For more than 1,000 years, pilgrims from as far away as Zagreb,
Budapest and Bergen have made their way to the Cathedral of Santiago de
Compostela in Spain to stand in the church that holds the relics of St.
James and pay homage. For many, the walk on the Camino de Santiago (The
Way of St. James) alone is reason enough for the journey. Today’s
pilgrims embrace the Camino trek not only as a time for self- reflection
but also for a way to embrace a simpler way of life.
The Way of St. James is one of the great pilgrimages of the world.
The entire Route of Santiago de Compostela is designated a UNESCO World
Heritage Site, and that, alone, inspires many to explore it on foot.
Beginning in Pamplona
Traditionally, the pilgrimage would begin from your
front stoop and it might take years before the pilgrim reached
Santiago. These days, most pilgrims fly to France and begin their hike
on one of the more popular routes, the Camino Francés.
The charming town of St. Jean Pied de Port, at the base of the
Pyrénées, is the traditional starting point for the Camino Francés. Due
to time constraints, my husband Scott and I began our pilgrimage in
Pamplona, Spain, 40 miles from St. Jean.
An occasional hangout for the late Ernest Hemingway, Pamplona is
dotted with signs proclaiming, “Hemingway wrote here” or “Hemingway
slept here” along with random shops each simply called “The Hemingway.”
We would have loved to stay at the
Gran Hotel La Perla,
where Hemingway slept after he took in a bullfight at the municipal
ring nearby, but rooms started at $500. However, if you travel on a
budget, as we do, you won’t have to wait long before a friendly Spaniard
will direct you to the nearest
albergue, or
refugio.
As we stood in La Perla’s lobby soaking in the ambiance, a hotel employee, noting our hiking apparel, asked, “Are you
peregrinos (pilgrims)? You must stay at the refugio!” He walked us there pointing out places where Hemingway had a cigar or took a lover along the way.
Refugios, or albergues, are where most pilgrims on the Camino rest their heads each
night. In Pamplona, for €6 (around $9) apiece, we were assigned a bunk
in the beautifully designed 100-bed dormitory
Municipal Albergue (Church of Jesus and Maria, C/ Compañía 4), located in what had previously been a 17th-century church.
We were able to buy our Camino
credenciales, or Pilgrim
Records (pilgrim passports), at the same time we checked in. These
passports are required in order to stay in the refugios along the Camino
and must be presented each day to be stamped as proof that you are
making the pilgrimage.
At the credential office in Santiago your passport will be carefully examined before you are awarded your
Compostela, a beautiful certificate that proclaims your accomplishment.
Provided you have enough room in your passport or have bought a
supplement with extra pages, you may acquire as many stamps as you would
like each day. Sometimes shopkeepers or villagers hosting informal way
stations have made up their own unique stamps, and they will offer to
add theirs to your passport. Historic churches along The Way have
particularly beautiful stamps.
Most refugios on the Camino have between 10 and 30 beds in one room.
“Sounds smelly!” you might be thinking, and in the old days you would
have been right.
Hundreds of years ago, a monk or priest would walk through the
refugio swinging a smoking incense ball to dull the odiferous funk of
the pilgrims as they slept. Fortunately, modern-day refugios have hot
showers, laundry machines, Internet access and kitchens. I had a hot
shower on each of my 38 days on the Camino.
The search for simplicity
It is said that one’s pilgrimage on the Camino should be a spiritual
journey, but there are as many reasons to do the Camino as there are
people on it. It could be a cultural quest, a physical challenge, a
meditative walk for nature lovers or a time to get to know your spouse
or partner a little better.
More often than not, it is undertaken as a search for an answer to the age-old question, “Who am I?”
For me, it was a walk of gratitude. I woke up every day feeling
grateful — for my husband, for my family and for good friends and,
especially, for my parents. Someone once said that the greatest gift one
can give another is a happy childhood, and I’m really grateful for the
one my parents gave me. Walking the Camino seemed a good way to say
‘Thank you.’
Whatever the reason for making the almost-500-mile trek (and they all
are perfectly acceptable), it provides a rare opportunity to slow down
life’s hectic pace to a rhythmic three kilometers per hour and ponder
the basics of living simply.
For five weeks, the biggest decisions one has to make on the Camino
each day are ‘Where will I eat,?’ ‘How far will I walk?’ and ‘Where will
I sleep?’ Eat, walk, sleep. Simple. There is something revitalizing
about embracing this simplicity.
Add to that what I call the blessings of the Camino — the people you
meet from all walks of life and from all over the world — and you have
an experience that is hard to duplicate anywhere else.
Doctors, lawyers, students, teachers, actors, widows, newlyweds,
inspiring couples in their 80s, cancer survivors (some who were still
undergoing treatment) and even the homeless are just some of the people
we met on the Camino. But while on the pilgrimage, we all became a
community of people with one common goal.
Accommodations
You absolutely don’t need a guide for this journey, but if you prefer
a guided option or like to stay in hotels every night, there are tour
companies that can show you the way and book your hotel rooms ahead of
time. For the independent traveler, numerous books, blogs and online
forums where you can find all you need to know about the Camino are
available. We arrived without a guide book but once we located the first yellow arrow to point us on our way, the rest was easy.
Except during the summer months, when the Camino is at its busiest,
finding a place to sleep each night is not difficult. Ask for a list of refugios
where you start your walk or refer to your guidebook for
recommendations, but there are always signs pointing to accommodation in
each town or village. There are often at least two albergues from which
to choose. The usual cost is €5-€8 per person.
We began our trek on Easter Sunday in April of 2010 and had no
difficulty obtaining a bed for all but one night out of 38. (We ended up
that night up in a private room in an annex — it might have even been
the albergue owner’s home — so it was fine by us that the dorm was
full.)
The newer albergues on the Camino are purpose built and well
insulated. Many others are in stone buildings, old drafty monasteries or
farmhouses. Occasionally, the floors were so icy that we could keep our
morning yogurt chilled by placing the container on the tile under the
bed overnight.
To help keep pilgrims warm and cozy at night, there was often a stack
of heavy wool blankets available. Usually, these were free of charge.
To save on carrying too much weight, some pilgrims forgo toting a
sleeping bag and rely on there being blankets and pillows available at
the refugios. I concluded this was too risky and was very glad I had
brought my own down sleeping bag, camp pillow and earplugs. (Bring
plenty of earplugs!)
Each year, more and more hotels are cropping up on the Camino, but 40
straight nights in hotels can get expensive. Besides, staying in an
albergue is part of the peregrino experience — sharing the day’s events
with new friends.
One rainy evening, Tia from Finland sat on a top bunk in a crowded
dorm room tending to her many blisters. A Frenchman in the bunk across
from her who seemed to know everything there was to know about blisters
began offering advice. Then an Italian girl crossed the room, putting in
her two cents while gesturing passionately toward Tia’s foot.
Soon, Tia was the center of an animated debate in Spanish, French,
German, Finnish, Slovenian, Korean, Italian and English. (I listened
intently to the advice, since I had a large blister the size of a cherry
tomato brewing on my own big toe.)
It was usually perfectly comfortable — and always entertaining — staying in what the Spanish call a
dormitorio, but occasionally, if available, we asked for a
matrimonio, the quaint term for a double room, or
un cuarto con dos camas solamente, a small room with only two beds.
Is it difficult?
Anyone can walk the Camino. Each pilgrim walks at his or her own
pace, soon developing a unique rhythm. We discovered that our packs were
too big and too heavy. (I had a 25-pound backpack and my husband
carried 35 pounds.) Though we still managed to walk 12 to 15 miles each
day, I would recommend much smaller packs. This can be achieved by
taking efficient, lightweight clothing and a compressible sleeping bag.
It’s 778 kilometers from St. Jean Pied de Port to Santiago on the
Camino Francés, so unless you are a speed walker it will take a month to
six weeks to complete. You will never regret traveling as lightly as
possible. Anything you have forgotten at home can be bought at shops
along the way or done without.
We did zero training for this walk, something I would not recommend,
as you will ache less if you train more, yet it took us only two days to
adopt a comfortable pace. We walked fast enough to get to the next
albergue before dark but slow enough to stop to pet a dog or cat or calf
along the way.
The landscape and scenery varied by the hour and no two days were
alike. One day we trod up and down gentle rolling hills of newly planted
wheat fields so green, they looked like jade rivers swirling through
the valley. The next morning a vineyard kept us company for a while and
then an olive grove. After lunch there might have been a steep climb to
dense forest. The day after, perhaps a visit to a Romanesque church and a
nap in the sun.
One day we walked on a straight-as-an-arrow Roman road, the Vía
Trajana, with not one tree in sight for 12 kilometers. Sometimes we had
to walk on concrete next to a main road, and those were our least
favorite days because, while it was flat, the pavement turned our feet
to mush.
We moved from village to village on country roads, but more often we
walked on muddy, rocky or cobbled footpaths, just the way pilgrims did
1,000 years ago — except we were powered more by
café con leche and chocolate croissants than by gruel.
Our daily walk took us six to eight hours per day, depending on the
terrain and how frequently we stopped for coffee or how long we lingered
over our picnic lunch.
A typical day
When staying in an albergue, it is considerate to follow Camino
etiquette. There is an understanding that everyone must clear out of the
albergue by 8 a.m. There is also an informal “no stirring before 6
a.m.” rule, which is routinely ignored. Most of the early birds — those
walking 30 kilometers or more a day — are chomping at the bit to be out
the door by 5:30 each morning, so rustling usually begins well before
dawn.
At 7 a.m., those still asleep (an incredible feat!) are jolted into
consciousness with a recording of Gregorian chants, traditional pilgrim
songs or, in one case, Bob Marley tunes. Soon the room is vibrating with
steady conversation.
Shoes are usually neatly stacked on shelves near the front door for
airing overnight, so it can be a tight squeeze in the entryway as
everyone laces up their boots.
Occasionally, the albergue will offer a breakfast of bread, jam and
coffee or orange juice, and sometimes a pilgrim meal will be provided at
night. In the teeny village of San Juan de Ortega, the community served
us surprisingly delicious garlic soup after evening Mass.
If the refugio hasn’t provided breakfast and you don’t have your own
supply of bananas or yogurt, you’ll start the trail on an empty stomach.
Cafés are few and far between and they don’t open before 9:30 a.m., so
it is a good idea to have purchased something the day before for the
morning.
As you walk out of the albergue, look for the yellow arrow, usually
painted on the road or on a building, which indicates the way to go.
Kilometer after kilometer, you follow the symbols of the Camino: scallop
shells, which are imbedded in the walkways like crumbs dropped by
Hansel, or yellow arrows that appear on trees, benches, stop signs,
buildings, overpasses or dedicated Camino steles.
Some people prefer to walk alone,
solitario, while others walk in community. Other permitted modes of travel are bicycle, horse and donkey.
By 10 a.m. it was time for a croissant or a coffee break with new friends.
If lucky, the first town you come to might have a shop where you can
buy supplies for a picnic lunch. Everything closes in the middle of the
day, so you have to time this carefully or you can go the day without
eating.
The daily walk was broken every three, six or 13 kilometers by
another village with a church — always a church — and a bar or café.
Bars serve coffee, croissants, beer and sandwiches in smoke-filled
environments, but they’re the best places for a cup of coffee in the
morning or a cold San Miguel for an afternoon pick-me-up.
In almost every town, an enormous stork nest or two topped the towers
of tall churches. Long before we could see them, we could hear the
storks clacking their beaks as they built their nests. This became our
favorite symbol of the Camino.
Some days, frogs serenaded us, sounding just like the tribbles from
“Star Trek,” and it seemed there was never a single moment without
birdsong. We loved that part.
The villages were so charming and the clouds so exceptionally fluffy
and white that we usually forgot all about our inflamed blisters, sore
feet, aching backs, screaming calves, burning thighs, noisy knees and
tight shoulders until we lay down for the night.
An advantage of a springtime trek over a summer one was that there
was more color in nature. Sometimes the scenery was so vivid, it felt as
if we were walking through an image that had been enhanced in
Photoshop.
We drank lots of water throughout the day. Refills were available
from spouts in the villages’ main plazas or we could always refill at a
café. A few peregrinos experienced diarrhea from suspect water sources,
but the tap water in the albergues was always reliable.
By 3 o’clock in the afternoon we were ready to stop for the day — our
feet were killing us and I was ready to throw my pack into a ditch —
but usually there wasn’t a church steeple in sight, so we would have to
keep going.
This was the time of day that I became most “spiritual.” I would pray
for soft soil and no steep ascents (or any change in elevation at all)
before getting to our destination for the day. It didn’t matter if we
walked 13 kilometers or 22, the last four kilometers were always the
hardest.
Finally, we would reach a village and follow the yellow arrows to the albergue.
At 7:30 or 8 p.m. a “pilgrim meal” would be served, usually at the
one bar or restaurant in town or sometimes at the albergue. There was
usually a first course of soup, salad or paella, then a second course of
stew, pork, fish, rabbit, octopus or chicken, ending with a dessert.
Every meal came with water, bread and a bottle of wine, all for €8-€10. I
loved the pilgrim menu.
All in and lights out in the albergue was usually at 10 p.m.
Cruz de Ferro
About 200 kilometers from Santiago we climbed to the highest
elevation on the route. Here, a major milestone on the Camino, La Cruz
de Ferro, a small iron cross, is affixed to the top of a tall wooden
pole.
It is tradition to bring a stone or pebble from home and carry it
with you on your pilgrimage as a symbol of any heaviness in your heart.
Into the stone you put all your sorrows, disappointments and regrets.
When you get to Cruz de Ferro, you are supposed to leave the stone — and
all your sorrows — behind. For some, the time there is even more
meaningful than arriving at Santiago.
I didn’t know about the custom of bringing a rock from home. A German
woman told me, “Just pick one up along the way!” I did but promptly
lost it down a sink drain while doing laundry one night. On Cruz de
Ferro day, I found a small red rock and laid it at the base of the cross
as a prayer for Africa.
The journey is the goal
After 38 days and almost 500 miles we arrived at Santiago de
Compostela. My one desire was that the sun would be shining when we
arrived at the cathedral. I got my wish. After a week of hiking in
dreary rain, heavy fog and even snow, the sun shone brightly.
Unlike in other cities along the Camino, once a pilgrim enters the
city limits of Santiago, there is no stopping for café con leche or a
beer or even to empty boots of pebbles that have settled uncomfortably
between toes. After loading my backpack from a top bunk one last time,
lacing up my boots and crossing one last Roman bridge, I had a strong
drive to just
get there.
There was a conspicuous sense of urgency amongst our fellow pilgrims.
Few stopped for a break on the way to the goal line that day.
When we finally arrived in the city of Santiago, the route to the
cathedral was perfect, winding up and down and around, the cathedral
spires hidden from view until we were practically standing beneath them.
Serendipity was with us that day in Santiago. We took a wrong turn
near the cathedral and ended up at a little-used entrance. No backpacks
are allowed inside, so I said to Scott, “Why don’t you go in first while
I watch the bags.” After a few moments he hurried back out, saying,
“You have to see this!”
I walked in to find the Botafumeiro, the huge incense burner, flying
just over the heads of the congregation and continuing through the
entire transept. Whoosh! The sound as the burner passed just feet from
me was incredible.
Historically, the Botafumeiro, which hangs from ropes and an
elaborate pulley system near the ceiling 150 feet above, was used to
exterminate the aromas produced by all the heavily clothed pilgrims,
some of whom had taken a year to reach Santiago. Seeing the incense
burner in action and
feeling it as it flew by moved me to tears.
For those who hike the Camino in a Holy Year, as we did (the next
will be 2021), the Catholic Church awards pilgrims an indulgence,
meaning, in the eyes of the Church, all sins are forgiven. Raised as a
Catholic, I would be leaving Santiago with a “clean slate,” so to speak.
At the pilgrims’ office adjoining the cathedral, one of 10 officials
checked our credentials, carefully examining the many stamps we received
along the way, and issued us Compostela certificates. Our certificates
are different. My husband, a history buff, had decided
to earn a “cultural” certificate. No indulgence for him!
“How was your journey?” asked the church official as she filled in my
name in Latin. “It was wonderful,” I replied, wiping my tears, “and we
arrived at the cathedral in time to see the Botafumeiro fly.
“You are very fortunate!” she said. “The Botafumeiro only makes an
appearance during special Feast Days or if a group has made a large
donation.”
I walked out feeling like one lucky pilgrim.
To top it off, as we walked away from the cathedral, a jazz musician
sitting in the square began to play “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” the
song played at my mom’s funeral. Mom had been gone over two years, but
she had been with me every day on the Camino. It was a perfect end to a
perfect journey. Our celebratory dinner consisted of things that reminded us of the Camino: potato chips, (picnics) champagne (joy), and chocolate (sweetness).
We listen to their rhythmic chomp chomp
chomp throughout the night. In the morning I sit on the bank of the Luangwa River,
one of my favorite spots on earth, and watch as sunrise turns the colors of the
opposite bank from glowing orange to the color of weak hot chocolate. I am in
Heaven. 
I want my family here. I want them to experience a game
drive where they might see the Big Five, or lions sleeping the afternoon away on
their backs and elephants browsing unhurriedly because after the
rains there is plenty to eat and drink. 
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