Traveling with Joe

Because of the staggering numbers of people that are walking parts of the Camino each year (over 300,000 and growing), there are an equal number of unique experiences to be had.  Many people have felt inspired to write, blog, make movies, speak about, and re-live their Camino experience.  Google “Camino de Santiago” and get 74 million hits (yes, Seventy Four Million hits).

Ironically, I had never heard about the Trek until about 1 month before I walked it the first time.  Now I’ve done it twice and while I am by no means an expert, there were parts of this adventure that repeated themselves and then there were the new experiences; not necessarily every hour of every day but enough to keep one from getting bored.  The terrain may remain the same but the seasons, the weather, the people and so much more, are constantly changing. Here are pics from the first 3 days of the Spring Camino.

March 16, 2015

March 17, 2015

March 18, 2105

Now that I have seen people much older than myself (I’m 58) walk the entire Camino without a hitch I believe that if you train properly and do your homework with your gear then anybody that is not substantially disabled can make this trip.  If you go with a group like we did (www.spanishsteps.com) then you always have the alternative of hopping in the van.  While most people seldom took that option, it is comforting to know that it is there.

So why would you (and should you) do something like this?

Notice I said “something like this” and didn’t just categorically endorse walking the Camino.  How many people and especially Americans, go on a 5 week trip of any kind?  The first time you leave the comforts of home for that long, and I have done that many, many times in my life, it can be a cold cruel slap in the face because we are so spoiled.  We can drink our water, there are always working toilets, most of us have air conditioning and for me anyway, giving up my King Size bed with 600 thread count sheets and my down pillows is one of the hardest parts.  I have an excuse; I’ve shredded my spine, but leaving the “creature comforts” requires discipline.  In fact, that is the hardest part of doing anything like a 34 day trek. Discipline.

25 years ago I rode a bicycle across the United States.  That was a 7 week trip, averaging 80 miles/day with only a few rest days along the way.  I left home at 195 pounds and returned 165; skeletal.  But of all the experiences I have had in my life, the TransAmerica taught me with great surprise on my part, that the hardest part is not the physical, it is the mental.

Getting up at 4am day after day, riding 12 to 14 hours regardless of the temperature, the rain, the heat, the winds, how you felt, nothing mattered except getting to our destination for that day and it was HARD.  The Camino, once you get your legs, is probably much easier if for no there reason, it is not that long.  Add 2 more weeks to a 34 day trip and see how much it changes and not necessarily for the better.  But it is not that long and you can always walk it in segments.  Once you cross over the mountains into Galicia I believe you enter some of the most beautiful terrain on earth.  If you don’t want to walk for weeks then walk for one week from Sarria to Santiago.  A lot of people do that and it will give you larges bits of what you would have gotten had you done the entire walk.

So, yank your ass out of your cocoon, throw away almost everything that is familiar to you, sleep on crappy beds and eat food that does not agree with your lifelong diet, get up early and regardless of what’s going on outside walk several hours to your predetermined destination. That’s the hard part of the Camino.  But when I think back to the now 10 weeks I have spent on that trail doing it twice, that is not what comes to mind.  Instead, the act of reminiscing brings back a kaleidoscope of experiences, sights, sounds, smells, breathtaking panoramas, laughter, friends you only know for a few days then never see again, other friends you meet and see for the entire trek, and a physical transformation that lasts long after you get home.  Both times my resting hear rate has plummeted because of the fresh air and exercise; lots of exercise.  You cannot put a price on the rewards you get from an experience like this.

There is also a post-Camino experience that is bitter-sweet but is worth it.

The trip ends so suddenly.  One day you are seemingly in the middle of nowhere and the next morning you are walking into the plaza in front of the Cathedral in Santiago and there is the stone with the Scallop Shell carved into it and thats it; you’re finished.  If you aren’t ready for it, if you don’t plan for it, most of the people you have been sharing all or parts of this amazing experience are suddenly ripped away from you.  I’ve noticed that most people just don’t think about the fact that we aren’t going back out the next day.  Sometimes you run into someone you know at the Pilgrim’s Mass that afternoon, perhaps you will see someone walking around town, but most people leave Santiago fairly quickly and if you don’t have an email address or a phone number then just as quickly as those relationships started, usually with a “Buen Camino”, they are over. Adios.

I miss my fellow Pilgrims.  Even people that I never really got to know very well; we saw each other day after day.  The people that by the 3rd or 4th time you crossed paths, no matter how anti-social you might have felt, eventually you would smile at each other.  After that the smile was the greeting, both hello and good bye.

Others, for reasons that are hard to put your finger on, became much more than just passing strangers.  You not only saw them again and again, you started sharing meals together, sharing stories together, and it genuinely feelt like friendship until you realize that you don’t even know their last name.  She was just “Norah from Boston” or “Charlotte from Vancouver” (those are two real names of Pilgrims I met and hung out with) and the odds of us ever crossing paths again are immeasurably small  Sadly small.  I’m not sure I even had a chance to say GoodBye.

But instead of making that a negative experience, it just shows that we are intrinsically social animals.  Maybe not all of us to the same degree, but bump into enough fellow Pilgrims and eventually you are going to strike up a conversation.  I have actually heard of people that have met their spouses on the Camino.  For me,  romance in sweaty gross clothes or romance during extreme fatigue, was not on the menu and I have a partner at home.  But a friendly conversation over lunch.  Laughs and wine over dinner.  Shared experiences, both good and bad, spread out over weeks, and something is created there that will stick with you forever.  I think it validates the basic goodness of people.

When one person trips and falls on the Camino 10 people ask if they can help.  Fall on the side of the road and every car that goes by will stop and ask if you need help.  Walk too far off the trail and somebody, be it a farmer on a tractor or a person in a passing car, will tell you that you are lost. That I know from personal experience because on more than one occasion I got so caught up in either the scenery (at least twice) an animal (at least twice) or you just miss a sign and you don’t know why (at least twice).  The Camino is probably safer than Disneyland and a whole lot friendlier.

There is a blogger that I find loathsomely arrogant.  His blog has “Camino de Santiago” mentioned in it at least 500 times to draw traffic to his garishly advertised site.  He claims to have walked it (both directions) in 24 days.  Frankly I think he’s completely full of shit and, if he did do it in that short a time then he completely missed the point of this kind of experience.

Anyway, I digress.  This person does get a lot of hits on his blog because he’s clever and, unfortunately not because he’s an interesting writer, and his page about the Camino is completely psychotic.  It used to be worse but I called him on some of his misstatements so he went through and re-wrote it.  Now he alternately bad mouths the trek then praises it and he even mentions it in a Ted Talk that he did.  He has an enormous page on his blog all about why you should use umbrellas when you hike, most of his reasons are, well, can I use the word “stupid”, and then, HUGE coincidence, he has advertising videos at the end of this umbrella diatribe.    Anyway, because he has walked – a lot – somebody thought he might be interesting.  He wasn’t.  But, again, I digress.  

He criticizes the Camino for some of the very reasons that make it so unique.  His viewpoint is that everybody should do a 2,500km trail across absolute wilderness and anyone that walks 800km on a mixture of roads, streets, trails and footpaths, has no merit.  Again, this guy has walked a lot.  But he is a crappy writer, his photos are, for the most part, even worse, and now it appears that his glory days are over, he’s wishing he had used his degree from Harvard, so he pimps out hiking gear (and a lot more) on his rubbish blog.  Oh, and his first name is Francis.  I’m sorry, that’s a gay-ass name and I can say that because I am GAY.

What my nemesis seems to hate is that the  Camino is accessible.  There are restaurants and hostels and bars (with bathrooms and food), and, yes, not every kilometer of the Camino is absolute wilderness but enough of it is to make that part of the experience.  I found walking through the ancient towns and villages to be fascinating.  I found meeting other people to be enriching, not a burden.  I found 34 days to walk the Camino one direction to be almost perfect.  Any longer and it would get exponentially harder, but much shorter and you would miss so much detail.

I literally stopped to smell the wildflowers.  I lost count of how many animals I knelt down to pet and talk to.  I honestly got lost twice while communing with dogs.  The first time I thought she was escorting me out of town.  In fact, she just walked with me to the edge of the village, went poo, then turned back.  I should have realized my mistake but I generally walked at least a mile before I wondered about the lack of Camino signs.

The second time I came across a black lab and a white lab out in some of the most remote parts of the trail.  They obviously belonged to a nearby farmer, were absolutely loving and I got mesmerized because we have a black lab at home and we used to have a white lab (her sister) until she passed.  I got so caught up in their similarities to our dogs that, again, I walked right past a subtle turn in the trail and didn’t stop until a farmer turned me around.

But, for me anyway, and call me a romantic or call me pedantic, it is the immeasurably complex mixture of the minute and the macro absolutely perfectly randomized, from the wildflowers to the seemingly endless panoramas, that I brought home with me.  Did they get boring? Absolutely not!.  When something is so beautiful, whether it is a field of wildflowers blooming in the sunlight in the most improbable colors, or the view you get when you crest a ridge and your body just automatically stops walking so you can pivot your head around and take it all in, you just don’t get that where I live and even if you did, it would be a mere snapshot compared to what you are exposed to after 5 weeks of walking.

I’ve learned from my travels that long trips, done properly, are enriching experiences.  Short trips, the kind that the vast majority of people take, can be fun, they can be relaxing, they can be lots of things, but there is nothing like immersing yourself in something so completely different from your usual paradigm that you are constantly forced to learn and adapt.  

Walk the Camino, move to a foreign City (I’ve lived in a few), travel around the world, or even just learn a foreign language at any age; broaden your mind and you will discover that even in this CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera world of poverty and violence and evil, that the vast majority of what you find once you slam your own front door behind you, is good and kind and you will be a better person for it.

May 6, 2015

Joe Jeter

The following are just some of the hundreds of Camino photos I took.  Brilliant colored flowers, breathtaking panoramas, ancient castles and monasteries and cathedrals, and incredibly varied, stimulating, sometimes challenging, but always rewarding sights along this trail.  – Buen Camino.