The Camino

'I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more' a lyric that was sung countless times on the Camino but truth be told, I walked 790 kilometres and then I walked 150 more. From the small town of St Jean Pied de Port in the French Pyrenees mountains to Santiago de Compostella in western Spain and then onto Finestere on the coast, the end of the world as they once thought. The Camino de Santiago is a thru-walk like no other. A pilgrimage crossing mountains, plains, deserts, through cities and remote towns right across Spain until you reach the pinnacle, Santiago. There is also added option to continue walking onto Finisterre for those crazy enough. Indeed, I was. Thirty seven days of non stop walking. 

 

It was tough. Mornings started early to beat the hot Spanish sun, days were long to walk the average twenty five kilometers per day and your body blistered and ached with every step. 

 

The alarm would go off at 5:00am and my very first waking thought every day was 'what the hell are you doing?' Who would be silly enough to just randomly quit your job, sell everything you have and with only a backpack walk across Spain on foot? Without any training, without any research, without anyone.  

 

 Call me crazy but I saw an unknown adventure and a challenge on a map before me and I just had to do it. What I never  had imagined was that those thirty seven days would come to be the hardest and best days of my life. 

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People walk the Camino for many reasons. As a spiritual journey, to overcome heartbreak, to grieve, to solve life’s problems, to clear their heads or in my case, because I could.
 

I set off on my Camino journey on my own, but as soon as I had checked into the Albergue the night before I would start my walk, I had already met other pilgrims, all just as excited and nervous as I was. While I may have been on my own for the 5 weeks, I was never alone.

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No matter what country you are from or what language you speak you greet everyone you meet or walk past with ‘Buen Camino’ and a smile. This translates to ‘good journey’. It was the ultimate ice breaker for every stranger you came across.

 

Sometimes you’d walk alongside someone for a few minutes and in those few minutes you’d find out their name, where they’re from and why they are walking the Camino. On the Camino, you were you. No one knew your background, your financial status, your job. You simply just presented like everyone else, on a level playing field, all with the goal to reach Santiago.

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You may only meet that person once and never see them again, as they were tracking at a faster pace or stop off to have rest day. Others you would meet and cross paths with days or weeks later when you would by chance end up staying in the same albergue or you would pass them in a random café in a one shop town. Others you would walk with daily. I was fortunate enough to meet Jess an Australian girl, living in the UK, early one morning in the first week. We had stopped at a service station for a coffee and it was when Jess quipped 'where's the choccy milk and sausage rolls?' that I knew we were going to get along. I also met Anna, an American girl from Michigan, who had formed a camino family with two Italian guys Sergio & Emmanuele. We all walked together for a couple of hours one day and I knew I had found a special friend in her but it wasn’t going to be until two weeks later that we  ran into each other again along the way.

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Jess & I became inseparable on the Way. Our reputation even preceded us on the Camino grapevine. We would often meet people and be told ‘I’ve heard about you two! You’re the Aussie girls, laughing their way along the Camino, with little preparation’. Yep, that was us. We were not on the walk to mourn, we weren’t there to solve life's big questions, we were there to enjoy ourselves, lose weight and get a tan. In doing so, I know we brought much joy to people as we passed them. People who needed it. People would share some of the darkest stories with me, heart breaking stories. I met people carrying ashes of loved ones and spreading them in places that person never got to go, others were just needing a friend to talk to, before carrying on, on their own.

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Early on, on the walk, I realised I had time. So much time. All I had to do each day was wake up and walk. There was no stress, no deadlines, or time, clocks didn’t matter. So what reason did I not have to give people my time. There were times when I felt like I was a very unqualified therapist listening to people who felt that could freely open up to me. I may not have had all the answers but they got to share and feel heard and I would always make sure there was an element of joy or laughter in those conversations before we separated.

No more a time than my dealings with Blue Man. He could quite possibly have been the grumpiest man to walk the Camino. He socialised with no one, he spoke to no one and he only ever wore blue except for at night when he wore an orange shirt. Yet I saw this middle-aged French man as a challenge. I was going to make him smile, even if it took me the entire five weeks. I would always say ‘Bonjour’ to him and he would just grumble. Blue Man had a name for himself and people thought I was just wasting my time but I knew at one point I would get him to crack. I lost him for a few days but in the town of Estrella, I was sitting outside a bar having a well earned beer after a hard days walk (to be honest there was a beer after every days walk), when Blue Man strolled past. I quickly and excitedly yelled 'bonjour!', raising my beer as a toast. He stopped, scrunched up his nose and threw his head back and said ‘ohh cerveza’. Not even a hello, just ‘ohh beer’. I signalled for him to come into the bar to buy me another beer. After our cheers, he smiled. I had done it. He didn’t sit with me, he just drank it and continued on but not before I took a photo as evidence. I saw him only a few more times in the days after and he would always be the first to shout ‘cerveza’ at me and I would reply with a ‘bonjour!’ Until one time it was the last and I never saw him again. Though, if I was the only person to interact with him on his Camino journey, I was happy.

 

While most of the times we made people laugh, there was one particular occasion where we made 100 pilgrims very angry. Jess and I decided this one morning to get up before everyone else and hit the road in the dark. Every alburge you stay in is different and for this night we slept in an open bunk room consisting of about 50 bunk beds, males and females all in together. I surprisingly had a good nights sleep despite the snoring of one man which can only be described as sounding like a wild boar being attacked by a grizzly bear with the whistle of a dying budgie. This was all through my ear plugs.
 

We couldn't wait to put that night behind us and walked out of town trying to follow the yellow arrows on the ground but in the pitch black it was tough. Especially because we were just too tired and lazy and couldn’t even be bothered getting our head torches out.  I’m not sure whether it was Jess’s theory that she thinks the albergue owners shine torches in the eyes of roosters so that they crow and wake us up or whether it was because I was so engrossed in my 5 cent nectarine that I saw a sign but distracted, took the low road instead of the high road. Well what did that mean, 50 other pilgrims who saw us go that way, blindly followed like a pack of sheep.

 

We soon got overtaken by pretty much all of them with their head torches on all saying ‘buen camino!’ and ‘buenas dias’ all so energetic for 6:00am. We followed this road for a good 30 minutes, roughly 2.5 kilometres, when all of a sudden we see a police car flying along a parallel road with lights and sires on, eventually coming to a stop to cut us all off at an intersection. Murmurs started ‘is it a random visa check?. Was their a murder on the Camino? Was it a drug check?’ I got a tiny bit worried at that as the Germans had been going on for days about all the codeine tablets I had and how they are illegal in Spain. Luckily it was none of those reasons. We had just gone the wrong way. The pilgrims weren’t happy. One lady shouting ‘Who was the leader, who were we following?!’ Jess and I coyly slinking back into the crowd with the biggest grins on our faces, trying not to laugh.

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We made a lot of people angry that morning. We had sent people on a one hour five kilometer additional walk, making most of their days now a 30 plus kilomenter day. Did Jess and I care? Nope, we laughed and took a few selfies with the cops, quietly told them it was our fault and now they wanted to take more photos with us to hang proudly on the station wall. They offered to drive us to Santiago which was tempting but we declined and continued on our way.

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We decided that as the day was already a shambles by 7:00am, we would take our time and try the coffee in every village we passed through. At the first village café we could hear everyone chatting about how someone led them the wrong way and were still trying to find out who. We just looked at each other a bit our tongues.

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The Camino brings out the worst and best in you. You hurt, you're tired, you get over it. And the people around you see that and love you still. There is a week where you walk through desert plains from Leon to Burgos. The scenery so baron, you’ve nothing to distract you from your own thoughts. This in itself is enough for people to be scared of it that they skip this week. What it meant for me, music on listening to Mumford and Sons and Dean Lewis, singing, arms in the air, dancing in my own world, loving everything about it, even the yellow desert.

 

The beauty of the Camino is you walk at your pace and stay where you want. After reuniting in a town outside of Burgos with Anna, we were now a trio with Anna quickly setting the tone by asking whether we would be embarrassed if she pretended she was blind with her walking pole and proceeded to do it as we walked through the town. And so we spent the remainder of our walk, laughing, crying, whinging, discussing life and telling stories and making sure every morning started with a pan au chocolat and a good strong coffee.

 

We stopped off and stayed in the sixth century, Samos Monastery and we went to mass with the Monks. We also toured through incredibly ornate Catholic churches, one particular standing out to us as it had its walkway lined with human skulls. It was a little eerie having the entire church to ourselves and in the main cathedral Jess and I decided to sing. Unable to work out a church song we both knew we hilariously settled on silent night. Boy did we sound terrible but the acoustics were incredible.  

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It was at the week four mark where the journey started to feel long and you just want to get to Santiago de Compostella but it was a great lesson in patience and to learn to value and appreciate the here and now and not wish you were somewhere else sooner. That time was to come. 

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After walking thirty five kilometer days, day after day, your feet and legs would hurt so much; the pain actually at its worst after you stopped walking. It was crazy that when you knew you had five kilometers left to go for that day, the pain would set in and it was mind over matter at that point. Often collapsing once you found where you were staying for the night or lying on your back with your feet up in the air against a wall so to let your blood rush down from your feet. Doing anything you could to relieve the pain.

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You would shower immediately after arriving at your alburge. I reached a new low on the Camino. Not in my thoughts, more in my standards but I'm not sure what is worse. To everyone who has walked the Camino they can relate, ugly goes. It wasn't the fact I was now preferring to walk in hiking socks and sandals, the low was when you go to have a shower but just couldn't be bothered undressing. On multiple occasions I simply hopped in the shower fully clothed. It could be because a tight sweaty sports bra is near impossible to get off without looking like some trapped daddy long legs spider trying to dislocate shoulders, banging your elbows on the small cubical walls trying to get it off. Or just the feeling of water (sometimes even hot if you're lucky) on your face after a long day was simply amazing. I would just stand there exhausted, fully clothed under the shower until I finally had enough energy to take them off. Conveniently on the Camino you only have two sets of clothes so you was what you wear every night so really I was just saving time and doing it in the shower. 

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We'd have an early pilgrim dinner and retire to our beds to pop and drain blisters and lather ourselves up in deep heat. Lying there questioning our life choices and wondering what on earth did we think our bodies were going to feel like after five weeks of solid walking. Yet every morning you awake renewed and you go again. 

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Anna had told us about an Australian guy called Nathan she had met at one of the alburges. According to Anna, we'd know Nathan when we met him. She had also mentioned Evan and Finn, two kiwi guys walking one week of the Camino.

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By pure chance we stumbled on Evan and Finn as we were climbing up a mountain range, exhausted. While we may have brought light to others, Evan and Finn were like a ray of sunshine for us. They didn't hold back with their jokes and insults and the five of us walked the rest of the day together with a renewed energy. Perhaps because they were only on day two and we were day twenty five that they were so upbeat and happy. It was exactly what we needed at that time. 

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While relaxing that evening outside the albergue with an icy cold beer, we hear a loud 'G'Day!' and look up and this guy charges through the front gate and with one swift move pulls a bottle of wine from his pack drink holder and spins it around his fingers like a bar tender performing tricks. We all look at each other and then straight to Anna and mouth 'Nathan'? You bet ya. 

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Over the next two weeks I'd strangely form a nice friendship with Nathan and his Dad. While the sad beauty of the Camino meant that we'd lose Finn and Evan the very next day and so it was almost as though they came across our paths just to reboost our spirits and give us renewed strength to continue on. 

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We continued up and down more mountain ranges and through picturesque farm sides and to our relief and only after getting lost once more, we walked into the main square of Santiago, with the Cathedral in front of us. We had done it. We had walked 790 kilometers and a few more thanks to some unintentional detours. We gave each other such a big hug and it was the most surreal feeling. We sat and watched other pilgrims arrive too, watching the look of elation cross their face and happiness when reunited with other pilgrims they shared the journey with.

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We would be leaving Jess in Santiago. Jess having walked all she wanted, while Anna and I set off again at 5:00am the next day to continue another three days onto Finisterre just because. 

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Over those three days I savoured everything. I took great delight in the coffees and pastries. The red wines tasted so much better. The scenery seemed new again and the sight of the coastline up in the distance was the greatest sight of all. There was Finisterre.

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There was to be no more alburges, that night Anna and I paying for an AirBNB so that we could enjoy a comfortable bed and a long hot shower. We checked in, put our bags down one last time then headed out to buy ourselves a bottle of wine and our standard Camino lunch, chorizo, cheese and a baguette and continued our final kilometer up to Cape Finisterre. 

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Upon seeing the lighthouse and the marker signalling 0.00km we had made it. We had walked the entire length of Spain. What a feeling. We sat on a rock overlooking the ocean and watched this incredible sunset closing out our Camino journey. Sitting there reflecting, I went through nearly every day of the camino in my head. A highlights reel and oh boy, a lowlights reel. I would go through all the people I had met. Vividly remembering their faces and wondered where are they now? Did they make it to Santiago? Did they stop? Did they find what they were searching for? Were they happy?

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I don't know why but I had a strong sense of assurance that my cranky little Blue Man made it to the end. I hoped that he would find more joy in his life. If he would just let people in. 

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I met so many incredible characters along the way. All to return to their home countries and unless you exchanged details you probably will never see any of them again. Yet all these people you have shared so many deep conversations with, told them your secrets, asked for advice or had just been a friend to them. They made your journey.

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What I found so incredibly strange in retrospect is had I had started my walk a day earlier or a day later the people I called my Camino family, namely Jess and Anna, would have been completely different people. 

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The Camino made me question why aren't we so bold in our every day life to speak to strangers? Within thirty seconds on the Camino you know so much about the person and you receive an honest answer when you ask how they are. When you run into them again days or weeks later when asking 'how have you been?' they don't answer 'good' or 'busy', you get a real answer, an answer that conversation can stem from not one that shuts conversation off. 

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As mentally and physically challenging as the Camino is, I would recommend it to anyone. There is something so therapeutic about removing yourself from your day to day life, from anything familiar, from stress, and just being free to walk. You process thoughts, emotions and you can sing loudly walking or you can just walk until you are so utterly exhausted you can't walk no more. And why you sit there questioning what are you doing? You are also thinking how incredibly great is this journey that you're on.