by Tony Kevin
So if I were to go on giving you a precise, day-by-day account — about villages passed, of interesting buildings and other things seen, of good people met — it would be true in one sense but less relevant in another, because my walk had now become a different kind of observed reality. It didn’t really matter so much anymore where I was each day, no more than it matters to a sailor scudding across the waves on the sea, or a wild horse cantering across an open prairie. I was a free spirit now. Of course, I still had to navigate; I still had to know roughly where I was, and take in the markers of a day’s journey from A to B. I had to remain, to that limited extent, planted in physical reality. But to let my mind slide into a different rhythm of existence — that was a rare and lovely feeling.
In one way it became mindless, but in another way it had became an intensely spiritual experience of extended and focused meditation on my life. My walking was now a smooth flow of energy, rather than a chain of discrete events. My body and mind were engaging together in a different way than they do in normal life. There was a great simplification, a sense of leaving behind bodily cares, of forgetting the body. For when the body is just the vehicle, the conveyance that is taking you along the camino, the soul becomes truly free. I think this must be a little like how an animal might feel as it moves across terrain. How a wild horse, a free-ranging wolf, might experience its passage through open country.
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It also occurred to me that a long pilgrimage is more than just a metaphor for a life. It is a separate little life within the larger life, a life experience that takes you so completely out of your ‘real’ life back home that you enter an altered state of perception of being. The camino to Santiago, like a life, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Getting to Santiago marks the fulfilment of the goal of this ‘little life’ — it is what you have been aiming for. But, in another important sense, you dread the journey’s end in Santiago, because it is a kind of death. Arrival in Santiago, the end of the camino, is the end of your little pilgrim life. And just as one clings to the joy of life even if one believes in the hope of Heaven, one clings to the joy of every day’s experience on the camino — because it has become one’s life. As most of us live most of our lives in the present, without thinking about the death that awaits us all, so it had now became for me on the camino — the journey was now more real than the inevitable destination. The joy was in the doing, more so than in the anticipated arrival.
While on pilgrimage, you are experiencing the ‘real’ world from a different place, and looking at it through a different lens that refracts the things you see and offers a different perception of them.
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I mentioned earlier a matter I called ‘walking technique’. This was the final ingredient — after getting fit, getting my weight down, and adopting good dietary habits — in making my long walking pilgrimage most pleasurable. ‘Walking technique’ is really an inappropriate term to describe something that is mostly a matter of simply listening to your body and trusting what it tells you. I gradually discovered the main elements of this. They will be obvious to experienced long-distance walkers, but may help others who are newer to it.
First and foremost, it is a matter of how you use your legs and feet, and how you use your staff efficiently to help as a third leg. I have already talked about the staff, and here are some thoughts on legs and feet. Above all, you must learn to walk the way an animal does: lightly, never stamping. Think of how a cat or a dog walks. They don’t march. Marching is a thoroughly unnatural and tiring, learned human gait; an animal’s natural gait is a light, relaxed pad. As the Irish traditional traveller’s blessing says, ‘Let the road rise to meet you’. Don’t try to stamp the road down into submission. Many female walkers know this instinctively — perhaps that is why women take to long-distance walking so well, as they do to endurance horse-riding. Male walkers have to unlearn the competitive conditioning of a lifetime — the idea that sport is about beating the challenge, driving yourself on, forcing the pace, staying the course, climbing that mountain even if it kills you, pushing your limits … all those misleading, inspirational metaphors that were drilled into us in competitive school sport.
If you approach your walking in that way, your body inevitably tenses up, your legs stiffen and so have to work harder to transmit the energy from your heart and lungs, your feet bruise and your soles blister more easily, and sprains and pulled muscles are more likely. And it is just like riding a horse — if the rider is stressed and anxious, the horse will feel it through the rider’s body, and become tight and stressed in response. Shanks’ pony reacts similarly. Good, safe walking, like good, safe riding or cross-country skiing, is all about mental relaxation, putting your feet down gently, breathing evenly and easily, and helping your body to relax and de-stress. It is in no way about ‘winning’, about ‘triumphing over yourself’ or over nature. Indeed, the secret of good walking once you are fit is to let your body take charge. Like an animal, it knows exactly what it can do. You must simply trust it.
Micro-navigation, watching where you plant your feet, keeping an eye on the terrain immediately in front of you, is something that, initially, you need to do consciously; but after a while it becomes as instinctive and automatic as steering a car. You don’t want to step in ruts or holes, obviously, but you also want to avoid stepping on sharp protruding stones because they can unbalance you and cause ankle injuries. I found myself looking for softer, sandier ground or turf surfaces to walk on in preference to bitumen or hard-baked clay, because soft ground is easier on soles and heels, which can bruise even through thick, rubber-soled shoes.
If you are walking on the sloping shoulders of a main road that’s not busy, it is good to walk alternately on either side, to balance the sideways pressures on your feet. On a busy road, on the other hand you should always, for safety’s sake, face the oncoming traffic.
It is important to start the walking day gently. You may be stiff and sore with seized-up muscles from an uncomfortable sleep or a hard previous day. Do a few leg- and back-stretching exercises before you start. Then let your legs warm gradually into the walk. If you force the pace at the beginning you are more likely to pull or strain something. As a horse does, let your legs warm up, and don’t rush to get into your full walking stride: it is going to be a long day, and you don’t have to gallop in the first half-hour. As your legs warm up and relax, your pace will naturally quicken and your stride will lengthen, in their own good time.
Everyone has their own natural, long-distance optimal walking speed, depending on their physique, metabolism, and fitness level. For me, when fit, it was about four or five kilometres per hour on level ground in the morning, slowing back towards three as the day got hotter and I became more tired. Back in Australia afterwards, still fit from Spain, I walked one day with a young distance walker from Canberra, Amy Banson, who was just finishing an epic 1400-kilometre, solo charity walk from Brisbane to Canberra. A tall, slim young woman with a body like a gazelle, Amy’s thigh joints sat up somewhere above my waist, and her natural speed was a long, fluid lope of around six or seven kilometres per hour. It was fun walking with her on that day; but in trying to keep up with her I tensed up, in spite of my fitness, and after a few hours my legs were stiff and aching. If you try to walk faster than your natural speed, you will pay for it. And so in a group it is physically important — not just a courtesy — for all to go at the speed of the slowest walker, or for the naturally faster people, if they want to move faster, to go ahead and meet up at the next agreed stop.
How many rest stops to have through the day are an individual preference. Some people like to stop more often; others like to keep going. Too many stops become energy-draining and morale-sapping. It is always harder to start again after a stop: your leg muscles seize up quickly, and any bruises in soles and heels certainly remind you of their presence when you start off again. Thus some people prefer to keep going steadily for hour
s, snacking or drinking on the move, out of a convenient hand bag or a rucksack-fitted drinking tube. On the other hand, after a pre-dawn start, an early or mid-morning coffee and toast with jam if you pass an open bar can be sheer bliss! Taking photos need not slow you down too much, if you keep your camera in an accessible front belt-pouch. Towards the end of the day, as you approach your destination, your body tends to speed up, as a horse does in anticipation of the end of a ride.
The sun on the meseta is potentially debilitating and dangerous. I always kept my head and neck and arms well covered: Australians are taught to respect and fear the ultraviolet rays of the sun. Northern Europeans understandably love to strip off to bare skin after their long cold grey winters, but I was not taking any chances. Even after six weeks back home, my arms were all white while the backs of my uncovered hands were still deeply tanned and freckled from the sun.
I wore comfortable, loose-fitting, long-sleeved clothing. I took care of my skin, watching for any chafings or insect bites that could turn into something nastier, and medicated them appropriately, either simply with talcum powder and Vaseline-type creams or, if they were more inflamed, with a hydrocortisone cream such as Dermacort.
You can usually walk out minor foot, leg, or body aches, because a slightly pulled muscle will usually loosen up and fix itself on the move and with a bit of liniment cream. If real pain doesn’t go away after an hour’s walking, though, you know it’s more serious. Then it’s time to stop, have a rest, take some Nurofen, and take it gently until you get to somewhere to rest up properly and evaluate the problem.
For most people it is a mistake to try to walk non-stop, day after day, without breaks. Rest days are necessary for most of us, especially in the early stages of a long walk when you are still conditioning your body. Once again, it makes sense to trust your body. If, as happened to me several times during the initial three weeks from Granada to Mérida, your body tells you that it needs a rest day after only three or four days of walking, trust it. Stop. By the end, you’ll be going six, seven, and maybe more days without your body feeling the need for a rest day. Alison Raju suggests — and my experience supports this — that rest days in little villages are more beneficial than rest days in cities, which all too easily can become sightseeing marathons. (Visiting museums, for me, is the most exhausting exercise of all.) My best rest day was in Alcaracejos, where I did almost nothing all day beyond a gentle morning stroll around the village, hearing Mass, listening to music on the radio, having a long afternoon siesta, enjoying a leisurely dinner, and then taking in some television.
Finally, it is important to decide, before you head off each day, where you intend to stop and sleep at the end of the day. Your body and mind need this information to pace themselves through the day. There is almost nothing more stressful than arriving somewhere and then deciding, or being forced, to go on further. It is like a time change — it disrupts the rhythm of your whole day.
That is all I have to say about ‘walking technique’!
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From the border of Castile to Salamanca was seventy-three kilometres, a relaxed four-day walk for me, all blessedly far away from the N630 through quiet back-country roads and walking paths. I stayed in three villages: Calzada de Béjar, in a charming, new, commercial albergue; Fuenterroble, in a quaintly eccentric refugio set up by the famous and tireless parish priest Don Blas, who sadly was away — I would have liked to meet him, as I was told he loves pilgrims and is the kind of Spanish priest I would have really enjoyed talking with and getting to know; and, finally, in a comfortable little refugio in San Pedro de Rozados, which I remember as the most perfect little village I encountered in Spain. I had plenty of fellow-pilgrim company on the three nights in these villages. Although I was still choosing to walk alone by day, I was meeting pretty much the same people each night, forming friendships.
The short day from Baños to Calzada was mostly downhill after crossing the pass. It was initially very green and mountainous, with the sound of streams never far away, but dried out as I got further away from the rain catchment of the Béjar pass — with wonderful views opening up as I looked back at the still-snowy high peaks of the Gredos mountains. The first day, I met a bunch of school-kids and parents and teachers out on a local walk; it was a good meeting, and it was nice to be looked at in awe by the children when they heard I had walked all the way from Granada! Calzada, a tiny village, had a sweet albergue, a converted barn at the entrance to the village, with a charming casita (house warden), who cooked a good and reasonably priced, simple dinner for us. These sorts of pilgrim accommodation facilities, provided by local village councils with financial help from the Spanish government or EU funds, help keep travel costs down, are a good way to meet other pilgrims, and are good for the village economies as well.
The next day, from Calzada to Fuenterroble, is not a day which I remember much about, except that it seemed harder going than the day before. Don Blas’ refugio was a lovely place, with a library and a fireplace (we did not need to light it — far too warm), and gifts and mementoes everywhere. Without meeting him, I could see that Don Blas was a priest with a romantic imagination and a love of humanity that led him to to understand the wonderful potential synergies of the faithful pilgrims passing through his remote village, and the life of his regular local parish ministry.
Fuenterobble to San Pedro was a tough day: twenty-nine kilometres, including crossing the Pico de la Duena hills, at 1140 metres the highest point between Seville and the mountains on the Castile–Galicia border. The peak wasn’t much of a climb: more of a steady, long walk up a ridge, past a long array of about sixty, softly whirring electricity-generating wind-towers. They were the first wind-towers I had seen, and they had a beauty of their own. Ranged along the crest of the ridge, they looked like big, white, friendly giants. Some were resting, motionless — I was told these were the times when they switched themselves off to download stored power into the grid — and others were in action, their huge, white blades lazily turning under a gentle breeze from the west.
Later that day came a long, hot, roadside walk through dry encina fields, and past a huge pig farm where I was generously welcomed and given ice-cold water from the refrigerator; I had run out again. Then came more road-walking, over an endless plain … this part of the walk was the closest thing I could imagine to walking in inland Australia. I remember cresting a low rise soon after the Pico de la Duena, and looking forward in horror at a long, straight, dipping stretch of road in front of me that must have been seven or eight kilometres long without shade or turning. In its own way, this Castilian meseta country was as harsh and sun-baked as Extremadura had been, and it was almost as hard going. I was pretty exhausted when I finally crested the last rise and saw, in the middle of golden, ripening wheatfields, the white walls and terracotta roofs of the little village of San Pedro de Rozados in a gentle valley before me.
Going down into the village, I soon found the bar … and walked in to see the televised second half of Australia versus Japan, Australia’s first World Cup football game. Japan was ahead 1–0, but Australia miraculously came from behind in the final minutes to win 2–1. It was my first 2006 World Cup match; I was to see many more while in Spain. San Pedro was a most attractive village, with a lovely old church, a bar, a small, hidden-away supermercado, nice village gardens, an adequate little refugio … and not much else.
If I remember the next day well, a twenty-five-kilometre hike to Salamanca, it is because of an inspirational moment about halfway through the day’s walking. Coming over a low rise, I saw across the low, rolling brown hills ahead of me, in the distance, what looked like two tiny church spires poking up from a flattish horizon. Could they possibly be the spires of Salamanca’s cathedral, now some fifteen kilometres away? They kept reappearing as I crested rises, a little bigger every time. Yes, they were! The spires continued to grow as I drew closer to the city. The wonderful thing was that there wa
s nothing to block my view of them, no intervening modern buildings. I was seeing Salamanca’s mighty cathedral from afar, exactly as medieval pilgrims coming up the Vía de la Plata from the south would have seen it, and I shared that same excitement and tingling anticipation of the city that they would have felt. How wise of the modern city authorities in Salamanca to have protected this glorious view from the south — all the modern suburban and industrial development of the city is away to the east and west. I thought of our cities, with their proud glass towers to commerce, and their church spires and cathedrals now buried in their shadows. How wonderful it was to see the cathedral, still the highest landmark building on the horizon of a modern city.
That afternoon I walked into Salamanca through an attractive modern suburb of apartment buildings set in a riverside park, eventually arriving at an old, stone bridge just below the magnificent cathedral and university-precinct buildings, all glowing golden sandstone in the afternoon sun. I crossed the bridge, walked up a short hill into the cathedral quarter, and soon found myself in a comfortable large pilgrim refugio, built into an old palace next to an exquisite little city park. A charming casita offered us fresh apples, ice water from the fridge, and tourist maps of the city. In the best refugios — and this was one of the best — arriving pilgrims are greeted with such quiet affection and hospitality, a memory that I still treasure. In the dormitory, I again found my friends from the past few days, showering and getting ready for the evening in Salamanca.
Salamanca, population 167,000, was the largest city on my route after Córdoba. A dignified city of sandstone churches and colleges, it is quintessentially Spanish, the heart of proudly conservative Castile — the region that, more than any other, has shaped and defined Spain. But Salamanca left me with mixed feelings, all those great buildings somehow intimidating me a little. The university had been, in medieval times, one of Europe’s greatest centres of learning, but it shrivelled intellectually under the destructive interference of the Inquisition, and then quietly stagnated through the decadent eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, almost untouched by the European Enlightenment. In the twentieth century and now in the twenty-first, it is enjoying a revival of real scholarship. It is now one of Spain’s great universities again, and certainly the most beautiful.