take the ferry to cross the short (about
100m) stretch of water and continue hiking from Passai San Pedro on the other
side or make the landlubber’s diversion which, according to my calculations,
would add a further three or four kilometres of bleak industrial walking to the
day’s total. Fortunately, the pilgrim is permitted to take the boat though my
inner psychogeographer did have cast a lascivious eye over the frontages of
post-industrial porn.
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| Ermita de Santiago, Irun |
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| 'Alpinist' pilgrims up and onto the ridge, the rest of them along the 'easy route'. It was day one, I took the latter |
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| Passai Donibane |
As I was serenaded, on
the ferry, by a group of retired Basque doctors – I kid you not – I had visions
of an effortless passage to Santiago with enough time remaining for a quick
hop-and-skip hike onwards to Finisterre. At my time of life, with half-a-dozen
caminos under my belt, you’d have thought I’d have known better but I was
walking with the eyes-wide open of an innocent child, the silver sands and
faded glory of Donostia/San Sebastián were just around the corner.
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| Ferry 'cross the Portua de Pasaia with industrial porn background. Sadly no retired Basque doctors present |
Not. The lack of
fitness told already; Donostia/San Sebastián was another eleven kilometres
away, up and over the cliffs, access to which was via a 120 metre staircase,
direct from sea-level. Shouldn’t have come as a surprise, should it? You pays
yer money and you takes yer choice; if you opt to hike the Basque littoral you
really ought to come at it with the understanding that the coastline can and will
bite back.
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| Donostia/San Sebastian: plenty of siver sands but not its glory still unfaded |
Which is exactly what
it did for the next two days, from Donostia/San Sebastián to Zarautz and Deba.
The ‘kneebreaker’ disniveles never
quite crippled me physically but on more than one occasion they filled my soul
with the wrath and ire of hiker who thinks the path has wronged her, even
though she knows, deep down inside, she’s the one to blame.
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| Don't ask! |
I walked, as intended, alone;
for reasons I’ve outlined elsewhere I didn’t want to get socially or
emotionally involved with a path I was only going to follow for three days
although I’ve subsequently realised I might be seeking an intellectual excuse
for my inherent commitment-phobia. This policy was put to the test on only the
second day when I fell in step with Manuel on the descent into Orio and spent
the remainder of the day walking alongside him.
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| Last rites for a walking pole |
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| Manuel and his Venezuelan flag; now so full of signatures one can barely make out the colours and stars |
Manuel, a Madrileño from
Venezuela was – still is – walking the camino in what many would consider its ‘true
spirit’: with minimum funds, trusting himself to the kindness of strangers and
the whimsies of fate – or God, as the case may be. He was - still is - carrying
with him a Venezuelan flag which he asked fellow pilgrims to sign in the cause
of peace in his homeland. When he arrived in a town he would seek to engage
with local politicians and any fellow venezelano
emigres to draw attention to his cause which was, in a nutshell, a protest
against the growing militarisation and authoritarianism of Venezuelan politics.
As a student of Latin American politics, an afternoon spend in discussion with
Manuel represented, in many respects, the ideal camino day in which the landscape and the trail come second and
third to social – and in this case political – interaction and in this instance
our talk of Venezuelan politics took me back to the hallowed halls of my alma
mater, the Institute for Latin American Studies in London, some fifteen years
ago.
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| From Donostia to Zumaia |
You know what’s coming.
Is it possible to speak of Venezuela and not immediately follow it up with
mention of the late Hugo Chavez? I’d finished my MSc in Latin American Politics
before Chavez and Bolviarismo had really made their mark on South and North
America and it was Causa R – the Radical Cause – that caught my attention at
the end of the 1990s as a possible future for the Latin American left. I think
Manuel and I must have exchanged only a couple of sentences before the ‘Ch’
word was mentioned and it immediately occurred to me that Manuel was out and
about to tarnish the image of the former leader in particular and Chavismo in
general and make a case for a return of the right.
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| Getaria |
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| The Basque coastline at its most sublime. It's only day two and already I'm thinking about changing my plans and following the Camino del Norte all the way to Santiago. I mean, how does one tear oneself away from this? |
Well, he was and he
wasn’t; in espousing the cause of Causa R he was certainly disparaging current
president Nicolas Maduro as a thug and a criminal but Manuel was equally
calling for the return of a more democratic leftism which, he argues, has been
tarnished by the current regime, if not Chavez, too. I was stuck in
no-pilgrims-land, like many on the European left, I’d taken a shine to Chavez,
been taken in by his charisma, some might say, but I’d been out of Latin
American politics for so long I waded in carefully and with an unusual amount
of thoughtful consideration.
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Zumaia
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My big fat Basque diet
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The mountains already
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But we talked about the
camino, too; about the reasons why we were drawn to it and, after telling him I
was technically homeless, Manuel memorably summed up my situation in one pithy
phase: tu casa es el camino – your home
is the camino.
Out of the mouths of
Venezuelan Madrileños!
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The wonder that is Donostia
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Manuel and I parted
ways in Zaruatz; me to sleep in a hotel, him to crash out on the beach after
taking his flag around the seaside town but it would be wrong to say we never
met again as we followed each other’s trajectories on the Book of Face, he’s
just finished the Camino de San Salvador which I walked in late July – and we’ve
just decided to hike together from Rome to Santiago in the next few years.
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If this doesn't get your geological lovejuices flowing, nothing will
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In many respects, that
afternoon’s hiking with Manuel reaffirmed my resolve to walk alone but it also
reminded me, quite intensely, of what I was renouncing. For the next day I
could fall back on that familiar cliché of having the sea as company to counter
any melancholy solitude might – would – bring on but on Day 4 I’d turn inland
and head for the mountains, leaving the pilgrims behind.
