Tag: camino

Unfinished business

~ kevinrevell ~ 4 Comments

Well, the last Emu blog received quite a bit of attention. Thanks for that, although I’d hope that the rise in stats wasn’t entirely due to a morbid interest in the infection levels of Mrs E’s feet. If it was, for you, then I suggest you take yourself off to onlyfans, where there are specialist subscriptions for the likes of you.

If you have a more healthy interest in the follow up to the last blog, however, do read on. Because minutes after getting home on one foot, Mrs E decided that there was some unfinished business on the Camino Portugués, and that that business was to be finished just as soon as she had two workable legs. Optimistically, she decided that should be within six weeks, so I was set to work rebooking hotels (tick), rerouting routes (tick) and claiming on travel insurance (no tick, another story, unfortunately).

And so, around six weeks after our shameful exit, we were heading off again to Santiago de Compostela, this time jammed in to a Ryanair flight along with about two hundred Spurs supporters, all headed to Bilbao for the Europa League final the following day. ‘But Bilbao is nowhere near Santiago de Compostela’, I hear you cry. Well, apparently any flights and hotels for Bilbao were stupidly expensive, so, according to the Spurs supporter that I spoke to, it made much more sense to get a plane in the right general direction, then hire a car and drive the 6 hours to stay in Santander, then get a train to Bilbao for the game, then do the whole thing in reverse the next day. Luckily for him, they won the game, otherwise that would have been a really long trip back. Our hearts go out to the long suffering Man United supporters of course, one of whom I heard in the passport queue, worrying that he didn’t know what he’d do if they didn’t get a win out of the final, because ‘we need to get something from this season’. Poor lamb.

Anyway, back to the walk. Despite Mrs E’s enthusiastic atheism, she’d had her doubts when getting injured, thinking that she may have been struck down by the spirit of St Isabel. This thinking went back to around 7am on the morning when we crossed from Portugal into Spain, where we’d settled into a conversation with a particularly stern American man and his son. The conversation ended at the point where Mrs E said that she had no truck with this religious nonsense, and was only really doing the walk so she could get to the end. It turned out that the Americans very much did have truck, and were absolutely on the route to get whatever spiritual lift (and possible guidance through purgatory) from the hike. We spent the subsequent boat journey avoiding eye contact and conversation, and grunted our goodbyes on the Spanish pier, at which point they shot off like rabbits in a completely different direction to the route markers, and we never saw them again. And only an hour later, the heavens opened, Mrs E’s feet got soaked, blisters were formed, infections were developed, and before too long she was in Vigo hospital on a drip, wondering if St Isabel was working in a very mysterious way. I mention this now, because on part two of the walk, Mrs E was a bit more open about the chance of getting a spiritual lift. After all, part of the point of the pilgrimage was to suffer in the name of something that you believed in, and it would be a shame if you couldn’t have that something to help the suffering along. And towards the end of the walk I saw a side to her that is normally very well hidden, offering factor 50 to women who looked a little red round the shoulders, stopping to offer Nok cream to people with sore feet, and generally putting herself about like she was the living embodiment of Saint Isabel.

To day one then, and we strapped ourselves into Beast 1 & Beast 2. I appreciate that this will mean more to you if you’ve read part one of this blog, but if you haven’t, this might be time to use your imagination and possibly remind yourself of what a terribly sordid mind you have. Anyway, an easy four hours in the sunshine, out of Vigo and north east along the coast to Redondela. Lots more people on the route than in March (unsurprisingly) and already sorting themselves into a hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy are the pilgrims who are carrying their own gear in big rucksacks and staying in albergues, which are the hostels on the route. Next level down are those, like us, who are carrying their own gear but have opted to stay in cheap hotel rooms, primarily to avoid sleeping and snoring in noisy dormitories. These two levels can also be separated by the use of wooden staffs for balance, as opposed to walking poles, which mark out the seniority of pilgrims, as well as Tolkien characters. Next level down are the hikers who’ve arranged to have their luggage transported between stages. This is a very good idea if, say, you can’t function without hair straighteners and a travelling library of an evening, and it’s something that we’ve done in the past on other walks, but it kind of minimises the suffering. There really is nothing like the feeling of 10kg on your back to make you lean forward onto your stick and at least form the silhouette of a medieval pilgrim:

Anyway, the hikers with day packs can be spotted by their excellent posture and practiced overtaking manoeuvres. A little further down the list are the cyclists, who have a varied approach to overtaking notification, and still seem to be doing the same distances as the hikers. And finally the guys who have hired electric bikes for a couple of weeks, and freewheel cheerily by on the uphills, occasionally smoking a fag. Somewhere in this hierarchy are the horse riders, who can also receive certificates for completing the Camino; we didn’t see any of them though, I suspect they’d go out early to avoid the crowds and the heat.

A bit of reflection on the spiritual journey as we wandered along. This pilgrimage lark obviously means lots of things to lots of people, and we spent a bit of time talking about what those things might be, concluding largely that they were to make sense of and manage mortality, something that I’m obsessed with, and of which Mrs E has a much more mature and nonchalant view. So, a few happy miles chatting about death, during which we planned each others funerals – I can’t give you the detail of the conversation for reasons of sensitivity, but I can tell you that a) I’d really like to be around for my dry run, including the wide variety of guest speakers that Mrs E plans to invite and b) Mrs E, after her last walking adventure, has opted to be cremated in an open toed coffin.

Day one ended fairly early at Redondela, a really lovely town where it would be rude not to sit in the town centre with a cold glass of Estrella and a couple of plates of tapas. So we did.

Redondela to Pontevedra the next day was a bit further, and took around six hours, with a couple of fairly gnarly climbs in the sun, but eased by some really great tracks in the forests, sometimes allowing us to look left and down to the inland sea of Enseada de San Simon. All a bit too much for Mrs E, who was missing cold water even more than spiritual awakening.

Pontevedra is another lovely town, the sort of place that you could happily retire to and write that novel that you’ve always promised the world. Although in reality, your days would be just as fulfilling if you were watching the world go by with a coffee in the morning and a beer in the evening, separated by a serious siesta in the daytime. Really must get round to that one of these days. On the subject of books, Mrs E decided that a good use of our time would be to get me started on some productive and rewarding work for a change. She’s been saying for some time that I ought to write a book, so suggested that we spend the several hours from Pontevedra to Caldas des Reis working out the main character and plot lines from a number of lucrative novels. Figuring that Richard Osman is all the rage at the moment with a series about unusual detecting, we agreed that we should create a new character called Santiago Jones, who solves a number of crimes on Camino routes, mainly by interviewing fellow hikers. Santiago Jones will have some detective skills, but we couldn’t agree on the specific traits that would set him aside from other gumshoes. On the understanding that no idea is a bad idea, we agreed that he should be something of a modern polymath. He can play any musical instrument, speak and understand any language, and make any animals do his bidding. He has a good understanding of martial arts, and will normally carry an axe, along with a staff carved from a tree branch from the garden of his late lamented mentor. He is also proficient in gymnastics, archery, boules and imitating birdsong. The first few mysteries that Santiago Jones will solve (copy these at your peril, Osman) are provisionally titled Murder on the Camino Portugués, the Mystery of the Masked Pilgrim and The Compostela Massacre.

Pontevedra to Caldas de Reis next, and another six hours, very hot walking, but with a gentle breeze. And the mildest camembert, tee hee.* There was a big bump in the middle of the route, where we stopped at a very strategically placed van, serving food and drink. I mentioned in the first blog about getting your Compostela card stamped en route, which would mean that you would get a certificate at the end, and Mrs E was delighted to get by far the most elaborate stamp yet, finished in black wax with silver detailing. Also explained the length of the queue at the van.

At the end of the stage, Mrs E had unfortunately developed a problem with her right eye. ‘It’s not affecting my walking’, she declared, tripping over her walking pole for the 15th time, ‘I just need some chloramphenicol’. We went to the chemist, and were directed to the doctor around the corner, where we google translated ourselves into a waiting room. This was beginning to feel familiar from our last saga, but we were seen really quickly by a doctor who did a full assessment involving fluorescein, lots of torch work and folding Mrs E’s eyelid back with a fairly chunky retractor. Mrs E remained cheery throughout the process, testing out her new Duolingo vocabulary (already an impressive 500 words) with a doctor who disappointingly spoke perfect English. She was also chuffed with a prescription for chloramphenicol, sagely agreeing with the doctor that this was a very wise diagnosis. As the prescription was being stamped, she reached into her bag and brought out the Compostela documents, asking the doctor to stamp these as well. I’m still not sure that she was joking. Anyway, back to the chemist, paid the massive prescription charge of €4, and reflected on the wonders of the Spanish healthcare system. As I write this, Mrs E has just returned to work to a criminally understaffed hospital where all nurses and doctors are being offered voluntary redundancy to meet cost challenges…

Caldas de Reis to Padron the next day, and a slightly shorter five hours, but with another bump half way. With only two days to go, and the merger of the coastal and the mainland Portuguese camino routes behind us, it was getting to be a bit busier. Good in lots of ways, and we met some lovely people, and exchanged ‘Buen Camino’s with loads of other pilgrims, but the solitude of the previous walks became something that we began to miss. And certain voices managed to cut through the countryside like knives. I wished I’d had the ability (like Santiago Jones) to speak lots of languages, cos some of the conversations were so animated and so long – sentences that seemed to last for ten rapid fire minutes without drawing breath – it really made you wonder what they were about. It’s quite difficult to put a lot of distance between you and other hikers, unless you stop to take a picture, at which point you inevitably find that they stop as well. It’s like being in a very polite marathon but at a much slower pace. Similarly to marathons, the technique for overtaking is quite challenging. It might take you twenty minutes to make up fifty metres on someone, because you’re walking at such a similar pace. So if you go past them, you have to speed up a bit, otherwise you’ll end up getting under their feet. Obviously you’ll give them a cheery ‘Hola, Buen Camino’, but what then? Sometimes you might fall into an easy conversation and spend the next few hours chatting away, and maybe swapping addresses and making promises to holiday together some time (this has genuinely happened to people I know), but more often you’ll have a brief chat, then remember that you need to complete your overtaking manoeuvre. Timing is crucial here, as there is a danger that you end up continuing to chat over your shoulder, which is uncomfortable at best. Anyway, it’s a bit like being one of those lorries overtaking uphill on a motorway. It takes for ever, and you do wonder once it’s done what the point actually was.

Padron is another lovely town, tiny steep streets and beautiful stone buildings , and it would be really peaceful were it not for the endless procession of pilgrims enthusiastically trooping through. Still, I guess if you’re going to have a tourist trade, peaceful religious pilgrims who want to be tucked up in bed by ten and who eat like horses are the ones you’d want.

We were tucked up in bed a little later than ten and by the time we got to the 0730 breakfast, the locusts, or, as we will call them, mountain bikers, had already filled their capacious lycra clad stomachs and back pockets with pretty much everything that the buffet had to offer. Consequently we left for the longest leg with fairly empty stomachs, reminding ourselves that breakfast is a much overrated meal anyway. But this did mean that we managed a reasonably early start, and it was overcast until about 2pm, so perfect weather for the parade into Santiago at around 3. By the time we got to the outskirts of the city, we didn’t need signs any more, we just followed the snaking trail of pilgrims all the way to the cathedral, where we did all the things that you’re supposed to do at this point – sighed a bit, took pictures, posed for more pictures, sent messages home, took our shoes off, and lay in the sun with our heads facing up to the top of the cathedral.

Santiago de Compostela is a gorgeous city, and completely dominated by the cathedral, which in itself is astonishing. We’d been in it before on another adventure, but didn’t feel that we could justify seeing the relics of St James or touching the back of his statue above the altar until we’d finished the Camino. But we had now, so we did, and felt fairly good about it. Not quite a conversion, but maybe a bit more respect for people who have a belief system that means that a bit of suffering goes a long way. And if that long way means that there’s a bit less time spent in purgatory, well that’s just peachy. Mind you, we had an interesting conversation with a couple of hardcore pilgrims at the airport, where we considered whether taking a coach to all the key points, getting Compostela stamps and certificate for a couple of days travel was cheating. And having concluded that it was, then so was staying in hotels, sleeping in beds, not working your way from stage to stage to pay for your meals, wearing anything other than sandals and a robe, not carrying a staff and not walking home afterwards. So maybe we’re all cheating a bit, and maybe that’s the life lesson we need to learn about trying a bit harder next time.

So, until next time, Buen Camino!

  • This joke courtesy of ‘A Bit of Fry and Laurie’ c1986. In the same sketch, SF says ‘I stooped to pick a buttercup. Why people leave buttocks lying around I’ll never know’ ABOF&L made us very happy for a very long time.

First avowed intent

Featured ~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

If you know about the pilgrim Camino network in Europe, then skip this bit. If you don’t, then buckle up, because, even if you don’t fancy yourself as a modern pilgrim, it’s still fairly special.

The legend of St James is that his remains were brought to Galicia for burial where they were lost, and only found after a hermit followed a bright star (I know you think you’ve heard this before, but carry on) to the burial spot in what is now Santiago de Compostela. Word got back to King Alfonzo, who ordered the cathedral to be built on the burial site. The relics are still there, and have been verified by various popes, so they’re definitely the genuine article…

So, after the cathedral was constructed, it became a place of pilgrimage, as part of the general ‘suffer on the way to see the relics of St James and you’ll buy yourself an indulgence which will speed your way through purgatory’ process. 2025 is a special year, as indulgences are actually available to modern pilgrims (although you need to be catholic, take confession and jump through a couple of other hoops before you get a certificate).

Queen Isabel made the pilgrimage twice in the 14th century and she later became a saint, which we both saw as a strong incentive for the walk. Well, you’ve got to have dreams, haven’t you?

The Camino network starts from many places in Europe, but most notably Spain, France and Portugal. People do the pilgrimage walks for lots of reasons, and there are, understandably, lots of enthusiastic Christians that look on it as a spiritual adventure. I reflected on this quite a bit over the days we were walking/hobbling/sheltering from the elements, wondering how much the positive and negative parts would be magnified if we’d have been travelling with St Isabel, for example. Btw, let’s abbreviate her to SI now. I’ve a feeling she’ll be featuring quite a bit as we travel toward Santiago. In fact, let’s see what happens by telling the story of the walk…

Day one, and we headed out of Porto. I should have mentioned that there were four of us on this trip. Me, Mrs E, and two unpleasantly large rucksacks, which we will call Beast 1 and Beast 2. We’d packed lightly, taking whatever we thought we could get away with, but even so, the packs seemed to weigh a ton. We’d managed a 15 mile walk with full packs the previous weekend, and all had been well, but we’d not taken more than a few steps before Mrs E and Beast 2 were struggling to get on.

‘I’m not going to get on with you for two weeks’, she said, probably addressing the pack.
‘Let’s just get out of Porto’, I helpfully suggested.

If you’re planning to do this trip, please note that it takes about four hours to get out of Porto. By now, packs had been adjusted and there was just a bit of back pain to put up with. Unfortunately, Beast 2 was still complaining, with a squeaking noise that no adjustment could shift.

‘I really can’t put up with this any more’, Mrs E announced, again, probably addressing the rucksack.

By now we were skirting around Porto airport, and the squeaking was still audible over the sound of the planes taking off and landing. Mrs E was getting even more frustrated with Beast 2.
‘Why doesn’t yours squeak?’ she demanded.
Then I may have told a slight untruth, which even SI might have forgiven.
‘Oh, mine squeaks all the time’, I fibbed.
That seemed to settle things nicely. As long as Beast 2 wasn’t making it personal, and as long as Beast 1 was also being annoying, all was right with the world, and even though the squeaking continued for another three days, it was never mentioned again.

Eight hours and 30km later, we got to our hotel, just outside Vila de Conde. Many pilgrims choose to stay in Auberges, which are hostels along the route, where you pay about €15 a night for the opportunity to sleep in a dormitory along with other pilgrims. We’d decided, in a Christian-like spirit, not to impose our snoring on others, and to stay in rooms with comfortable beds and bathrooms, and decent breakfasts. Not sure this was quite the pilgrim spirit, and I think SI would have preferred a more spartan arrangement, but who knows? We’d prebooked the hotels and it would be a shame to not use the rooms, after all.

A fitful night’s sleep for Mrs E – I’d dropped off nicely as usual but she was kept awake initially by the floorboards creaking (‘Just imagine you’re on a boat, and it’s the sound of the timbers’, I helpfully said, going to sleep myself on the second syllable of timbers). This kept her awake for an hour or so, before a rowdy group assembled at the bar just below our room. This was the final straw, so, wearing a fetching ensemble of nightdress, walking trousers, fleece and sandals, she marched down to reception and asked for another room. Apparently (this was, after all, during my REM phase), she did so between tears, only managing to blurt out


‘I’m very tired and tomorrow I have to walk the caminho!’
over and over again.


Unsurprisingly, the group was moved to another part of the hotel. A few hours later, fully refreshed, I asked her how she’d slept. I received what Paddington fans might remember as a ‘hard stare’.

Day two, and a recovery from that tetchy start, with a walk along the coastline to Esposende. We’d seen some horrendous news from Southern Portugal about storm Martinho, which had caused loads of damage through storm rain, floods and gales in mainland Portugal. It hadn’t spread too far north yet, but it was expected to make an appearance in the next couple of days, so we enjoyed a really good hike across boardwalks and forest tracks, met a few more pilgrims on the way, and started to hear a few ‘Bom Caminho’s’ as we went along. We even managed a few of our own – there were hikers going in the opposite direction, towards the Fatima shrine, between Porto and Lisbon.

Beasts 1&2 were being slightly better behaved, although at least one of them was still squeaking away.
We saw a lot of the sea – we’d hiked in Galicia before so we knew it could be a bit lively – it would have been great for surfing, had it not been for the coastline, which was very very rocky. Frustrating for Mrs E, whose idea of a perfect morning includes a sea or river swim, ideally at around 5°C – we’d even packed towels just in case we wanted to interrupt eight hours of walking with a bracing dip – but it was not to be.
Anyway, 26km later we were in a comparatively crappy hotel, grabbing food at the only veggie restaurant in town, and back for a thankfully undisturbed sleep.

Which brings us to day three. When me and the two chuckle brothers (see previous two wheeled adventures) reminisce about our bike touring trips, we often mention the ‘day from hell’, an 80 mile ride in the Netherlands, where it started pouring as soon as we set off, where we were all soaked to the bone within 30 minutes, and where the rain just kept on giving and giving, only relenting with about one mile left to go. You may be ahead of me here, but day three was our day from hell. Storm Martinho had decided to take a trip North, and although it didn’t bring the destructive winds from a few days before, it definitely tried hard with the rain. We lasted ok for the first hour, with our ‘waterproof’ coats keeping us fairly snug, but apparently there is a limit to how waterproof a coat actually is, and our limits were both about an hour, with at least another six to go. And our feet were soon sitting on top of a layer of puddle, sock, puddle and shoe.

Absolutely everything was soaked. I suggested to Mrs E that if we looked on this as a true pilgrimage then we might want to think of these conditions as a test of our faith. (She didn’t agree). At times it felt a bit like that scene in Forrest Gump, when Lieutenant Dan ties himself to the mast and shouts to God ‘Is this all you’ve got?’ in the storm. But the rain eased off a little after four hours, and we began to count down the distance to Viano do Castelo. But Martinho hadn’t done with us yet, and as we crossed the bridge from Cabadelo, it decided to pick up with renewed enthusiasm.


A word about the bridge. It’s called the Ponte Eiffel, (designed by yer man Gustav), it’s made of steel, it’s 645m long, and the top floor, where the traffic and pedestrians go, is completely open, except for a guard rail on each edge. I don’t know how high it is off the water, but definitely high enough that you don’t want to look down. There was no way that we were going to take a picture in that weather, so here’s one that someone took in drier times :

I suppose looking down wasn’t really an option anyway. The rain was so bad that you just had to concentrate on looking ahead. The wind was incredibly strong, and blowing from the sea, threatening to throw us into the traffic at any point. I decided that the best approach was to put my left arm over the guard rail to hold on there when the wind really gusted. Every now and then I’d turn round, and I remember being quite surprised to see that Mrs E was still on the path. Anyway, it took about 10 minutes to cross, one of the scariest things we’d ever done, and at the end, completely drenched and with no feeling left in our hands, we tried to find somewhere to shelter to see where our hotel was. Unable to operate a wet phone with broken thumbs, we guessed, and fortunately headed in the right direction. We made something of an entrance to the very posh hotel, dripping water on their shiny wooden floor and refusing to sit down on their pristine seats. Recovered a bit to sign in, but only managed to do so by holding a pen in my fist and moving it randomly around the registration form.
We managed to get into our room without too much further embarrassment, and made a check of clothing that needed to dry. Because we’d packed very light, almost everything needed to be worn again the next day, so, dressed in dry shorts and T-shirts, we borrowed an umbrella and found the town laundrette. Not quite Nick Kamen, but not far off.

Day 4 brought further storms which would apparently be ‘over in a couple of days’. Most of our clothes were relatively dry and we were quite keen to keep them that way. We’d noticed other pilgrims on day three wearing huge capes that covered them and their rucksacks, and also wearing smug smiles as they eased past our shivering forms. Was it wrong to envy other pilgrims? SI wasn’t around to ask, so we decided not, and so I set off after breakfast, again in shorts and umbrella, to a tiny shop that we’d noticed the night before, that had a handwritten ‘ponchos’ sign in the window.
‘Don’t get yellow’, Mrs E helpfully called out, as I headed off into the monsoon.


As it happened, colour was the least of the issues. My Portuguese is beyond rusty, and the elderly lady at the shop was not only very Portuguese but also very deaf. Eventually we established that:
a) she did sell ponchos
b) that she only had one left (in blue)
c) they were €7
d) that she’d go and look out the back for another one
e) there wasn’t one out the back
f) the one hanging up could be for sale
g) but on closer inspection it had a number of rips and tears
h) so was neither use nor ornament (I’m paraphrasing the Portuguese here, of course)
i) that she could help me no more so here was the change from €10
j) that there wasn’t another poncho seller in the town
k) that our business was was concluded


Then, apparently as an afterthought, she held the torn (yellow) poncho out to me, presumably to dispose of as I saw fit.
And so it was that we set off, with both of us and the two Beasts covered with the flimsiest of plastic covers, Mrs E in a fetching blue, and me in a less fetching yellow number, looking very much like I’d recently been attacked with a Stanley knife. This is the first picture we took. Possibly not our finest, but I’m very keen on the porthole look that my wife has gone for. I think it’ll catch on.

The rain kept up for hours, we were marginally drier than the day before, except where our legs and arms emerged from the cape (and for me, below the numerous slashes).
We hiked through some lovely forest and went up and down what would have been challenging rocky paths, but, because of the weather, were challenging river beds. At one point, we took shelter in a bus stop and both independently thought about checking the bus timetable. We had to cross a river on giant stepping stones, each about a meter apart, with precarious falls on each side, and only mentioned the bus option to each other afterwards, by which time of course, we couldn’t go back.


We’d agreed after day one that we’d try to drink water every hour, just to have a break, and this was a good tactic, or it would have been had it not been for the process of needing to go to the loo every hour as well. This is challenging on a walk at the best of times, but in pouring rain, with full packs, hiking gear, ponchos and hands so cold that fingers and thumbs were inoperable, it proved particularly challenging. Obviously the challenges took different forms. I managed with very little precision using some ungainly thumb work. Mrs E found a balancing point that looked oddly like an outtake from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, quite elegant in her own way, but requiring a partner to lift Beast 2 off her back in order to reassemble her lower clothing.
We’d completed these manoeuvres, thankfully, when we met up with a couple of German women, who we walked with for a couple of hours, and the change of conversation and company meant that the miles went by much faster. Said goodbye to our German friends as we reached Amoroso, as they were staying there, but we still had another 10k to go, as we needed to get to Caminha, on the Portuguese border. This was hard work, as it started raining again, every now and again it would stop, there’d be a little bit of drying out, then it would start again.
‘I’ve really had enough of this’, said Mrs E, as we climbed yet another hill. And then a miracle happened. I might have mentioned in the past that Mrs E has a real aversion to whistling, and there, at the top of the hill, sheltering under a huge umbrella was a whistling man. A tunelessly gormless whistling man at that.
I turned to my long suffering wife who, incidentally, hadn’t been able to see anything out of her porthole since the morning as her glasses had been covered in rain.
‘What if there was something at the top of this hill that really annoyed you even more than the rain? But that you could just walk away from?’
‘Yeah, like that’s going to happen’
And so it was, at the top of a hill in northern Portugal, in pouring rain, a gormless man whistling a tuneless tune under a huge umbrella, miles away from anywhere, found the contents of a blue and a yellow cape, covering ridiculous hunchbacks, openly laughing at him. SI would not approve.
On the way downhill from the whistling twit, Mrs E managed some further good news. Beast 2 had stopped squeaking. Maybe the beast had been tamed.
Eventually we got to Caminha, and checked into a creepy hotel which was full of dark winding corridors with ‘staff only’ doors shutting just as we turned each corner. And, for some reason, a glade plugin on every available power outlet. Rarely wared, as they say in Norfolk.
We were on the Portugal/Spain border and needed to get across the Minho river. The hourly ferry wasn’t running, but we managed to book a water taxi, which was as billed as a ‘speedboat for six’, at 0830 in the morning.

So Day 5 started with a walk to the dock, and a chilly wait with other pilgrims for the speedboat for six.
Actually, it started a bit before then – Mrs E was determined not to have wet feet any more – she’d started to get some really nasty blisters from walking in wet socks and shoes. To her delight, she found that a plastic sanitary bag from the bathroom was just right to cover her sock. But only one sock, so the day started nice and early with her asking the night porter for another bag, a challenge that probably wasn’t helped by her miming that she wanted it, not for its original use, but for her foot. The night porter struggled with the challenge, especially when trying to enlist the help of the breakfast cook, but eventually returned with a couple of carrier bags, so Mrs E set off on day five with a sanitary bag on one foot and a large plastic bag on the other. Meanwhile, the speedboat turned up dead on time, and sped us across the river in under five minutes. This was a relief – if we’d not got the boat we would have had to wait until 1430, or take a 15km diversion via an inland bridge.

So we set off into Spain, where, thanks to Mrs E’s 30 day streak on duolingo, we felt much more relaxed with the language, seamlessly switching from ‘Bon Caminho’ to ‘Buen Camino’. Of course it started raining almost immediately, but it was soft and light and intermittent rain, so we were wearing our ridiculous capes for fun rather than function. It turned into a long day though; the stages so far had pretty well matched the suggested routes in our guidebook, but we wanted to stay in a hotel a bit further into the next stage, so we ended up walking for eight hours, and covering about 30km.

The last couple of hours were quite hard work – Mrs E had blisters from wet socks on the previous couple of days, so we trudged down the hill to what ended up as a fantastic hotel with its own hydrotherapy spa – unbelievable luxury – we looked and felt completely out of place in the posh reception with our rucksacks and muddy trousers, but this mattered a lot less by the time we got to the spa, where Mrs E found a freezing plunge pool and looked as happy as I’d seen her for several days.

Even better was the news that day six was a rest day of sorts, with only a couple of hours into Baiona, where we’d be staying at the Parador. I may have bored you before about the joys of the Parador hotel – each one a national monument that just happens to be a hotel, and this one was as special as they get – we were literally staying in a restored fort – the outside wall of our room would have been the stone fort, the whole building covered the 18 hectare peninsula, and despite the fact that Francis Drake attacked it enthusiastically in 1585 it remains in amazing condition. And everything (this being a Parador) is just wonderful. We didn’t have time to explore all of the castle and the fort, opting to loaf around, make phone calls and recover properly, but if we had, we would have seen the prince’s tower, dating back to the 10th century, later holding the Hapsburg prince who was in an iron mask, the inspiration for the Dumas novel. And, for that matter, the slightly shorter Billy Bragg song.

Day seven, and the first proper sunny day – our map suggested that we’d be hiking about 20km, but the caminho route said otherwise, and we ended up doing about 24km. A lot of this was off road, and a huge amount uphill, winding through forest tracks with terrific views of the ocean below, which for the first time showed a couple of spots that you might have been able to paddle in without being flattened by the big waves.

Mrs E found it hard going, and the last few kilometres were really taxing, very hot, very uphill, and by the time we got to our (very lovely) hotel, she was dragging her right foot a bit like Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects.

That’s where part one of this blog was going to end. You could have read this and been excited for part two – we were halfway through the trip, the easiest walking was to come, and the celebrations in the square at Santiago were just six days away. I could have told you about the pilgrim’s service in the cathedral and maybe even the process of obtaining an indulgence. But there isn’t going to be a part two, because after Mrs E had limped to the hotel room, she made the mistake of removing her right sock. Despite a lot of Vaseline and a year’s supply of compeed, her blisters had got much worse and she was in lots of pain. Even worse, we could see the start of infection heading up from the foot.

One of the many wonderful things about my wife is the way that she manages her health. She has a really nasty disease called rheumatoid arthritis – if you don’t know about this, it is unhelpfully labelled, being neither rheumatism nor arthritis – rather, it is an autoimmune disease that can seriously inflame and damage tissue and joints. She manages it brilliantly with some unpleasant drugs and a great deal of very cold water, and refuses to let it define her. But the side effect of the drugs means that she’s immuno-suppressed, meaning that her body is less able to fight infection. So this sign of infection was a bit of a red flag, and by about 8pm that night we were on our way to Vigo hospital for an evening with Spanish A&E.

Emergency rooms are the same the world over. They’re full of people who (obviously) don’t want to be there, sometimes carrying injuries that must be incredibly painful, and everyone just desperate to be seen. Other than hanging around quite a bit, Mrs E was treated brilliantly – admitted really quickly, put into a wheelchair by the triage nurse, assessed by the doctor and put straight onto an IV drip with painkillers and antibiotics, bloods taken for tests, wounds dressed, X-rayed, and finally reassessed with the results, which showed the infection and a likely match with the antibiotics that would treat it. During all of this, we leaned heavily on Google Translate and WhatsApp support from Dr Jr Emu#1, who gave a varying quality of advice:

You might be eating your breakfast with this so I’ll not share the pictures of the wounds, but here’s a picture of the foot post-dressing.

Eventually we got discharged, and headed back in the early hours with vague ideas about me continuing and Mrs E spending the next couple of days travelling by taxi and resting.

Woke up on day eight, and we both realised that those ideas were hopelessly optimistic, and the sensible thing to do would be to get home as soon as possible, so we spent most of the day cancelling hotels and flights, and booking stuff to get back the following day. And that’s where we are now, in Santiago de Compostela, sharing an airport bus with lots of happy pilgrims and their backpacks.
On day 4 we’d had an interesting conversation with our German friends, trying to understand why there’s no English equivalent word for schadenfreude, when the English probably needed the word far more than the Germans. I don’t know what the opposite word for being selfishly envious at other people’s happiness, but that’s what we felt now, when we heard the pilgrims chattering away. Well, a bit, anyway.

But we’d given it a go. If Mrs E could have put one more step in front of another with Beast 2 then she would have done. (My Garmin says we did 245,459 steps in the first seven days, so maybe that’s an achievement of sorts). And maybe we’ll come back next year to give it another try, if she can get hold of some waterproof socks.

We didn’t have a particular religious or spiritual experience, and we didn’t get to experience the end bit. But we saw some beautiful parts of Portugal and Spain, met some fabulous people, and really looked after each other when we needed to. Which, when I think about it, is vaguely spiritual in itself. So that’s probably enough to stop being fed up.

Until the next time, Buen Camino!

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

~ kevinrevell ~ Leave a comment

So we escaped the hullabaloo of a collapsing government, an increasing volume of vociferous gammon, and an overexcitable media to head for the relative calm of the Galician coast. Fairly skipped out of the country, we did, in the hope for simple hiking adventures in the bright June sunshine of the Spanish countryside.

And it’s not like we didn’t have the odd warning on the way. Our first warning was a phone call next to the Ryanair gate at Stansted. I’d had an MRI scan a couple of weeks before, after going to my doctor and telling her that I was struggling to stand up if I’d sat down for any length of time. This phone call was from the triage doctor, following up on the scan, and asking if I’d had any further issues. Not really, I said, it’s just really painful and I look like I’m about ninety when I stand up. Incidentally, my mother, who has just actually turned 90, can easily beat me in the getting out of a chair without complaining stakes, particularly if it’s 6pm and time for a drink. Anyway, the lovely doctor said that he’d refer me to someone who could see me and the scan in the same place,, at the musculoskeletal (MSK) clinic and recommend some sort of intervention, which sounded ominous. Incidentally (again) – I saw my GP in May, had an MRI scan later that month, had this phone call mid June, and now have an appointment at the MSK clinic at the end of June. I absolutely bloody love the NHS. Anyway, at the end of the phone call, the lovely doctor told me that I’d better not do any walking between now and the MSK appointment. Ooops.

Second warning was the actual booking. We were due to walk the ‘Wild Atlantic Coast’. I didn’t really worry about what actually made it wild until we started. Maybe it was going to be the wild flowers, or the wild sense of abandon you felt as you skipped along it’s banks. Or maybe it was wild like a wilderness, a leafy green expanse of rolling green that we’d skip along as we held hands along manicured footpaths. Wild in a Kate Bush style, if you like. Well none of that. The Wild Atlantic Coast really should have the Wild Atlantic bit in bold. and underlined. When the Atlantic gets enthusiastic around these parts, it really makes itself known. Wild in more of a Keith Moon/Oliver Reed style then. We were walking the lighthouse way, from Laxe to Finisterre, and it’s known as that because you can’t walk for more than a couple of hours without tripping over yet another lighthouse. And you need them here because otherwise there’d be even more shipwrecks. Did I mention the shipwrecks? Well, one of the first things we did, when opening the map of the route, was to ask what Costa da Morte meant. Our Spanish isn’t that great, but our French is ok, and surely no-one would ever name a touristy destination the Coast Of Death. Well, they did, and it’s because there’s a long history of shipwrecks along the coast – galleons, fishing boats, german submarines, oil tankers – they’ve all misjudged the waves and the winds and the rocks and understood a bit too late what the Wild Atlantic is all about. We stayed in a hotel that showed all the shipwrecks on a series of maps along a corridor. They were very big maps, it was a long corridor, and the writing was very small – there have been over 600 shipwrecks since the 14th century, hence the need for lighthouses, although with that sort of record, you might want to have put a few slightly brighter bulbs in.

We set off from Santiago de Compostela, a beautiful city best known as the destination for the pilgrimage Camino walks that start all over southern France, Spain, and Portugal. Santiago is named for St James, whose relics are held underneath the cathedral, hence the pilgrimage destination, and there’s a long queue of pilgrims in the cathedral every day, queuing up to touch the shoulders of the statue of St James behind the altar, to mark the end of their journey, which may have been a six week hike. It’s quite emotional watching people get to the cathedral with their backpacks and walking poles, and quietly filing around the altar to get to this moment. We felt as if we’d be cheating if we joined in, so we went outside to the sunny square behind the cathedral, where pilgrims were arriving after their journeys, looking exhausted but elated, lying down on the cobbles, hugging each other, taking selfies and generally feeling very pleased with themselves. We spent half an hour here, soaking up the sun and atmosphere, and also managing to drop one of our passports on the floor, which we didn’t notice until a couple of hours and a 50km taxi ride later, when we tried to check in to our first hotel. Key travel tip – if you are going to lose your passport, make sure you do so in a crowded square full of elated and repentant Christian pilgrims, as they’re more than likely to hand it in to the police station. So, 100km of taxi rides later, we were back in Laxe, very relieved, and having a quick dip in the Atlantic before dinner and the start of the walk.

Laxe is a small fishing town and the start of the lighthouse walk which travels all the way around the Costa da Morte to Finisterre. Quite a few restaurants, all of which seemed very keen on local seafood, including pulpo feira, which is a kind of cold cake made of sliced octopus. Tastes a lot better than it sounds. Fortunately we both like seafood, as this was pretty much all we’d be eating for the next week. Started the walk the next morning, from Laxe to Arou. Quite a bit of up and down stuff, up to the top points to lookout to sea; down to the boardwalks and the beaches, with waters that looked fairly lively:

All was well and sunny, until it wasn’t, and when we hit a bit of rain, the walking suddenly got quite a bit harder. No slipping about on the rocks, thankfully, but the rain just kept coming, and managed to make its way inside our coats and boots so that when we finally arrived in Arou, we were fairly bedraggled. Whenever we do one of these walks, we tend to exhaust the conversations about the kids and politics fairly early on, so we’ll play games to keep our spirits up – the game today was alphabetically naming places we’d travelled to together; exclusions for Q, U, V, X and Z, with nominations for place we’d never return to (Sequoia, it’s a long story), and places we’d go back to like a shot (Kathmandu). Did our best to find places to dry boots and coats, then headed into town, trying to dodge the rain, Found the only restaurant in town, where Mrs E decided to indulge me by pretending to like beer (which she did, in a 1:10 mix with Sprite), and be interested in the football, although England’s uninspiring 1:0 win over Serbia really wasn’t a great introduction to the beautiful game.

We were hoping for better weather the next day, but we’d been warned about likely storms, which were confirmed in the morning. The advice was to skip the walking altogether, which, looking at the forecast, we agreed to, so we jumped in the taxi with our bags and headed to Camarinas. Part of both of us wanted to be walking, and the rain held off until about 10am, but after that it absolutely hammered down, so we made the best of things – me knocking out 5,000 words on the history of cigarette marketing, and Mrs E brushing up on her Galician history and language. As I mentioned, we can get by ok in French, but our Spanish is dreadful, and our Galician non-existent. They’re similar languages in many ways, but Galician has many more Xs, which are a bit confusing until you realise that they largely make a ‘sh’ sound, and lots of squiggly lines above the N letters. But the main challenge is in pronunciation. I’m all for rolling my Rs, but Galician takes it to a new level, so that any word beginning with an R starts off like a Formula One car, and there are plenty of other words that seem to involve coughing up about 10ml of mucus at the start of the word for the correct sound. And there’s a certain amount of pride in how fast you can talk as well, so we’re lost in a muddle of hawking and industrial purring and machine gun sentences before we ever get a chance to try to tune in to one word, just one word that we might be able to connect with. One of our sons is in Japan at the moment, where he’s gone to teach English, and assumed he could just wing it speaking Japanese with no prior knowledge. He’s taught himself a few useful phrases, including one that roughly translates as ‘oh really, how interesting’, which allows the conversation to rattle along while his brain shuts down. Incidentally, he also learnt the phrase ‘please, do sit down’, so that he could be polite to old people on buses and trains, before being told that his pronunciation was slightly off, and that what he was saying was ‘please, can you touch me?’. He also made the mistake of clinking glasses with someone in a bar and saying ‘chin chin’, which apparently translates in Japanese as the must depraved thing you can possibly say about a penis. More of this in a short while. Anyway, while writing my stuff (an absorbing project that I expect will have a voluntary readership of less than two people when it reaches a final draft next year), I found myself listening to the Galician equivalent of Smooth FM, which had a variety of show tunes and easy listening pieces on repeat. It was on the third rendition of My Way that I realised just what an appalling song it is. Actually, the third one wasn’t too bad in that respect, as it had a throaty saxophone over a lilting orchestra, but the previous versions were truly dreadful. And it wasn’t the versions themselves (one Tony Bennett soundalike, one slightly bossanova version with a impassioned Spanish tenor). It was the lyrics. And with that song, it’s all about the bloody lyrics. The version we all know was written by Paul Anka, whose pedigree ought to have put him above the tenuous rhymes that make their way onto My Way. It’s almost as if he came up with the title, then scuttled off to the rhyming dictionary and scribbled down the first things he found….highway/byway/shy way, then thought, crikey, I’m on a roll here, I’ll have a go at curtain/certain; mention/exemption; knew/chew; losing/amusing, and then I’ll plug them into a song about a self-entitled twit whose claim to fame appears to be that he’s rattled through a life where his top ten priorities are all about himself. And then, all being well, a whole load of people will line it up without any sense of irony to be played as their funeral anthem, Anyway, that’s what I thought when I was listening to it. And don’t get me started on Magic Moments..

Next day from Caramarinas to Cereixo, reasonably dry, and up and down again, onto tracks that looked as if they’d not been trodden for years, so that we dragged through soaking bracken and gorse to get to the top of some of the passes, then plunged down to beaches that looked like they were in the Seychelles.

Mrs E was very keen for a swim, and, having dramatically misread the map, I advised we’d be able to stop at a beach nearer the end, at which point we headed inland and it started to rain. We’d been walking for seven hours by the time we got to Ceriexo, where we were staying in a B&B out of town . Had a good meal there, with both cooking and entertaining from our genial Galician host, Julio, a man who by rights should have been sponsored by both the Galician tourist board and Grecian 2000. His after dinner presentation, which may well have been in either Spanish or Galician, was about the health benefits of a home distillery, At one point, with all parties being lost on where the conversation was going, we turned to the Galician to English setting on Google Translate. The very next sentence translated as ‘you will have no further fears for the mis-use of a penis’, which we all found a little baffling. But we stuck with the whole presentation and were rewarded by sampling his ‘digestifs’, one of which was fabulous (coffee) and the other one, which brought up memories of an unfortunate time when I tried to siphon petrol out of a mini clubman. Today’s walking game: alphabetic rounds of people we both knew, managed about six rounds of this with exclusions for X and Z, but the game fell into disarray when Mrs E denied ever meeting my last two Y’s.

And so to Muxia, another challenging one with wet footpaths getting much wetter as it tipped it down for the duration – when it wasn’t raining, we always seemed to be in the jungle-y bits of the route, so our feet got wetter and wetter, and on the few bits of tarmac we both made a squelchy sound as we walked. Some lovely beaches, but all a bit wet and windy for swimming, and we had an appointment to keep at the Paradores hotel. This was a bit beyond Muxia, but we’d been drawn to it because it looked like a really lovely place to stop mid-hike. It’s new, huge, very modern, and looks a bit like Tracey Island, cut into the side of the hill, and up a long track from a sandy beach.

And very lovely it was inside too, it was on five floors, which were connected by a cross between a lift and a funicular railway. I think it must also be a place to stay for a pampering sunny weekend as well, the other guests all looked a bit fed up with the weather, and we stood out like sore thumbs with our hiking boots and poles (although we did leave them in the room when we went to the bar). Anyway, we did manage a swim, in the ‘seasonal’ hotel pool, which was lovely, albeit under the disapproving gaze of everyone in the cafeteria, looking on in disbelief as we swam in the cold drizzle. Today’s walking game: name one hundred famous Scottish people: we managed this fairly comfortably, but I was denied both Rod Stewart and Alistair Campbell (on the no accent rule, which Mrs E introduced mid-game), although I did score extra points for BA Robertson, and we had a happy twenty minutes not being able to remember any of his ‘hits’. I’m just writing this up, and Mrs E has gone into a tragic fit, as she’s just remembered that neither of us included Jeanette Krankie.

Another diversion in the morning, as we’d had a warning about a loose and large dog that had bitten a walker a couple of weeks previously. So we hopped in a taxi with a very nice man from Luton, who dropped us off beyond the range of the Alsatian which was, apparently, as big as a pony. We started near the Monte de Buitra, which we walked around first to give us a bit more mileage. It was (of course) wet, and fairly desolate, and reminded both of us of Craggy Island. A couple of mysterious farm buildings, a lighthouse (of course) and we only came across one other road user, also striding purposefully along:

Then south through more rain, up a couple of challenging climbs, and down into Lires, a tiny village which fortunately had a fabulous restaurant where we ate cake when we arrived, dinner much later, and even bought our lunch from them the next morning – hands down the best food that we’d had all week. By now, there was no likelihood of drying out our wet socks or boots, so the socks headed straight for the washing bag, and the boots stayed outside the front door, thereby leaving an unpleasant smell at some distance. The views were amazing on the walk though, we saw hardly any other people this or on any of the previous days, and the footpaths, although marked with green dots, in the most green countryside we’d ever seen, were fairly easy to spot. There were some paths that were described as vertiginous, which were actually ok, and some that weren’t, which were fairly scary. There were definitely places that would have been described as dangerous at home, with sheer drops onto cliffs a hundred metres below, but we were ok sticking to the path, and of course hoping that nobody in their right mind would be walking towards us. Today’s walking game: Musicians as Animals. Mrs E’s winner – Llama del Ray. Mine – Elephants Gerald. Honestly, the miles flew past.

And then, the final leg, from Lires to Finisterre. We were told that we should allow ten hours to do this leg, which was fairly daunting, but in the end it took us just over eight. And probably the hardest walk in terms of climbing (some proper hands over your head stuff) and descending – the drop into Finisterre felt like it was near vertical, and looked like it facing back from the beach (it’s the worn bit in the centre of this this picture):

Finisterre means end of the earth, and it ought to be continental Europe’s most westerly point, given that it’s got the name and everything. But the cape at Touriñán, which we’d walked around the day before,, is further west, as is Cabo da Roca, in Portugal, but, as they say, why let the facts get in the way of a good story? What Finisterre has got, is the most western lighthouse, which pleasantly lit up our hotel room every 30 seconds or so, as we drifted off to sleep that night. Just beyond the lighthouse is a little strip of rock, where pilgrims complete the ‘extra bit’ after they reach Santiago de Compostela. They’re suppose to burn their capes and boots at this point, to formally end their pilgrimage, but apparently that’s now been outlawed – probably just as well, as flaming goretex wouldn’t be a good environmental look. Instead, they have photographs taken, which is better for everyone.

Headed across to the other side of Fisterra for the final night, where we at last managed a swim in the (according to Mrs E) warm Atlantic. Mrs E’s warm is anything over 8 degrees. Mine is above 65, and ideally in a sauna, so we are ill-matched on that front, but she tells me that cold water will be good for my back, and I believe her because she’s a nurse, and because believing her has served me very well for quite a long time now. And so when she says it’ll be a good idea to do one of the full camino pilgrimages next year, I’ll be there like a shot, even if I’m not allowed to burn my cape at the end.