Saturday, May 19, 2012
Arzua to Santiago de Compostela

I am booked in a tourismo rural in Arcos O Pino, 18 kilometers away from Arqua, for Friday night. Originally, I thought that I would arrive in Santiago on Sunday,but I change my plan: I will skip Arcos o Pino and go straight on to Santiago, 38 kilometers away. My experience has been that II arrive too early to prepare to go to bed and I do not like my rooms or the bar scene, or the lack of WiFi. So I call the Altair to try to book for Saturday night as well as Sunday. Fortunately, they can accommodate me. I will be motivated to walk just knowing that at the journey's end I will be lying in a lovely bed in a lovely room there.

I arrange to have my knapsack sent on to Santiago for 5 Euros and set out at 7:45 a.m.. I can see one other walker ahead of me, but we never meet. I pass a pasture of sheep, and again, crowing cocks, lowering cows. At one point I pass a Vedado de Caza, a hunting preserve: nearby is a kennel with five beagles, all of which start crying in their particular way as I pass by. An unkenneled little dog tries to chase me off the border of the property.

Tony and Katharina, whom I met in the Hotel Suiza, where I spent the night in Arqua. Tony is a native New Zealander, but served in British Special Forces. He was in Kosovo for several years, working on post-conflict reconstruction, a subject he now gives lectures about. He is, I would guess, in his late sixties or early seventies, short, with curling blond hair, ruddy, with bright blue eyes.

Katharina is a solidly built young woman who used to work with Tony. She now lives in Stockholm, and decided to join Tony (who has walked the Camino from Saint Jean Pied-de-Port) in Sarria. I had drinks and dinner with them, along with Sharon, Jason and Vicky, three Irish from Cork, classmates in a program to train high school counselors.

Tony is a soldier: he walked for seventeen days in driving rain for the first part of the Camino, the first three through snow up to his knees.

"It was miserable," but I found a kind of pleasure in knowing the skills I had learned but hadn't used for twenty years were still there.

The day before readhing Arzua, Katharina and Tony walked forty kilometers. Unfortunately, Katharina's feet are the worse for the experience. She was quiet during dinner, exhausted and aching. When I saw her the next day, she was better.

"As long as I keep walking, I am OK." she said wearily.

So not every experience on the Camino is a pleasant amble. Pilgrims have unhappy experiences, too, like that of Vincent, whom I met in Santiago before I set out.

Ruddy, short, still blonde at sixty-five, he had been robbed of his wallet while travelling to Saint Jean Pied de Port from Valencia, where he lives. I met him because I asked for directions in Santiago.

"My life is a disaster: my wife left me --she is a Jehovah's Witness, and they do not like Roman Catholics."

"Do you have any children?"


"Three daughters --one lives in Normandy."

"That's a nice place. Couldn't she help you?"

"My wife turned them all against me--"

"But why would you not do the Camino again?"

"Because I don't have the money! I have no job-- I tell you, my life is a disaster. The Camino I just completed --and I have done them all--- the Camino Primitivo is the most beautiful-- but this is my last Camino. I'm tired."

I wished Vincent well and said I would pray for him.

--"And I will pray for you. You wait and see, you will meet many lovely people on the Camino."

So not every experience of the Camino is a happy one. Tony spoke of a woman who disappeared a few days after setting off from Saint Jean Pied de Port. Whether she was found he didn't know.

Near the Monte do Gozo, the mountain 5 kilometers from Santiago from which the towers of Santiago can be seen, marking the final stage of the pilgrimage, there is a cross with a sign.

Remember and pray for Myra Holland, who died peacefully in her sleep, aged 52 years, in Santiago, after completing her second pilgrimage.

***

A few kilometers from Monte do Gozo I stop at a cafe-bar and start a conversation with two women who I overheard saying were going to Monte Do Gozo today. I thought I might walk with them, if they didn't mind.

Gallegas, nurses working at the cancer hospital in La Coruna to the north, they welcome me gladly. They are named Begonia and Beatriz. They ask me where I learned to speak Spanish and I explain my family's roots in Galicia. Begonia asks me where my family hails from and I tell her. When I mention that my mother spent her childhood at her grandparents' home in Mino, she tells me that her husband's family has a house in the section of Mino called Sombreo. This is quite funny, because Sombreo, a hamlet of nine houses within a village, is where my maternal great grandparents' house stands, and is where my first cousin lives.

As we reach the Monte do Gozo, we plan to separate, as Begonia and Beatriz want to walk in to Santiago together: they went to school there and are work colleagues. They ask someone to take a picture of three of us together at the giant monument commemorating Pope John Paul II's visit to the Monte do Gozo, and the pictures taken, I am off, five kilometers from the Cathedral.

Entering Santiago, I run into two Irish women who started walking on Monday, Elizabeth Finch and Adrienne Cooper. Elizabeth lives in Dublin and Adrienne grew up in Dublin, but lives in Toronto. I explain that I am going to Dublin on May 31 and will stay there eleven days, visiting friends. Adrienne asks where my friends live and I say "Ranelagh", a neighborhood north of Saint Stephen's Green in central Dublin.

What are your friends' names? she asks.

Grainne and Niamh Martin, there mother is Clare, their father was Gus--

The two women stop dead in their tracks.


I knew it! says Adrienne, and Elizabeth nods in agreement.

Adrienne went to grammar school and high school with Grainne. Indeed Grainne visited her in Toronto about a year ago.

We ask for directions of an elderly couple who cross our path. Adrienne and Elizabeth are feeling the strain of walking and would love to get to the Cathedral, and soon after, their hotel as soon as possible. The couple discuss two says of getting to the Praza do Obradoiro where the Cathedral stands, and ultimately advise us to take a small street across the way that climbs. We do so, then ask for directions again, going to the right and into the Plaza de Cervantes. I know where I am now, and start walking towards the Cathedral, but the way is blocked by a mountain bike race.

The three of us wind our way around the barriers, as cyclists whiz by, jumping obstacles to cheers and applause from the crowd. When we reach the plaza there is a giant stage set up and loud music blaring. We have to walk behind the stage to get to the Cathedral, inching past bicycle race spectators all the way.

This isn't how I thought I would be entering Santiago after this long week's walk, wails Adrienne.

Don't worry, I say, once you are in the Cathedral you will forget all of this.

I take them in through the entrance at Praza das Praterias and once inside the sacred space the hurly-burly of the world vanishes. The cathedral is standing room only for a Mass said in the dialect: today is the celebration of the ascension of Saint James the Greater, Santiago Apostol into heaven. I show Adrienne and Eizabeth to their hotel --the Hostal de los Reyes Catolicos, the finest parador in Spain, perpendicular to the Cathedral. They had no idea it would be so grand, and I am happy that they will now be able to rest and feel the satisfaction of having completed their pilgrimate, which was organized by the two women in honor of Elizabeth's fiftieth birthday on Monday. We exchange e-mail addresses, I promise to let Grainne know I saw Adrienne, and leave them.

I attend both the 7:00 p.m. Mass in the Chapel of the Virgin of the Pillar, as well as the 7:30 p.m. Mass at the main altar. I need to do so because after participating in the first Mass I reach the communion rail last, only to find the priest has just given the last sacrament. A bit upset at thinking I have ended my pilgrimage this way, I stop the priest --the same priest to whom I confessed before I set out-- and ask what to do.

Please forgive me, I didn't know I did not have enough hosts. You can go to the Mass at 7:30 p.m. which is just starting and take Communion there.

I sit through the Mass a bit tired, but I am glad to have the sacrament at last.

***

When I walked with Begonia and Beatriz we talked a little about Spain's financial crisis. Beatriz says little, but Begonia is forthcoming:

"No, I don't think people will turn violent. People know that they have been living beyond their means for years, the government has been doing so as well. So now it's time to pull the belt in."

She has visited Hawaii, Arizona, New York City, and is struck by Americans' respect for the law.

"In Spain there is not a lot of respect for law. If there's a law, the Spaniard tries to find a way around it. Take the speed limits. Here everyone drives as much above the speed limit as possible, so you are always reacting to those drivers who race by. When I was in the United States, I was struck by how, generally, people stay within the speed limit."

***

My last word about the Camino pertains to the purveyors of accommodations and food along the way.

There is something Chaucerian about the whole experience of the Camino --the people you meet along the way and the tales they tell, the innkeepers, in particular. That the quality of the accomodations varies is obvious from these pages --the Hotel Suiza stands out because although it was not expensive it had a standard of accomodation and food that stood out.

Most cafe-bars though, were keen that pilgrims not use the bathrooms without paying for the privilege. Jessica, the newly-minted doctor remembered how the face of a woman at one switched from forbidding to ingratiating when Jessica first asked about the bathroom, then said that she planned to have lunch.

Along the road there are also local people who do a bit of business from the Camino: a young woman asked me whether I wanted a gourd with the cross of Santiago painted on it.

"Are you selling them?"

"Of course!" --Meaning she was not giving them away.

Passing by a house on the Camino between Palas de Rei and Arzua an elderly woman called out to ask me "Have you ever tried pulpo?" Yes, I had tried octopus, indeed I am the daughter of Galicians, I said. She changed her tune immediately, but I had the feeling that had I said "No", she would have tried to sell me some out of her kitchen. Galicians are known for shrewdness with money.