constanttrek

Santiago

January 21st, 2005

Two thousand and something kilometres later, here we are in      Santiago. Home of the bones of St James, place where one hugs a statue on an altar, and earns a place with the man upstairs.  Of course, mine was already assured, so this is of little importance.

Odd that after 800km on the Camino, and many refuges – some good, some not – the worst should come at the very end of the journey.  “Adequate” was how our guidebook described it.  Adequate if one was a patient in a mental asylum in Siberia 50 years ago, perhaps, with the odd KGB guard playing nursemaid, but somewhat less than salubrious to the modern day traveller – especially at €10 for both of us, and no kitchen.

 

However.

Please excuse the long break in updates; we have been a little busy trekking over mountains, catching up with the odd Templar Knight, and indulging in that most important of pastimes: eating.

We left Astorga, and the last of the meseta, in it’s usual frozen state, and headed up the road on the way to the highest point on the Camino.  Andreas and Ato had fallen behind by a day – sore feet on Andreas’ behalf, sheer laziness on Ato’s – and it was to be the last day we would spend with the Bavarian Barbarian, also.  Johannes was determined to walk on further than us to spend the night with a character called Tomas.  So that you have an understanding of our preconceptions regarding Tomas, I shall reproduce here the brief in our guidebook:

“….a simple refuge best described as atmospheric….Tomas devotes his life year round, in an almost medieval manner, to caring for pilgrims in this high, desolate spot where bad weather (fog, rain, wind, snow) is almost the norm….mattresses for 20, basic W.C, outdoor kitchen.  Gregorian chant provided.”

Quite frankly, we have had enough of the medieval spirit what with tent living in the middle of winter, so we were happy to give Tomas a miss.  Johannes, however, at last fulfilled his threats to leave, and fuelled by the last of his full fibre cookies, loped off up the hill.

The following day we plodded up the track to Manjarin, where Tomas lives.  It was a truly beautiful day, sunshine and no wind.  Perfect for mountain climbing and meeting odd characters; and odd, our Tomas most certainly is, but in the loveliest way.

I imagine you have heard of the Knights Templar, the medieval order of monastic militants who became the repository for much of Europe’s banking treasure during the early middle ages.  To my knowledge, conspiracy theories and bestselling novels aside, the Templars have been history for a good 600 years.  Not according to our Tomas.

On approaching his self-built home of stone and wood,

a large banner hangs proudly out the front, sporting the Spanish mark of the Templars, the Templar “T” in bright red on a white background.

(It hangs right next to the sign which has the distances to Jerusalem, Machu Picchu, and Timbuktu on it).

Then Tomas himself comes out to meet you, wearing his Templar apron belted around the waist with a large leather belt.  Somewhat aggressive geese wander about, pecking happily at unwitting pilgrims, and various dogs, chooks, and other miscellaneous wildlife (some recognisably human, only by their own Templar aprons) also mooch around the place.  Tomas has set up a long trestle table with coffee and biscuits for passing pilgrims, and another with the Templar sword laid out with various historical works about the order, in an almost ritualistic manner.  He is enormously friendly and hospitable, eager to talk and to share his biscuits and coffee.  No matter what may be written about him, offering tired and cold pilgrims hot coffee and biscuits goes a long, long way to raising someone in my estimation. 

He showed us all around his abode.  It was quite a construction, from the subterranean well to the solar powered computer hooked up inside an old decrepit Landrover.  Apparently Tomas came up the mountain some 15 years ago, had a vision of a kind, and decided that middle class family life in Madrid was not for him.  He fashioned himself in the Templar tradition and has been up there ever since.  A large bell hangs outside his front door; on seeing a pilgrim coming up the mountain in bad weather, he rings it frantically to guide them in the right direction.  For some reason I found that enormously touching.

Nonetheless, and all admiration aside, little would have induced me to spend a night on top of a freezing mountain in winter, in truly medieval conditions, with a few people convinced that the Templars live on, and Gregorian chants blaring continuously from the stereo.  Each to their own.  It obviously did it for Johannes; by all accounts he did indeed spend the night there.  The fibre cookies must have done their job, for thereafter Johannes has been no more than a name in various refuge guestbooks – at horribly long distances apart; we reckon he must have got to Santiago at least three days before us, and we have been going pretty hard.  Ah, the joys of an 8kg pack.

Meanwhile we walked on from Tomas and up to the summit, the highest point on the Camino.  It really was dramatically beautiful, with rugged snowy peaks on one side, and the soft, green valleys of Galicia on the other.  Coming down the mountain,entering the verdant country of Galicia was like walking into another world after the harsh meseta.  Even the villages seemed more beautiful.

Ponferrada has an old Knights Templar castle, and after the Tomas encounter we thought we had better stop and have a look at it.  Ponferrada also has a good outdoor equipment shop, and our desire to stop was largely fuelled by the momentous decision to buy NEW SLEEPING BAGS. 

Oh yes, folks, after months of freezing our extremities off, the cold refuge at Molinaseca was the last straw, and we decided that there was nothing for it but to spend some of the bank’s money on two new, flash, sub arctic aint-nothing-getting-through-these-suckers roasty toasty sleeping havens.  There are not the words to describe my excitement on first sliding between the covers of my new cocoon; except to say that I refused to leave it for over twelve hours.  I mean, you could have a party in this thing.  Want to pull one knee up but not the other?  No problem, it has stretchy bits at knee level.  Fancy pulling the whole thing over your head?  No dramas, it’s over 6 feet long. I could go on.  I could give you weights, measures, and percentage of down and feather, but I appreciate the fact that you may possibly be bored stupid, and that I may make Tomas look entirely balanced by comparison.

Incredibly fortunate that we invested in these new toys when we did.  Seeing as every refuge since Ponferrada has been BLOODY TROPICAL.

Would you believe it? It seems that the local authorities in Galicia pay for the refuges, which means they can run the heating permanently, on Jamaican temperatures, so that one spends much of the night with a window open gasping for fresh air whilst sweating buckets. 

These flash refuges also coincide with an increase in that speciality of the Camino:  The Nutter.

Suddenly they are everywhere, and they are all have titles.  There is Bicycle Man; he rides an ancient contraption with a variety of plastic bags hanging off it, and rarely travels more than ten kilometres in a day.  If he isn’t behaving madly enough to alert the Hospitalero on arrival, it usually takes no longer than the following morning for him to be unceremoniously thrown out, whereupon he hops unsteadily back onto his creaking steed and weaves off to harass the next lot of pilgrims.  So far he has introduced himself to me three times, and each time he has claimed a different town of origin and different starting point on the Camino.  It is estimated that he has been living in Albergues/refuges for over three years now.

Then there is Hat Man, who fancies himself an invaluable help to every Hospitalero on the Trail, and who has a rather substantial drinking problem; he usually staggers in from the bar at around 10pm, tells the assembled pilgrims that he is there to help, passes out and talks to himself all night, and then stalks out early the following morning in high dudgeon with the world at large.  We have seen him getting on the bus twice now, so I guess walking isn’t really his thing.  One Hospitalero told us he has over 30 Compostela Credencials.       

These are just two of what really is an endless list.  During the winter months the refuges are abused constantly by the enterprising bums of the world – and good luck to them, I say.  They provide amusement in spades.

The last part of the Camino is by far the most walked.  In order to qualify for their little Compostela certificate, people only need to walk the last 100km; as you can imagine, at the 100km point the Way suddenly becomes more like the M25. I think I liked it better when we were freezing in the meseta.

But, oh sweet Lordy, the food.  We have been waiting for some time to fall in love with Spanish food.  We knew it was out there, we just hadn’t had the experience which would transform it for us.  So it was with great care that we made sure we passed by the Bar O Marillo in time for lunch.

Our guidebook raved about it as a great place to eat typically Galician food.  The most well known of these is Pulpa, or octopus, but we had decided to wait until we reached a proper “pulperia” for that, and were prepared instead for lashings of Caldo, a Galician casserole type soup, and whatever else came our way.

Oh, Man, it was good.  From the fresh asparagus and jamon and rich Caldo, to the perfectly cooked veal and hand cut potato chips, it was sheer bliss.  The wine was good, and even the dessert list went outside the usual “helados, fruta, flan, tarte” spiel which Elsbeth used to have perfectly memorised.  To finish they insisted we try some of the local moonshine.  A shot of that stuff and no mountain would be too high, I tell you.  The most awesome thing about eating in Spain is the price – for two full three course meals, with wine and coffee, we paid only €16.

Some days are just perfect; we sailed out of that restaurant into brilliant sunshine.  The mountains were all behind us and Santiago and a holiday in front.  Not to mention the fact that buoyed by that much alcohol, we probably could have flown to Santiago if we had tried.

As it was it took a few more very long days to get here. 

And I am really, really glad that it is not our final destination, and also that we did not have hugely high expectations of our arrival.  I guess that after walking over two thousand kilometres, hugging the statue of the Apostle of St James is a bit of an anti climax, really, even if his venerated remains lie beneath.  Santiago is a beautiful old city, with an historic centre as picturesque as any, but at the end of the day, the heart of the Camino is in the walking I think; not in the arrival.

And the stupid woman in the pilgrim’s office didn’t believe us anyway.  She smirked and cocked her eyebrows at me in a most disbelieving fashion when I answered “London” to her question about where we started.  “So, you walk from Paris?” she said, indicating the fact that the next stamp after London in our credencials came from Paris. 

“No, actually, we walked all the way from London itself,” I answered, used to people misunderstanding. 

“No, you didn’t, I think from Paris, yes? And you are FROM London?”

“No, I’m FROM Australia, but we walked from London.”

“But you didn’t walk all the way from London.”

“Well, actually, yes we did.  To Dover.  Then by boat to Calais.  Then through France, and then in Spain.  Walking.”

“But perhaps you took the bus some of this way, I think?”

“No.  We walked.”

“Hmmmmmmmm.” (Highly sceptical eyebrow raising look).  “So I will write that you began in Paris then.”

“Whatever.  From London, though.  Actually.  We walked.”  At this point she was just nodding absently as she wrote “Paris” in the “Commence” part of the form though, and I really couldn’t be bothered arguing with her.

  My only revenge came when we had to provide a motivation for our journey.  In order to qualify for the “Compostela” certificate one has to claim a spiritual motivation for making the pilgrimage, otherwise one only gets the inferior “certificate”.  The stupid thing about this is that all you have to do is write “spiritual” in the relevant box in order to qualify, which I think is particularly pointless.  I have never much liked filling in forms, or bureaucracy of any type, for that matter.  I had also read that the office much prefers to issue “Compostelas” as averse to “certificates”, no doubt for nefarious number crunching reasons of their own, so with great pleasure I wrote “cultural” in the little box and waited for her response.

Sure enough she looked up with a frown.  “But did you walk the Camino with a spiritual motivation?”  She asked me sternly. 

“Well,” I began, knowing I was going to enjoy this, “there were definitely elements of the spiritual in our journey, but my motivation was not of a spiritual nature, no.”

“So you would say your journey was a spiritual one?”

“It definitely had spiritual moments.”  Particularly in the O Marillo bar, though I thought it impolitic to say this.

“So you walked for spiritual reasons.”

“No.  Do you think so?”

“Yes.  Definitely spiritual.” And she crossed out my answer.

  There you go.  Me, a non Catholic sceptic, walked the Camino for spiritual reasons, not just because it was on the way to Cape Town.  Ah well, at least I know now, and the Church has one more number for it’s statistics, bless it’s wealth gathering little socks.

So now we are resting our tired little bones in Santiago for a week or so.  Both Gary’s mother and mine are arriving to spend some time with us, which we are looking forward to.  The 800 plus kilometres from Dax to here have taken us 37 days; not bad when you consider that is very close to the distance from Sydney to Melbourne.  I have to say, though, it is the kind of pace I don’t fancy keeping up indefinitely.  Even if there are good restaurants on the way.

By text Andreas tells me that he and Ato are only a couple of days behind, so we should see them soon.  We caught up with the four Basque walkers last night, which was wonderful, and they insisted on buying us dinner which we hope to return one day somewhere down the line!  I think they enjoy their food as much as we do.

So now we are about to head out into the sunshine for another looooong lunch.  Important to have as many of these as possible before we walk again, I think. I guess the next entry may come from somewhere near Portugal, as that is where we are heading, although how I will ever find my way anywhere without little yellow arrows now I don’t know….

Entry Filed under: trekking