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...
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