Alright I know the experience is richer for the images and those thousand words that are so much faster to read but honestly, most of the places I´m staying are pretty rubbish for internet speed and it takes hours (truly) to upload photos. So you´ll just have to be satisfied for now with a brief update without photographic support.
Today I´m writing from a village called Villar de Mazarife (a decidedly Moorish name) just this side of Leon. I passed through Leon yesterday and of the cities we´ve gone through along the Way it was my favorite so far. Part of my enjoyment of the city was the somewhat magical reunion with people I´d though I´d lost somehow along the road but who all seemed to arrive in Leon on the same day anyway. It was the place to be last ¡t night really, where were you? Also, they had a rather remarkable Cathedral and the very homeopathic formula I required for my swollen and unhappy knee.
The walk into Leon (as with really the approach to all of the cities on the Camino) left something to be desired... Burgos being the worst... but that´s another story. Yesterday though, walking into Leon was all on the roadside version of the Camino. I´ll admit to a gross oversimplification of things here for dramatic effect (and this will not suit for my academic writing but for the blog...), but sometimes I feel as though I could boil my personal preference for, and experience of, the ¨landscapes of the Camino¨down to proximity to major roads. Let me put it like this...
If you were given the choice between taking a walk, a long walk mind you, on either the Bruce Trail (Appalacian Trail) or the 401 (I-70) which would you choose? On option 1 you might have wildflowers and birds and smells of morning dew or something slightly hard to place but lovely... on option 2 you have weeds that are likely toxic, traffic that is dangerously fast and the smell of exhaust. Unless you are completely crazy or engaged in some sort of ¨art project¨then the question is clearly rhetorical. Well it feels like that simple a dichotomy out here sometimes. The Camino that isn´t ¨written home¨about is the long walks into cities by tire factories and car dealerships, the lenghty kilometres (miles) of walking on road shoulders with truck drivers flying past so fast and close you have to hold your hat on and the pathways so untended they feel lonely and rejected despite the many thousands that walk every year. This is the unromantic Camino, the camino that is not written about in any of the published accounts or shown in any of the photographs. This is the last pleastant to experience but the most interesting to record (for my research anyway).
I don´t mean to sound cynical at all, I´m having an amazing experience to be sure but since the rest of my blog has been lovely with pretty pictures I do feel obliged to report the slightly more honest version of things. I´ve not yet gone through my maps and diaries to extract some kind of percentage of the camino that feels ¨souless¨ but I can at least say that it´s a somewhat sad amount of it. Before I came to Spain I was perusing a book called ¨Non-Places¨ which was effectively the anthropological study of places like freeways, waiting rooms and airport terminals. Places that we in our very modern lives may actually spend a lot of time, but rarely notice or really take the time to look at. These places are really only meant to be a means to an end, a way to get you from point A to B. Well a good amount of the Camino feels that way, paved over, pushed to the sidelines, neglected and perhaps sort of sterilized for convenience sake.
However, these places, that are difficult to walk through because they make you feel like not walking, do rather have the effect of making you really appreciate the quiet countryside, even if it is just endless fields of straw. The monotonous landscapes of the ¨Meseta¨ are certainly very conducive to contemplation because there really isn´t much to look at but your own mind, and that can be very interesting. I´d like to write more but I´ve got 4 minutes left, so I´ll have to continue where I left off soon...
Friday, September 30, 2011
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Miracles and the Meseta...
Well well well,I´m in Burgos now which means I´ve travelled just under 300km by foot alone already! I´m feeling pretty accomplished about that and my feet are feeling it too.
Burgos marks the end of the first third (although distance wise it´s a bit further). The walk tomorrow takes me out of the hilly, sometimes mountainous, country of vinyards, orchards and winding roads and into the (dreaded by some) Meseta! The Meseta, is a flat dry plain with the Camino stretching on into the distance for straight and long stretches. Few turns, hills and sometimes few towns to mark the passage of land... I imagine it makes you feel that you´re not making much ground and that sounds pretty hard for some so many people skip it by bus or parts of it anyway.
I´ve heard the Camino split into three parts: Part one, from the Pyrnees to Burgos is the Body; part two, through the Meseta is the emotions (poignant that many people skip it I think); and part three, the return to mountains in Galicia and the spiritual. Having just finished part one, I can agree with the body. It took these nearly two weeks to get my ¨Camino legs¨ as they say. It´s not really that the soreness and aches of the hard days walking go away, but that you begin to accept them and your awareness is able to grow to include other experiences also. At first I felt like all I could do was inhabit my body, and all my attention was there, but now I can free myself a bit more and engage with the path and with the community that forms in movement along it. You have to go through, to get out as it were. It has been an expansive couple of weeks!
As you move along, and you see the same faces those faces begin to have names and countries of origen. Even though you may know nothing more of these people, these pilgrims (Peregrino/a´s in Spanish) they become your community in motion. Just by smiling and wishing each other a ¨Buen Camino¨ you become friends and soon you are eating, drinking, cooking and walking together.Unlike most relationships you start out sleeping together... in large dormitories OF COURSE! Conversation is in bits of mutually comprehensible languages and often quite hilarious for that. I learned how to cook Paella the other day from a Castillian man named Marti who spoke no English at all but fortunately cooking can be easily demonstrated with gesture and intonation. Marti, his wife Rosa and an assortment of British, American, Swedish, Italian, Mexican, German and far more than expected Canadians make up the bulk of my Camino crew. Some days I walk in the company of another, some days on my own, there is no expectation of staying together as everyone has there own reasons for making the journey but we nearly always end up in the same place. The camino doesn´t end with the end of the days walking, it continues with the company you keep each afternoon and evening.
The experience I can most liken this to is sailing out at sea! We are all in it toegther, sharing the same experience, sleeping in cramped quarters and putting up with snoring. We travel along the same way, and feel the same aches and pains of the work. You could choose to get off, make port, and get on another ship with a new crew but most don´t if they can help it. It´s good to have a community to share the experience with. For me it´s good to hear what the experience is for others also (research and all).
Last night in San Juan de Ortega (St. John of the Nettle) I witnessed a miracle! Although I don´t know if a predictable miracle really constitutes a miracle but it felt a little miraculous to to be present for it nontheless... So, in this tiny town (Population 20) there is a monastery, that was built but St. Juan, a disciple of this other Saint, St. Domingo and both were big supporters of pilgrims. In the church attached to the monestary there are all these stone pillars and on top of one of them is a little scene of angels and pilgrims and the Virgin Mary with palms forward (pictured above). On the equinoxes of the year (which just happened to be yesterday when I found myself there) the light shines in through one window to illuminate this very scene at 7pm. I knew nothing of this until I found myself there and witnessing this very event with a church packed full of pilgrims, residents (the few there were) and bus loads of tourist. Que Suerte! (what luck). My old friend syncrhonicity is also travelling the Camino is seems. I filmed it.
Apart from this, the Camino has been walking walking walking... and passing through towns which are celebrating the Fiesta de San Mateo this week (a festival of wine producing in a serious wine producing region). The picture below of crowds in Logroño was on the first night of this festival. There were crowds drinking wine in the streets all night and still drinking wine in the streets at 6:30am when I walked out the next day! The street was sticky with wine.
This is not an elegent ending but I have no more change and 4 minutes of internet left. So until next time, Buen Camino!
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Five days in.Well I´ll be honest, the first 3 were brutal, there were several times I thought I might die and given that, that I would surely never make it 3o odd more days. But, on day 4 I took the rest my body was angrily (I´ll spare you the picture of my feet) demanding and I only walked 8km instead of 25. Day 5 was accordingly, much much better, I even started humming at one point!
So a quick orientation. I began walking in St. Jean-Pied-de-Port which is located in the French Pyreness. That means that the first day was pretty much alllll up hill. 20 out of 27 km in fact were up hill and no small gain, I climbed up 1390m (that´s metres not feet American´s, convert it). This would be like climbing Long´s Peak in Colorado, though the base was not nearly as high. In any case, my fragile lungs failed me and I had to stop every 100m to breath. But I made it all the way to Roncesvalles, which is is Spain so I crossed the border at some point in the mountains. I´m pretty excited to be in Spain but my body, a little less so. There were lot´s of lovely views of French and Spanish countryside, I particularly loved the Beech groves for their trees and their wonderful shade, and lot´s of pretty cows, horses and sheep with bells. I´ve been hearing bells since I started, cow bells, church bells, alarm bells... etc...
Day 2 was pretty easy by comparison, though after day 1 is was exhausting nevertheless. The Convent turned Pilgrim Hostel (Albuergue) in Roncesvalles, turned on the lights at 6am sharp and they expect you to get up and go. I was awake anyway so I was on the road by 6:30 and walking in starlight. I enjoyed that actually, though under trees in the beginning I had to use my headlamp to see. It was funny, I could tell where all the other pilgrims were by their individual little spotlights in the trail. The Camino, is meant to mirror the path of the milky way actually, and is sometimes called the Via de las Estrellas (Way of Stars). One of these days I´ll rise early enough to walk with the galaxy, I think that would be divine (pun intended).
So the scenery is lovely and all, but Spain is not a vegetarian friendly country and I´m a stubborn vegetarian so by now I´m not really feeling that great (you cannot use this much energy and survive on bread... I know that very well now). I had already decided to forgive myself for eating the fishies because I really have no choice, and I did in Roncesvalles already. It seems that Verduras (vegetables) means also with fish, and if you´re very lucky not with pork as well. In any case the food is not sustaining me even on day 2 and by day 3, well I´m basically failing and pretty unhappy accordingly. I barely even remember that day and it was only 2 days ago (but don´t worry Nate and Al, I took notes!). That day was rough at the end though, it was all paved, mostly in a city. I made it to Pamplona on the third day and I did not get gored by any bulls!
Pamplona is pretty cool, big walls around it and narrow winding streets going every which way but always leading to a plaza. The plaza´s however seem pretty empty, until that is... 7pm. After 7pm, the streets are a MOB of people! Everyone is out and walking around and speaking Spanish so fast I can´t understand a single word, and eating tapas and drinking wine which is as cheap as water. Seriously, I went to a restaurant where I could have either wine or water with dinner, same price (obviously I chose wine), water is free in the plaza. Fun city, but after three days on calm, quiet country lanes and earthen pathways, the city is also frantic, disorienting, chaotic and hard. The next day I was so disoriented in fact that I wandered the streets aimlessly unable to decide what to do with myself until about noon, when I decided I would at least get out of the city so I could start early the next day in peace. Best decision I´ve made yet, I felt SO much better out in the coutryside again and had an easy afternoon of rest and writing and even a bit of sketching.
Today, I walked from Cizur Menor to Puente la Raina about 19km. Easy, I made it to my destination by 11:30am, I started walking at 6:30 in the sublime moonlight. But after a day of rest my mood was SO much better that even the 350m climb over Alto Perdon (Mt. Pardon) seemed like a breeze. It was actually breezy too, in fact windy and the ridgeline was cleverly lined with wind turbines (pictured below in Day 5). The descent was harder, steep, loose rocks and blistered feet, and don´t forget I´m wearing a pack that probably weighs about 15kg!
I was over that mountain so early the sun didn´t touch me until I was already down the other side. So the weather was lovely for walking, sunny (by 9), a cool breeze, almond and olive tree lined earth pathways and charming hilltop towns with medieval churches. That brings me to Puente la Raina.
This town is gorgeus. If you ever get to come here, do. It´s wine country, you can´t go wrong. There is a massive gilded church called the Iglesia de Santiago, first church I´ve gone in on the pilgrimage actually, others have been closed or I´ve been too tired to explore at the end of the day. I´m so glad I went in this one. It seemed like a nice, quiet place to sit out of the sun and take my daily notes which takes a couple of hours at least. So I go in and sit down near the back. Other pilgrims and tourists come in every so often wander down the isles and take a few pictures, nobody stays more than a few minutes so I pretty much have the whole place to myself. As I´m sitting there writing after about 20 minutes, the sun beam from one of the two windows way up high moves right onto me. Suddenly I´m illuminated (pictures above) and it feels amazing. It was like somehow catching the end of the rainbow or being immersed in the ray of sunlight from the lone hole in a distant raincloud (I´ve always called those God ray´s, and I´m not religious). But here I am sitting in a medieval church, walking a medieval pilgrimage and the God ray lights me up for a few minutes, I´m feeling pretty religious now! A wave of contentment and joy and peace washed over me. Wonderful. Since I was writing in my journal already, I interrupted the chronological flow of my notes to record what I was experiencing, and I took a picture (yay pocket sized camera!).
Overall, the start has been rough but rewarding. I´ve written over 35 pages of notes, taken over 350 pictures and talked to myself (into a recorder) a lot, though I don´t know exactly how much the voice recorder is more mysterious to me. And this post has already cost me 4 Euros so since it´s almost 7 I´m going for dinner. More from me soon. Until then, Buen Camino!
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