God (damn it)

There are many reasons why people do the Camino. The most common reason actually is “I don’t really know, I wanted to try” or “I’ve done the Camino several times and I still don’t know”. People usually expect big revelations about how to improve their lives, to learn something profound about themselves.

Some people pray to God to show them the way, some people swear to God to file a complaint.

A legend says that if pilgrims manage to climb a mountain called Alto de perdón, all their sins will be forgiven. We started climbing it with a great confidence that this particular mountain could not be worse than crossing the Pyrenees. Our calves grew enormously in a week. If you ever see a movie or a book describing Camino as a spiritual journey, don’t get so easily motivated. The pain will always confront your will. After one week of walking you think that you’re ready for the pain. Let’s see, Alto de perdón is an important painful checkpoint on the Camino.

The first 10 km of the day were flat with mountains on the horizon. We spend hours guessing which one was on our route.

Camino rule #125: if there is a mountain in front of you, you will have to climb it.

In the end, the climb was not so bad. The weather was mocking pilgrims with ponchos. It started raining, they put the ponchos on, the rain stopped. It was raining for a while and the intense wind gusts made the ponchos dance. Thank God that we bought Gore-Tex rain jackets. The top of Alto de perdón offered a spectacular view. I don’t mean only the landscape – have you tried looking up from the base of a wind turbine? This monument to a modern civilization stands next to a metal art piece showing pilgrims in the last 1000 years.

Going down from the mountain was really testing any pilgrim’s faith in God and himself. All his sins were forgiven on the way up, but it was so easy to make new ones on the way down. Especially by taking the God’s name in vain. A steep terrain was filled with large round river rocks. The rocks rolled down, trapped our feet and simply destroyed our balance. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could walk down this terrain without an extra leg or two – the hiking poles. Until this moment many pilgrims didn’t seem to need them. Some pilgrims had heavy wooden sticks, like one Spanish guy who we nicknamed Jesus. The Camino gossip reached us later about his sad fate. When he was crossing a bridge, he stopped to enjoy a picturesque view of a town and his stick fell into a river by accident. Maybe the stick really believed that it could walk on water instead.

A Spanish guy in his fifties was passing us on the way down. We easily bonded over shared pain of the day. His name was Antonio and he used to be a part of the Spanish foreign legion. 4 years ago he had a parachute accident which left him with almost all bones in his body broken. He miraculously recovered and he walks the Camino every year to thank God that he’s still alive. Then we met the rest of his walking crew – Eli and Ruben. Eli is a Catalan 37-year-old filmmaker which decided to walk a part of the Camino even though she’s 4 months pregnant. Ruben is a funny 32-year-old guy from Galicia. We soon realized that this was going to be OUR walking crew.

Meeting our crew was Camino experience at its finest – showing that three completely different people from three different regions of Spain actually have a lot in common. Speaking Spanish all the time was a pretty difficult exercise for me, I rather just listened. I felt good in their company and we all shared love for good Spanish food.

After the terrorizing descent we all ended up drinking beer in the first available albergue. We met another German-speaking crew already drinking their second or third beers. They were waiting for a friend Uwe. Once he came, he was greeted with a loud applause and a beer. This limping guy took off his shoes and showed us the worst blisters that I’ve seen in my life. He thought that having a double layer of socks would protect the open blisters. We also found out that the brutal snorer from Pamplona albergue was our crew member Antonio! He often mentions this condition in the albergues and gets a private room for the price of a bunk bed. What Antonio loves the most is teaching pilgrims his tips and tricks. Since many people in the group agreed that his snoring closely resembles a dinosaur, he was named “ronco-saurus (snore-saurus)”. Uwe was the group’s “ampolla-saurus (blister-saurus)” and a cheerful Austrian girl Anna named herself “dirndl-saurus”. Surprise, they wear dirndls in Austria too! Stella, the singing Italian, made it to the pub as well. She had been facing plantar fasciitis for a week and this seemed to be the end of her Camino.

Me and Juan were perfectly satisfied with our trail running shoes. We had zero blisters. Despite that, every day we were reminded the

Camino rule #1: there will always be physical pain.

The descent from the mountain irritated my shin muscles so much, that I was crying. The destination seemed really far ahead. I decided to stop in the first hotel or albergue on the way, no matter the cost. It turned out to be a beautiful old house overlooking the river. I begged Juan to make a thick layer of Tiger balm on my shins. Unfortunately, a few minutes later, we surrounded ourselves by a menthol hell. God damn it!