Poles Together

A word about my walking poles. The one in my right hand is Iago - named after St James, the patron saint of Spain, the saint of Santiago de Compostela, where all the Caminos lead. The one in my left is Thérèse - named after St Thérèse of Lisieux and St Teresa of Avila. (The name also gives a nod to Mother Theresa and recalls, too, Fernando and Tere, the sweet brother and sister couple I met in Pamplona on my first Camino, and continued to bump into all the way to Belorado.)

Iago I bought for my first Camino. I hadn´t ever had trekking poles before. It took a day or two to get used to him, to accustom myself to this strange extra limb. But he soon felt like an old friend. In Conques a kind girl in the tourist office gave me Thérèse - she´d been left behind by an American pilgrim - and I quickly found out that two poles were much better than one. Thérèse lost her pointed tip some time ago, but she still performs well.

Iago and Thérèse, my right hand and my left hand. I really couldn´t manage without them. They help me up and down steep mountain slopes, they stabilize me on rock and in mud, they protect my knees from strain and injury. They give me confidence to ford rivers and streams. They warn off any dogs which turn out to be aggressive rather than simply curious. They embody the polar principles of the very Camino itself, both its yin and its yang, its sun and its moon, its positive and its negative. They are poles working together, always in rhythmic harmony, never apart. They are both the Spanish and the French halves of the Camino´s soul. They connect me with the earth below, yet also point up to the sky above. They keep me grounded, yet also promise the radiance of the stars.

(Posted from Cáceres, on the Vía de la Plata, Spain.)

Pamplona

Before I went home on the ferry from Santander to Plymouth I spent a few days in Pamplona, San Sebastián and Bilbao. This is Pamplona...

Death In The Afternoon

I left the suburbs of Pamplona and its university, its cranes, its new housing blocks. And stopped for a beer in Cizur Menor just outside the city. It was only late morning but I felt like a brief rest. The bored, red-lipsticked, black-haired bar girls were either languidly staring into space or talking passionately into their mobiles. It was still hours before they had to set the tables for lunch which in Spain starts at 3 pm. Refreshed I headed out into a bare and treeless countryside of red-brown earth. Arid, red-brown hills reared up all around me. This was a quite different landscape from the gentler, more rounded, wooded hills near Roncesvalles. I had never seen such a landscape in all my life. I passed a memorial to a pilgrim who had died at a spot close by.

It seemed an age to reach the windy top of the Alto del Perdon, the Hill of Pardon. No guide book study or map reading was necessary. You just placed your feet in the direction of the whirling monopods of countless wind turbines which desecrated the wide hill on the south-west horizon. But right then I didn't feel like being a Don Quixote tilting at windmills. On the summit there's an east-west procession of medieval pilgrim silhouettes sculpted in wrought iron. It was no place to hang about for long as the wind blew chill. I slipped and stumbled down the stony slope on the other side. From here you could see all the villages for the next 12 km mapped out before you in a meandering line: Uterga, Muruzábal, Óbanos - and Puente la Reina, my day's destination.

At Uterga I witnessed a sad accident. A cat raced across the village street and was crushed by a car right in front of me. Its legs twitched convulsively. A passer-by urged me to put it out of its misery by striking it with my walking pole. But as I approached it stopped moving. A couple of weeks later another pilgrim caught up with me and told me she had seen the dead cat and had carefully carried it to the side of the road. I wish I had done that. This incident haunted me for days afterwards. I felt somehow guilty for an accident that was not my fault... I kept thinking about Hemingway, and the killing of bulls, the ritual spilling of their blood. Spain was something else. Something more primitive... The path stretched before me like a snaking wound through the open landscape.

Traditionally and mystically there are 3 stages of the Camino: from Roncesvalles to Burgos lies the Way Of Reflection; from Burgos to Leon the Way of Penitence; from Leon to Santiago the Way of Glory. I had begun the Way of Reflection. Would I ever attain the Way of Glory?

My photo shows the church porch at Puente la Reina.

Pamplona

On 18 November I crossed the river Arga by the medieval bridge, the Puente de la Magdalena, walked over a further drawbridge and through the Portal de Zumalacárregui, and so entered Pamplona. It was early on Sunday afternoon and the shops were shut (when are they ever open in Spain?) but there was plenty of life on the streets and in the bars and cafés.

I wish I could tell you that I explored diligently the historic sites of this vibrant city, that I researched the fascinating history of King Louis I and Ferdinard V and the French troops which occupied Pamplona during the Napoleonic Wars, that I was awestruck at the famous cloister of the 14th century cathedral, that I sought out the early Gothic churches of San Cenin, San Nicolás and Santo Domingo, that I tracked down the places associated with Ernest Hemingway when he was a frequent visitor here in the 1920s, that I learnt about the encierro, the crazy bull-running festival that takes place each year from 7 July, which is the feast day of Saint Fermin, Pamplona's patron saint...

I wish I could tell you I walked the city's many parks and green areas and admired the modern sculptures in them, that I spent hours in the Museo de Navarra noting its treasures and antiquities, that I investigated the star-shaped 16th century citadel and its gardens...

But I did none of these things. What I did do however was eat and drink. I remember the warm glow of the lively bars as you entered, teeth chattering, from the cold streets. The street vendors selling hot, roasted chestnuts in the chill, evening air. The elegant glasses of red wine. The plates of tapas temptingly lined up - fried prawns, octopus and squid, mussels in white wine, anchovies with green peppers, bite-sized pork pieces with garlic, chicken in spicy tomato sauce, piquant chorizo, patatas fritas, sardines in olive oil, eggs with tuna, ham and cheese omelettes...

Beautiful Navarre

It took me 2 days to walk the 44 km to the walled city of Pamplona, capital of Navarre and historic capital of the Basque Country. From Roncesvalles the route led easily along undulating paths which crossed 3 river valleys ( the Urrobi, the Erro and the Arga rivers) separated by the wooded high ground of the Alto de Mezquiriz and the Alto de Erro. In Burguete, the 1st village I went through, I bought bread and cheese and chorizo sausage, which I ate lying on a patch of grass near the Alto de Erro. It was a remote and beautiful sunny spot in front of a ruined inn (now a cattle shelter) at an altitude of 800m. A cyclist and a couple of pilgrims drifted by. For much of the day the trees had closed in, but from this high viewpoint you could see rolling wooded hills stretching as far as the horizon. Then I climbed down an entertaining rocky path into Zubiri.

Passing a malodorous magnesium extraction plant on the outskirts of this small town, I walked 5 km along the Arga valley to Larrosoana, which I entered over its medieval bridge. The albergue was right in the centre but unusually it had no kitchen (in the evenings pilgrims often prepared their own meals and shared them), so I ate a delicious dinner of Basque food and wine at a bar-restaurant just around the corner. There I saw again 2 lovely Spanish pilgrims, a brother and sister called Fernando and Tere (short for Teresa), whom I'd met in Roncesvalles and at other times throughout the day. I would keep bumping into them for the next 8 days - and with each encounter the delight at seeing each other increased, and the hugging and kissing got more ecstatic!