Wild World!
There are certain topics that cause an intense concentration of the mind of every pilgrim on the Camino.
When can I eat next? - When you walk 30 kilometres in a day you can get rather hungry. When the distance between yourself and the next café is a mystery and the Spanish lifestyle doesn’t match up to the pilgrim meal times it can induce a strong sense of emotional mayhem. Sometimes we get very hangry but the Camino has a funny way of always looking after you before you faint!
Where the hell am I? To find your way from Irun to Santiago the Camino is marked by a series of yellow arrows. They are painted on posts, fences, footpaths, signs and many other places. These beacons are frequent enough to know you are always on the right path. This is an amazing way to travel, but in moments can create some confusion and anxiety. What happens when some hooligan has painted multiple arrows facing multiple directions? What happens if you are so busy chatting to your new Romanian friends that you miss an arrow and end up in a random field that smells like stinky cow poop with no arrows in sight? It’s like some intense version of orienteering. There is safety in those arrows, they are our emotional crutch and walking without seeing them can cause hysteria. Thankfully modern day Pilgrims also have the option of GPS.
How high is the hill? Hills on the Camino create a teeny bit of tension. They always seem to pop up at the end of the day. I sometimes feel like we walk for so long and climb so high that surely we must be guaranteed to pop out in heaven with my dad and Jesus waiting for us with a chilled glass of Rioja. That’s never the case though. Usually once you get to the top of the hill you just end up walking back down the other side. Pilgrims start rumours about the upcoming hills. We hear they will be terrible, we hear they will end us! But they never do! We just stomp our feet down one step at a time and keep on climbing! And sometimes on a good day you even have an Italian friend to distract from the burning in your legs by talking about PASTA!
Where will I sleep tonight? This is the biggest cause of hysteria on the Camino. When sleeping in Alburges there are only a certain number of beds. In Irun on the first day there are 60 beds. On day 2 in San Juan there are 14. At the beginning it felt like a race to get the last bed. Every day is different so you have to plan, leave earlier, walk faster, stop less, plan more! The topic of where you will go the next day and where you will sleep is a hot topic for pilgrims. When you’re a bratty young thing like me sharing such tight spaces with wild varieties of strangers can be both invigorating and horrific! Thankfully when you have a mother with a credit card the word ‘completo’ doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
All these topics can occupy much of your mind when you are walking, and we are all on this journey that we call life, so when you add real life, thoughts like the sweat dripping down your back, your greasy fringe, whether your boss likes you, if you will ever find love, whether you should buy a house, what you want to do with your future, it can be overwhelming!
But when the road is long, and the only sound is the drum beat of your feet none of this seems important, and all is good with the world! Pure happiness!
