Walking the Camino

by Tony Kevin

The next day was a magical walk through rolling hills down into the Valle del Jerte irrigation area, a broad, gently dished green valley, with two long, concrete aqueducts circling high around it, diverting the main flow of the Río Jerte and channelling its precious water around the valley’s side contours. From these aqueducts, smaller concrete water channels meandered down well-graded slopes into the river valley, feeding croplands and feedlots and orchards and tree plantations on the way, the left-over and run-off water eventually rejoining the original riverbed.

  As I walked across the aqueduct and then down the hill into the valley, the cheery, bubbling sound of flowing water was all around me. The whole system was gravity-fed, simply and ingeniously engineered, and it nourished a rich variety of intensive, small-scale agriculture and animal husbandry. It filled me with a sense of wonder to see how dry hill country had been made to bloom through hard work and careful irrigation engineering, using the simple gifts of nature — gravity, ample water, good soil, and a lot of human toil. I suppose it is unfashionable to feel joy and pride in the works of man, and some of us these days are inclined to put more value on wilderness than cultivated agricultural land, but I have to admit that the good husbandry of this thriving irrigated valley delighted my spirit.

  In the middle of the valley was Galisteo, a remarkable hilltop village completely encircled by massive stone walls. It was, mercifully, still an unspoiled village, all the more charming for being so taken for granted by its inhabitants as simply their pueblo. I could not even find a postcard of this beautiful little place to send home. I climbed the walls, and almost circumnavigated the village by walking around them.

  After Galisteo it was another long walk, through two nearby valley villages and then gradually up out of the green valley of the Río Jerte, across the northern aqueduct and into more rough, dry hill country, until finally reaching a large, Roman triumphal arch sitting improbably in the middle of nowhere — the Arco de Cáparra. No one yet knows what this arch signified in Roman Spain. Archaeologists are still excavating a small adjoining Roman settlement. Was it a crossroads town of north-south and east-west Roman roads, a staging post on the south-to-north road, or the scene of a great battle victory or peace treaty signing?

  I detoured off the camino here to stay in a roadside hotel on the N630 a few kilometres to the east. By prior arrangement, the hotel owner came across on a connecting road to pick me up at the arch in his beaten-up car. At the hotel, I ran into Marit again. The camino is like that — people move at different speeds, taking rests at different times in different places, and there is the pleasure of meeting friends again unexpectedly. We swapped travel notes over dinner. The next day, we walked on together, through greener slopes now, to meet Karin in Aldeanueva del Camino, a pretty village at the foot of the Sierra de Gredos.

  Here in the village park I came across an unexpected little memorial, an inobtrusive stone plaque whose inscription under a carved Jewish candlestick and olive branches simply read: 1492–1997. En homenaje a los judios de Aldeanueva expulsados por los reyes catolicos. Aldeanueva del Camino, agosto — 1997. (In honour of the Jews of Aldeanueva, expelled by the Catholic monarchs. Aldeanueva del Camino, August 1997). My eyes filled with tears at the simple humanity of this inscription. I did not know that Jews had lived here, and I was strangely moved by this sign of love and respect for neighbours long since departed. Reading it, I could believe that the modern-day villagers of Aldeanueva really did mourn the loss of their former Jewish co-villagers, and would have liked them still to be living here. I thought of Tevye and his family in Fiddler on the Roof, walking sadly out of their beloved Russian–Jewish village into exile, away from the country in which they had lived in peace for centuries alongside their Orthodox Christian neighbours, until cruel, state-encouraged pogroms forced them to abandon their homes and scatter all over the world. I thought of the suffering of refugees everywhere, pushed out of their homes by state policies and stirred-up religious or ethnic hatreds. And I remembered that in all my travels in Russia, Poland, Czech Republic, or Slovakia, I had never seen anything like this modest little memorial to lost Jewish neighbours: only the cold silence of conveniently lapsed memories.

  The next day I walked a little off the route, to Hervás, a picture-postcard hill town surrounded by vineyards and orchards. Here I found more rich Jewish memories, but not the same uncomplicated warmth as in Aldeanueva. There was a large tourist-information plaque in the picturesque and well-signed Jewish quarter, an area of narrow winding lanes and pretty, half-timbered houses. The plaque contained a wealth of architectural detail on the building styles, framed by a brief sanitised history:

  Northeast of here, on a steeply sloping hillside, there was a Jewish population in Hervás, especially in the fifteenth century. Famous family names included Cohen, Haben Haxis, Rabi Samuel and Bellida la Rica. It is a fact that after the expulsion decree, Hervás lost much of its Jewish population through movement away to the Portuguese frontier, to which the majority departed … When in 1492 the Catholic monarchs decreed the expulsion of the Jews, about 25 families left from the Jewish quarter of Hervás, moving to Portugal through Ciudad Rodrigo. Others became Christian converts.

  It all sounded painless, a minor movement of a few families to nearby Portugal. I could not believe it was really like that, and I felt a stab of anger at this smooth passing over of the truth of what must really have happened in Hervás in 1492. I surmise that the Jewish community of Hervás had been large — it was well situated on the north-south Vía de la Plata trade route in the remote borderlands between Castile and the south, and may have been a Jewish-majority town — and that their expulsions and forced conversions would have been of a much larger scale and more painful than this account suggests. No one could tell me where the synagogue had been: my guess was that it might have been on the hill directly above the ‘Jewish quarter’ — more likely, the original medieval town — on the site where the large church now stood. I felt more silences around me in Hervás than truth.

  But then, later, not far from a grand, old baroque convent that is now a museum, I came across a new bed and breakfast guesthouse, Hostal Sinagoga, with Jewish Sabbath candlesticks proudly displayed in the front windows. I introduced myself to the owner, Abigail, a charming, auburn-haired Israeli woman, originally from Prague and now living here, married to a local Spaniard. They were setting up this new tourist venture together. Abigail told me Hervás was a friendly and good town, where she was being made to feel welcome. Her guesthouse was doing well, with lots of tourists — including from Israel — coming to see Hervás. I said goodbye, blinking back tears.

  Onwards now, I walked down through cherry orchards and on to Baños de Montemayor, with the high Gredos mountains looming all around. I found a family-run pensión in Baños, two flats joined together in a modern apartment complex, simple and homely, and then it was off to the famous, restored Roman baths where I ran into Tim and Liz again, floating in a princely, hot spa pool. What a luxury! I went down a stairway to a warm and steamy basement pool area, smelling of sulphur and other minerals. On one side was the original Roman bathhouse museum area, excavated out of the soft, calcified mudstone — there were Roman stone baths, lounging benches, columns, bits of metal pipes and taps, broken statuary … and on the other side there were two modern thermal pools, all in gleaming white marble— a delightful modern interpretation of a Roman public bath. The two large pools were flanked by reproduction classical statues in white marble. The water was just short of too hot, with a cascading waterfall to luxuriate under, and underwater side-jets to caress sore backs. I stretched and arched my body in the warm water like a cat under a hot sun. It was all too much, but it was glorious.

  That night, unexpectedly and with no obvious physical cause, I was hit with the worst attack of diarrhoea I have ever suffered in my life. I was not sick — there was no headache or nausea — but over a few hours all my insides dissolved and turned to water. In one un
settled night, I lost four kilograms of body weight. I know this, because by coincidence I had weighed myself in a pharmacy the day before, and I checked it again the next day. In the morning, with hollow stomach and trembling limbs, I dragged myself weakly to the village medical clinic, where a kindly doctor prescribed rehydration salts and tablets to glue my insides up again. I went back to bed for the whole day, eating nothing but boiled fish and white rice, and drinking weak tea. The next day, with some apprehension, I set off on the road again, walking slowly the few kilometres over a mountain pass and into Castile.

  I realised later that this unexpected bout of illness marked a physical and mental turning point in my pilgrimage. I don’t know what brought it on — probably a combination of things: the accumulated tiredness and physical stress from pushing myself too hard for the past month, too much sun, the cumulative emotional impact of the pilgrimage so far, the unaccustomed heat and luxury of the baths finally triggering it off — who knows? Whatever the cause, my digestive system just gave up and went on strike.

  Until that day, I had been eating and drinking as if I were at home, not admitting that as a distance walker I might need to cut back on food intake, to take in no more food and drink than what I needed as daily walking fuel. We tend to eat and drink too much at home out of social habit or sheer boredom, as a distraction or relief from stress, or because we hope it might make us sleep better. Many of us become progressively more overweight as a result.

  It is a fallacy that you need more food when working hard physically — most of us work better and have more energy when we eat less. People who can cope comfortably with long-distance walks tend to be lean and wiry. I had thought the leanness came as a consequence of the walking, but it might be more the other way around. To walk long distances enjoyably requires the self-discipline of reducing your food and alcohol intake to no more than you need. If you make your body work on digesting excess amounts of rich food and drink, this takes energy away from the energy you need to walk. Why make your body do all that extra work of digestion, when you can walk comfortably on much less food? Ruefully, I recalled that, despite 500 kilometres of strenuous walking, I had not lost a single kilogram of weight between Granada and Baños de Montemayor. The illness in Baños was a blessing in disguise: it was telling me it was time to try a different approach.

  I gradually rebuilt my strength over the next few days, increasing my walking distance each day, and the diarrhoea never returned. I took care now to eat no more food than I needed. I drank a lot more water, and less tea and coffee. I no longer carried around with me great wedges of cheese, ham and salami, and ‘energy’ bars. I ate a bit of fruit and plain bread in the morning, and usually had just one main meal a day in the evening. I kept my alcohol down to two glasses a day. Doing this, I found that I was now shedding weight steadily and painlessly — about one kilogram a week. By the time I got to Santiago, I was eight kilograms lighter than when I left home. My belt was three notches narrower. There was a spring in my step and I felt fifteen years younger.

  With the weight loss came greater clarity of mind. It was as if a fog was clearing from my brain. I found I could think more calmly and productively — my brain was not clogged and dulled by the work of digesting so much food and drink. I think my emotional intelligence, my ability to confront uncomfortable thoughts and take a harder and more honest look at my own life, was greatly enhanced by the change of diet. It is no accident that in the history of the Church, mysticism and physical asceticism have tended to go together. I don’t think there have been many fat saints.

  In these ways, Baños de Montemayor marked a turning point. The remarkable thing was it had taken me so long to get to this point. I was thirty-one days into my journey, and had already walked nearly halfway to Santiago. It had taken the stubborn old Adam a month to admit that he might need a lifestyle change.

  chapter nine

  Across Castile to Salamanca

  My walking now settled into a generally predictable and pleasurable routine. Baños was about halfway from Granada to Santiago in terms of distance; Santiago was 570 kilometres ahead. There were no more dramas, but rather the quiet satisfactions of meditation on the move, letting the mind and spirit relax completely. I was just under halfway though the ten weeks I had planned to stay in Spain. With thirty-six days in Spain to go till my booked flight home, I was confident that, barring accidents or serious illness, I could now complete the journey. I was now regularly walking up to thirty kilometres a day without strain, and I only needed to maintain a daily average of sixteen kilometres to get to Santiago in time. As my weight came down, as the weather started to get cooler moving north, and as my walking technique improved, it all became easier.

  I was not thinking about getting to Santiago, but rather enjoying each day as it came. The blisters had been finally left behind in Extremadura, the soles and heels of my feet had hardened, my legs and thighs had trimmed down to an athlete’s physique, and the flabby folds of surplus skin left around my thighs from my lost fat were disappearing as skin elasticity returned. My buttocks had tightened, and even my belly — the middle-aged man’s last stubborn reserve of fat — had started to shrink. My cotton trousers felt pleasurably loose. I was sleeping well, no longer waking myself up with my own snoring, and not needing asthma relievers any more. I was happy with this new body.

  The benign endorphins of long-distance walking had at last kicked in, relaxing the mind, and walking had at last become less a matter of harsh will power, the exercise of ‘mind over matter’, than of just letting it happen. I was now truly riding on ‘Shanks’ pony’, a phrase whose meaning I now pleasurably understood. For my legs were now striding forward automatically and effortlessly, while I enjoyed an unparalleled relaxation and liberation from daily cares.

  The huge, rolling landscapes of the Castilian meseta unfolded like a slowly moving Circorama film around me as my mind ranged freely over my life. There was unlimited time to muse; to try to remember old snatches of poetry or music learned at school; to reflect on old loves, friendships, estrangements, enmities — all the knots and tangles of a complicated personal history. I found myself thinking more unselfishly and compassionately than ever before about important relationships and events that had happened in my life, whether spiritual, interpersonal, or political. It was a steadily developing process of mental relaxation and discovery of truth about myself. Talking afterwards to Father Frank Brennan, another Jesuit friend, about this, he agreed, saying that he had found his Santiago pilgrimage to be ‘taking your life for a walk’. And that is indeed what it had become now, in these happiest days of the pilgrimage.

  Let me say a little more about the physical character of this walking. In my life I have been lucky to enjoy several kinds of natural sporting motion — small boat sailing, cross-country skiing, horse riding, long-distance running. Once the specific skills had been mastered, all these sports involved the joy of movement with little sense of bodily effort, the same joy and excitement a small child gets out of being on a swing or rocking horse. In sailing, you have those wonderful moments as the boat comes about and your sails catch a new wind, the boat springing forward willingly as the helmsman is pressed back into his seat by its gentle acceleration. In cross-country skiing, you feel the easy slide of well-waxed skis in smooth tracks across a snowy plain, just the slightest push of your leg muscles sending the skis forward in a push-and-glide movement, so gloriously effortless once you have fully acquired the knack of it. In riding, you enjoy the gentle pressure of your shanks on the horse’s sides, sending him forward into a willing trot or canter. And even in long-distance running, there is that terrific feeling twenty minutes or so into the run (if you are fit) when your endorphins have started flowing, your muscles have relaxed, your breathing has settled down, your heartbeat is steady, and you are just letting the countryside slide by with hardly any effort at all …

  I had not expected long-distance walking cou
ld give me anything like those pleasurable sensations. My practice walks around home had certainly not been like that: they had been hard slogs, lung and muscle conditioning, dutiful exercise. And yet now, my walking in Spain, once I was fully fit, had became enjoyable in just these ways. I felt sorry for the nice but unfit and physically exhausted Englishman, Alex, whom I met briefly in Grimaldo, who complained sadly to me of how he was finding his camino: ‘It’s just a plod, really’. To me now, miraculously, it was no longer a plod. It had become a ride, a glide, a sail …

  How can I convey how walking these kinds of long, steady distances day after day can nourish the human spirit? It is not so easy to put this into words, but I will try. It was quite different from shorter exercise-walks around home, because there I never really left my daily concerns and worries fully behind. But once I was fully acclimatised mentally and physically into the walk in Spain, once I had left my home cares behind me, my soul entered a gloriously private and peaceful world as my ‘Shanks’ pony’ strode on reliably beneath me, walking me across the map of Spain.

  I was certainly still aware of the countryside, and I was appreciating and enjoying it, but in a strange way it didn’t really matter so much any more to identify where I was on any particular day or hour. I was now free-wheeling through a benign, ambient space. I felt safe, untroubled, joyous.

  The thought often came to me that I was a little capsule of life crawling forward across a vast landscape, where only the here and now had any meaning for me. Time had expanded enormously: yesterday was already a fading memory, and tomorrow was just a distant prospect. Today as I write this from home some weeks later, I could not tell you where I was or what I saw each day, without the memory-prop of the guidebook and my pocket diary to fix those geographical facts in retrospect. Were it left to me, the walk across Castile would just be a pleasurable blur now, jumbled memories of dirt tracks undulating up and down gentle hills around me, grasslands with scattered encina trees, golden wheatfields, dark storm clouds that massed but never brought rain, the strange Martian shapes of huge mobile irrigation rigs sprawled across the wheatfields, vineyards, gentle hills, dogs that came out to growl or bark greetings at me, neat white villages …