Walking the Camino

by Tony Kevin

  I whiled away some pleasurable time on the road thinking up real and imagined uses for a wooden staff. Here’s my list:

  Most importantly, a good companion on the journey.

  A symbol of the wood of Christ’s Cross.

  A link with home and family.

  A protective weapon to deter an oncoming hostile dog. This happened to me only once — most guard-dogs were on chains or behind fences — but I think if I had not had the staff to jab at this one threateningly, he might well have taken a piece out of my leg. His negligent owner was nowhere to be seen.

  A tool for poling along flat roads. Putting the staff down firmly in the ground at every fourth step, English-umbrella style, actually helps the miles go faster, because it takes some of the weight and forward thrust off your feet. It definitely makes for more energy-efficient propulsion, especially on softer trails where you can get a good, springy push off the pole.

  An aid for getting up hills. The staff transfers some of the work of lifting your body up hills from your legs and feet to your arms, shoulders, and back — exactly as cross-country skiers uses poles to help them up hills.

  An aid for coming down hills without overbalancing. Going downhill is the most risky time when walking with a rucksack. Many times, using my pole as a balancing third leg saved me from potentially nasty falls after a misstep on loose or uneven ground.

  A means of testing the depth in any watercourse or soft, marshy ground I had to cross.

  A balancing tool when crossing same, on wobbly stepping stones or in slippery mud.

  A weapon for knocking people off logs over rivers, in the style of Little John in Sherwood Forest.

  A means of practising one’s baton-twirling technique, in marching-band style, when one is in a cheery mood and nobody is looking.

  A life-saver if you were to fall down a bottomless crevass (it never happened to me, but my staff was certainly big and strong enough to have carried my weight if I ever needed it to do so).

  A tool for digging a hole in the ground and refilling it afterwards, if caught short in the bush.

  A centre-pole for a sun or rain shelter.

  A conversation starter in Spanish bars (e.g., ‘Señor, that is not a staff, it is a war club!’)

  A memento to hang proudly on the study wall when you return home, along with the framed compostela and route map.

  When I flew home from the pilgrimage, I nearly lost my staff for good. Conscientious Australian quarantine officers at Sydney Airport were determined to confiscate it. With difficulty, I managed to persuade them that it had left Australia with me (apparently I should had got official certification of this on my way out of Australia) and that it did not need to be impounded and fumigated for three months.

  Like Pinocchio the wooden puppet, my staff — an occasionally inconvenient but always true friend — had come to have a life of its own for me.

  chapter six

  Spanish Villages

  Regretfully farewelling the Andalucia I had come to love, I crossed the Río Zújar by a high road-bridge into Extremadura, Spain’s driest and harshest region. Extremadura is rather like inland New South Wales in Australia: reasonably large rivers run through it, fed by mountains to the east, which are heavily utilised for irrigation; but once away from the fertile river valleys, it is ‘extremely hard’ low-rainfall country.

  Eight kilometres of uphill roadside walking from the river took me into Monterrubio de la Serena: an attractive hillside town in iron-rich, red-earth country (hence the name — there were ancient iron-mines here), and back in olive-growing country. I got a room in the Hostal Vatican, a neat-as-a-pin hotel in the central Plaza de España, close by the sixteenth-century church and the ayuntamiento. Around the plaza were streets of particularly lovely, old, three-storey townhouses with climbing roses and solid, double-hung, carved-wooden front doors, and wrought-iron upstairs balconies filled with red, potted geraniums: it was chocolate-box pretty, like a stage set for an old-fashioned production of The Barber of Seville or Carmen.

  I was struck by the conservatism of the folk in the Vatican Bar. For a start, they were all men (there were no women), and noticeably more taciturn than the outgoing people I had been meeting in Andalusian village bars. Here there were quiet card and dice games going on, and less animated conversation. There wasn’t the same easy grace; people here seemed a little stiff and more wary of strangers. Maybe I was in the wrong bar, maybe the action was somewhere else in town? I did not force myself on people, but sat quietly and had a leisurely browse through the bar’s usual supply of in-house newspapers. Every Spanish bar provides daily newspapers to read as a service, but woe betide any customer who accidentally walks off with one under his arm. I had a quiet dinner, watching television in the dining room.

  The next day was an easy walk to Castuera, a gentle eighteen kilometres ahead through undulating red-earth olive plantations, with views across plains to a mountain range, where terraced villages were strung out along a high mountain road. Hawks and kites were wheeling gracefully overhead, searching for prey — rabbits, hares, smaller birds. They rarely caught anything as they ceaselessly scouted the terrain. Then, as if on cue, I heard the deep drone of propeller aircraft. Looking up, I saw what looked like three 1940s-era planes — they could have been old German- or Italian-supplied bombers, they had that look about them — flying overhead in a loose wedge formation, heading north-east in the general direction of Madrid. Maybe these were veteran Spanish air force pilots from Seville or Cádiz, on their way to a vintage-plane rally? I involuntarily shivered — these aircraft looked and sounded just like Nazi bombers in those old World War II movies. Inevitably, Guernica came to mind: that terrible Nationalist-ordered air raid in 1937 against a loyalist Basque town, carried out by pilots of the German Condor Legion, the air raid that first broke the taboo against deliberately bombing civilian cities in wartime. One third of Guernica’s population were casualties of this war crime — 1654 killed and 889 wounded. The town, which had been a Republican stronghold, was left as an exemplary burnt skeleton. It was a sight that was soon to become all too familiar in Europe.

  Arriving in Castuera, I had to walk through the village: the hostal I had chosen from my guidebook was on the other side of town, on the highway. It was a mistake: this hostal was new, pricey, soulless. I slept badly in a stuffy room with windows sealed to keep out highway noise and dust, full of newish plastic furniture and fabrics whose fumes triggered an allergenic asthmatic reaction in me.

  But, before that, I had chanced on a delightful hole-in-the-wall bar, where I enjoyed my first real conversation with ordinary Spanish farmers and workmen. As I stumbled in through the fly-curtain, out of the heat and glare of the street, and with relief dropped my pack in the corner — it was 2.00 pm, the hottest time of the day — it took my eyes a few moments to adjust to the cool semi-darkness inside. The tiny bar was crammed full: farmers and workmen were having an after-work drink with their friends before going home for lunch and their afternoon siesta. Everyone was in good spirits and curious to know who this strangely dressed foreign person was. After the initial ice was broken, we enjoyed some friendly relaxed talk — a bit of football, a bit of politics, a bit of Spanish and Australian comparative geography and agriculture. One man wanted to know how much houses cost in Australia, and how much ordinary people earned. Another asked, what did it cost to fly to Australia, how long did it take, was it a good place for a working holiday? What sort of people were Australians? Were we like British or Americans? Where did most of our immigrants come from now? What languages were spoken? What sort of a government did we have? What were our troops doing in Iraq? People bought me drinks, introduced me to the local wine and tapas. They told me Castuera was a good village, there was prosperity now, plenty of work on new construction and on surrounding farms. The local government was honest and efficient, they had no complain
ts. One man identified himself as on the Left politically, though most of them seemed to be Right-leaning. It did not seem to interfere with their mutual friendships, though. Gradually the Bar la Cabra emptied out, as people drifted off home for lunch. Soon, regretfully, it was time to go myself.

  After a restless siesta in my plastic room, I went out in the still sunny early evening to explore the town, go to evening Mass, and decide where to eat. The lowering sun was still hot, and the houses and pavements were still giving off the heat of the day. There was barely a soul yet to be seen on the silent shuttered streets. When the sun goes down behind the houses and the cool of the evening creeps in at around 7.00 pm, doors open, people come out of houses and start to walk and talk, do a bit of local shopping, have a drink on the bar terrace, go to Mass … that is the time of day that Spanish villages come to life again.

  But for now, as I wandered through the empty winding streets of Castuera trying to find my way back to the central plaza that I had passed on the way in, the fierce afternoon sunlight was still casting sharp blocks of light and shade onto roofs, walls, and pavements. Every street was a de Chirico townscape composition, bright colours and sharp angles, sol y sombra, the stark contrasts of sun and shade, no fuzzy-edged impressionism here. A cat, and a child sitting playing in a house doorway, were the only signs of life.

  After a few false turnings, I found the plaza, overlooked by an impressively large church. Mass was at seven. Waiting for it to start, I watched some boys kicking a football expertly around the plaza. The massive main church doors — only opened for feast day processions of the Madonna and saints’ images — served as the goal. Bang! thundered the doors as well-aimed shots hit home past the goalkeeper. No one seemed to mind — but the boys did stop playing during Mass. Afterwards, I sat again in a shady corner of the plaza, watching the resumed game. The evening seemed endless, a time for quiet contemplation.

  I thought about the near-perfect grace and beauty of these Spanish villages. Castuera, in terms of its street layout and architecture, was a model village. And it triggered some old childhood memories, that might be a clue as to why I found myself on this walk through Spain now, almost a lifetime later.

  As a rather solitary nine-year-old boy, the only child of separated parents, I lived with my mother and grandmother in a small flat in Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay, a cosmopolitan, immigrant-dominated enclave of tight-packed apartment buildings and crowded small parks. During school holidays I used to visit my father, a senior Australian public servant and diplomat who lived and worked in Australia’s bush capital Canberra, when not on official duty overseas (which was for much of the time). I stayed with him in the government hostel where he lived alone in a spartan single room. It was a strange sort of father-son contact we had, though I always loved seeing him. His room was piled high with books by his favorite authors Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, and with back issues of literary magazines like the New Yorker and the London Spectator. His room always smelt musty, like a library archive. I used to read a lot when I was with my father, because he encouraged me to and often there wasn’t a great deal else to do.

  In the hostel reception office hung a large old papiermaché relief map of the mountainous Australian Capital Territory region that surrounds Canberra. I used to gaze for hours at the steep contours moulded into this map, imagining myself plunging into those deep-green, forested river valleys, and skiing over those mysterious high, white Brindabella Mountains— which, in those days, always had deep snow cover in winter. I used to gaze across from Canberra at the white Brindabella peaks just 30-odd miles away, at mountain-tops with melodic aboriginal names like Bimberi, Ginini, Gingera, Tidbinbilla …

  I was also fascinated by the little villages shown on this map, strung out along the highway and railway lines running south from Canberra towards the country town of Cooma with the Snowy Mountains beyond. These villages had names like Colinton, Royalla, Williamsdale, Kellyvale, Michelago, Bredbo. They were shown by little crosshatched street plans, with symbols or initials designating a church, a school, a post office, a hotel. I used to imagine life in these villages: a lonely child’s storybook fantasy of happy Australian families living in real houses and gardens in real small towns. It was a disappointment a few years later to see these places as they really were: forlorn semi-abandoned postal localities along the highway, places that if you blinked twice you would miss as you drove past, government surveyors’ hopefully pegged-out townsites a century before that had never grown into real human settlements. Most were just postal names, with maybe two or three farmhouses clustered near a road junction for company, a forlorn rural church or one-room school set in a few pine trees surrounded by open fields, a ramshackle post office/petrol station on the highway, a few empty sheds marking an agricultural railway stop. I had dreamed of those villages as a sort of fantasy escape from the lonely realities of my transitional, immigrant-child Sydney life: but they had never existed.

  But in Spain, fifty years later, I found the villages of my dreams: lovely little communities of neat, whitewashed houses draped in climbing roses and cascading geraniums, clustered together in streets that wound randomly around hillsides; town squares tucked away in the middle, with a big church and, facing it, a town council building draped in bright flags — always three, the flags of Spain, the region, and the province; boys cheerily playing football in the square; young mothers sitting together in the sun or the shade near the fountain, with their small children in prams or crawling at their feet; older men playing cards and gossiping in the café overlooking the scene; young men showing off their shiny new motorbikes with lots of testosterone-fuelled standing revs; girls walking demurely in twos and threes, arms linked together; families out for a stroll together in the cool of the early evening; and old ladies putting out their chairs in the street in front of their houses for a communal knit or sew and conversation at the end of the day. Such villages as I had dreamed of, such communities, did exist after all. In a kind of way, even though I did not know anyone and Spain was not my country, I had come home.

  Let me describe a place that is like Castuera, but also blends in memories of similar villages I stayed in during my walk through Spain. So much of the joy of pilgrimage for me came from afternoons and evenings wandering around these villages in which I stopped to eat and sleep along the way. I never got tired of walking slowly through the maze of village streets, always finding my way out in the end, checking out the endless variations of Spanish domestic architecture.

  The joy begins on arrival: it is such a striking contrast and relief to pass in a few steps from a hot, dusty rural road or pathway through open fields into a cool village street shaded by close-set, two-storeyed houses down each side, with spotlessly clean, tiled footpaths flanking narrow, cobbled roadways just wide enough for two small Spanish cars to pass, with cast-iron streetlights, climbing roses in bloom … you immediately enter a different world. Like C. S. Lewis’s children walking through the wardrobe into Narnia, the pilgrim’s transition from countryside to village is sharp and thrilling. If the day’s walk has been especially hot and tiring, the pleasure of stepping into a shady, cool village street is all the greater. Your weary pace quickens and your bent back proudly straightens as you walk the last few hundred metres to a cool, welcoming café–bar or hostal.

  Spanish villages are usually very old. They overlay Iron Age and pre-Roman Iberian settlements. These locations were well chosen. More often than not, villages developed on small hilltops overlooking nearby fertile river flats, or (in hillier country) on a slope or ridge with commanding views of lower country. Such sites were chosen to enable the defence of a central fortified area against attack, and to have a good view of the village’s grazing and croplands, providing a warning if needed of approaching enemy armies or robber bands trying to steal livestock or to ravage ripening crops. They were also protected on hilltops from floods, and stormwater drained away safely and healthily after h
eavy rains. They were easier to see from a distance when finding one’s way home from a journey.

  Those villages continued to grow through the settled and prosperous Roman Empire era, and then survived through the more unsettled years of barbarian invasions that followed (Spanish historians refer to this as the Visigothic period, after the Germanic tribe that established a weak post-Roman hegemony in Spain), until around 750, when better-armed and better-led Muslim armies quickly took control of most of Spain. Menocal tells us what followed thereafter:

  Over the course of the subsequent three hundred years until roughly the turn of the first millenium as it was calculated in the Christian calendar, the sort of political order and cultural flourishing that had once graced Roman Spain returned to the peninsula … There was a vast economic revival: the population increased, not just in the invigorated and ever more cosmopolitan cities, but even in the once decimated countryside, where the introduction of new crops and new techniques, including irrigation, made agriculture a prosperous concern; and the pan-Mediterranean trade and travel routes that had helped maintain Roman prosperity, and which were vital for cultural contacts and continuities, were reconfigured and extended.

  So these villages, and the old rural roads and paths that I was walking on between them, had a long and rich history of human life and commerce. The Vía Mozárabe and the Vía de la Plata, initially Roman roads, became the main roads of Muslim-ruled Spain, safe trade and pilgrimage routes through the empire of al-Andalus and beyond, and northwards to the kingdoms of Christian Europe.

  And here is a delightful thing to contemplate — these gleaming white villages would not have looked too different in the al-Andalus period from the way they look now. There are, of course, differences: the mosques and synagogues are long since gone, torn down as in the cities, their dressed stones recycled into the large, beautiful post-reconquest Romanesque and Spanish Gothic churches that replaced them. Water and sewerage pipes, electricity, and Internet cables are now cleverly retro-engineered invisibly into the architecture of the old cobbled streets.