Yellow Coquille

We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time. T. S. ELIOT Four Quartets

So this was the end of the road. The Via Tolosana and the Via Aragonés had been completed. I'd walked 870 km from Arles in French Provence to Puente la Reina in northern Spain. It had taken 46 days - from 7 September to 22 October - at an average daily distance of 19 km, which included 4 rest days in Toulouse, Pau, Jaca and Sangüesa.

In Obanos, just before Puente la Reina, I'd joined the Camino Francés, the most popular and famous pilgrim trail of them all - the trail I'd walked last November/December. I had no desire to carry on and retrace last year's steps to Santiago - mainly because of my aching feet. At the beginning of the trip I did have half a notion to continue to Compostela via a beautiful but much more arduous route along the coast, the Ruta de la Costa. However my feet were not in good enough shape for that. Also my only guide book to this route was inadequate and confusing, and accommodation along the route was limited. Some of the albergues were closed in the winter as well. Perhaps I'll do it another time..?

I think the photo with which I began the account of my journey says it all - so I've reproduced it above. The orchards. The dead tree. The yellow coquille. And the dusty, sandy trail.

Buen Camino!

Puente La Reina Revisited

In Puente la Reina ('Queen's Bridge') last year I'd stayed at the excellent Albergue Padres Rapadores at the town's entrance. This time I thought I'd try somewhere different so I headed down the Calle Major to the Albergue Santiago Apóstol which lay at the top of a hill on the far side of town. On the way I crossed the famous bridge. This magnificent bridge had been built specially for pilgrims bound for Compostela in medieval times...

The albergue was big - and modern and clinical and not very atmospheric. But it was clean and quiet - though the strong wind which got up later that night did rattle the windows. I had an interesting conversation with Florian - a German boy and the only other occupant - then made my way back into town for a final meal with my Spanish pilgrim friends, Carlos and Javi.

The next day I visited the church of Santa María de la Vega y del Crucifijo. The origin of this church is linked with the Knights Templar (I've written before about the Knights Templar - they are closely bound up with the Camino. Indeed, the chapel of Santa María de Eunate I'd visited the day before is also associated with these crusader Knights - its design recalling the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem). This is the 13th century church porch...

... and this the polychrome effigy of Santa María, the Virgin Mary, I found inside...

Journey's End

4 veteran Spanish walkers arrived soaking wet later that night to join Carlos, Javi, a Spanish couple on mountain bikes and myself in the albergue in Monreal. They'd walked more than 40 km in one day and were exhausted. One of these 4 friends - a huge man with intense, dark eyes and a black beard - could have come straight out of a painting by Goya or El Greco. He was a living portrait of either axe-murderer or saint - I never did decide which. After applying various creams and medicaments to their feet and knees, the group had a boisterous meal then retired to the dormitory. Unfortunately as soon as one of the party put head to pillow he began an earth-shattering cacophony of snoring which seemed set to last all night. After a while I just couldn't take it. So I pulled my mattress from the lower bunk where I'd been attempting to sleep and dragged it downstairs into a narrow, sloping lobby area between the albergue's kitchen door and its exterior entrance. Even here you could faintly hear these tremendous snores. However I did manage to get a reasonable night's sleep in the end - which is more than can be said for the other unlucky pilgrims.

Early next morning I walked by Monreal's parish church...



... and the beautifully restored church of the Natividad in the hamlet of Yárnoz...



... then had a brief rest at the Fuente de la Paz (Peace Fountain) in Guerendiáin...

After 13 km I stopped for lunch in the village of Tiebas where I met up again with most of the pilgrims from the previous night. We ate in the bar. The guilty snorer looked rather crestfallen. Apparently his 3 companions were refusing to sleep in the same albergue as him any more! As usual I ate the rarely sensational but always OK menu of the day (menú del día) - normally a 3 course meal costing about 9 or 10 euros and consisting of something like soup, pasta or paella as a starter, followed by a simple, unadorned piece of chicken, beef or veal with a few patatas fritas, and a yoghurt, caramel custard (flan) or tart for dessert. You helped yourself to however much wine you wanted from a bottle plonked down on your table. A café solo (black coffee) or café cortado (coffee with just a dash of milk) finished off the meal.

The Camino passed close by the Canal de Navarra, a recently completed, beautifully engineered irrigation channel...

... and paralleled a railway line for a short distance to reach yet more wind turbines...

... until it finally brought me to the place I'd been dying to reach all afternoon: the chapel of Santa María de Eunate. The chapel is octagonal in shape with an exterior, free-standing, roofless arcade or cloister surrounding it. It's very beautiful, and very special, and very old - dating from the 12th century. Luckily it was open so I went inside and spent quite a long time there. I illuminated 8 candles (they were the electric sort which lit up when you inserted coins in a slot) - for my wife and for my 2 children, and for my father who turned 90 this year, and in memory of my mother and my sister, and for myself, and for this troubled but wonderful world...



... before completing the final few km to Puente la Reina, my day's destination - and my journey's end, for Puente la Reina marks the point where the Via Aragonés meets the Camino Francés...

Here are 2 photos of the famous medieval bridge in Puente la Reina (which I also photographed last year). The 1st is looking into town...

... and the 2nd is looking out of town. Notice the yellow arrow pointing the Way. This would be my last yellow arrow of the pilgrimage...

Cairns

This is the stone/drenched with rain/that points the way. Haiku by TANEDA SANTOKA

Wikipedia defines a cairn as "an artificial pile of stones, often in a conical form". Cairns can have a variety of uses and purposes.

They may mark a significant site, such as the summit of a mountain; or commemorate an event, such as a battle; or they may memorialize the dead (some UK Bronze Age cairns were found to contain small, square stone-built ossuaries or cists).

They may indicate a path - especially across stony, barren or featureless terrain.

They are created by Buddhists for use in religious rites; by Native Americans for cultural and sacred reasons, and for astronomical purposes; and by sculptors like Andy Goldsworthy as environmental art.

They may be formed quite simply and practically by farmers who want to clear their fields of stones (I've seen them in Wasdale in the English Lake District).

Cairns are just one of many different types of petroform. A petroform is a man-made arrangement of rocks or stones in the open air - it may be a stone circle, a dolmen or a menhir for example. The subject of petroforms and petroglyphs (carvings on rock) is a fascinating one - and one I hope to explore some time in a later post.

Between Santa Cilia and Puente la Reina (there are 2 Puente la Reinas on the Camino - this 1st one, Puente la Reina de Jaca, lies 5 km west of Santa Cilia) I passed hundreds of cairns along a path above the river Aragón (see photos) - constructed and added to over the years by pilgrims and other walkers and travellers. I felt compelled to add a few stones myself.

To what purpose? To give some concrete evidence of one's passing? To freeze in time a transient moment of one's particular Camino journey - and of one's life journey in general? To celebrate the beauty of the natural world and acknowlege its sacred nature? To express oneself by creating a primal piece of art as the early cave painters did in Lascaux and Altamira all those 10s of centuries ago? To remember and honour a significant person or event in one's life - similar to lighting a candle in a church? To build a primitive temple to the divine - a kind of spiritual vortex made of stone? I leave you to ponder...

Stars, Stones And A Doorway

From Puente la Reina to Estella (meaning 'Star', which recalls 'Compostela' - or 'Field of Stars' - the goal of my journey, and 'The Milky Way' - another name for the Camino) it's only 21 km. During the morning there were a couple of heavy rain showers which turned the clay path into a mudslide. After 8 km I met up with a French pilgrim called Laurent in the hilltop village of Cirauqui. I'd seen him briefly before in a shop in Puente la Reina, where we'd introduced ourselves.

Laurent proved to be a uniquely interesting person and the most stimulating company. We were to walk together on-and-off for the next week. He lived in Provence and had taken the pilgrim route from Arles to Puente la Reina via the Col du Somport. What was remarkable was that he had deliberately decided to rely on free, spontaneously given hospitality for the 1st part of his journey. It was a kind of spiritual experiment to test out the true meaning of the word 'hospitality' and the generosity of strangers. He had managed OK - but had lost weight! He had found people on the whole very kind, but sometimes even priests would turn him away...

Laurent was a stone mason by trade. He sold commercial pieces over the Internet, but his true passion lay in creating the individual, non-commercial sculptures he would carve and keep himself - for the love and freedom of it, and for his own personal satisfaction. He had a need to follow his own artistic calling rather than the dictates of anyone's commission. He had spent an ascetic year preparing for the Camino in complete isolation, working without distractions on a pilgrim sculpture in his studio. He told me his grand project for the next 10 years of his life (he was in his late 40s) was to restore a beautiful but ruined stone chapel near his home. More of Laurent to come, for he was the most knowledgeable and unusual person, with a real commitment to the spiritual side of life...

We passed olive groves and asparagus beds. We ate the few sweet remaining grapes left on the vines. We picked almonds. They were soft and delicious. When we reached Estella we found a lovely, historic little town built on a meander of the river Ega. The most tasteful Christmas decorations festooned the streets. I realised with a start that Christmas was fast approaching...

The striking doorway in the photo was taken in the village of Maneru between Puente la Reina and Estella.

The Old Bridge At Puente La Reina

The Albergue Padres Rapadores lies immediately on your left opposite the Iglesia del Crucifijo (Church of the Crucifixion) as you enter Puente la Reina. I spent the night there very comfortably. In many ways it's a flagship for the excellent Spanish albergue system. For around €5 you can expect bunk-bed dormitory accommodation with mattress and blankets (you bring your own sleeping bag), heating (the adequacy of this varies - but there's often the option of making a log fire which is great), hot showers, a communal eating area/relaxation room, and a kitchen which is usually well stocked (except in Galicia) with pots and pans, cutlery and cooking utensils, and basic foodstuffs like salt, pepper, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. (Its cupboards may also contain packets of pasta, tins of lentils and suchlike, left behind by previous pilgrims.) There may be Internet access too. You can't ring ahead and reserve a place in these albergues. You just turn up and it's first come, first served - priority being given to pilgrims on foot. Not that booking a place would be at all necessary during these late autumn and winter months - each night there was only a handful of pilgrims. Early next morning 20 November I set off under the stone arch connecting church and monastery down Puente la Reina's narrow main street (Calle Major). It had been squally in the night but now the wind had died down somewhat. I popped into the Iglesia de Santiago but left before morning mass got to the Eucharist bit. I walked out of town via the celebrated 12th century pilgrim bridge (see photo) over the river Arga. Some consider this bridge the most beautiful in Spain. Though perhaps not the houses behind.

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.