Skip to main content

Palas de Rei

The Camino has a way of working things out for you. When we were trying to figure out what to do for the next few days, we met two South Africans, Shirley and Lara. A mother and daughter they had been walking for a few days and Shirley was not able to continue. So it was decided Clemency and Shirley would catch the bus to the next town and Lara and I would walk together. It worked out pretty well. Clemency made it to Portomarin with a minimum of trouble and I walked 36 km through soft forest paths, up a couple of gentle hills and through any number of delightful country villages. For most of the way I had the company of a lovely young woman who shared with me some of the reasons she is walking the Path of Miracles. The sun shone, the route was gentle and the scenery as pleasant as any we had encountered.
Just after sunrise, just out of Samos

About 11.00 am Lara and I passed through Sarria and past the best equipped Camino shop I had ever seen. There was every conceivable type of knapsack and boot and stick raincoat and badges galore to stick on every imaginable part of yourself. I wish I had encountered the shop a year ago, but it was a warning of things to come. Sarria is 111 km from Santiago and it is the place where many people start their Camino. From Sarria onward the track became more and more populated.  Around mid day I passed the sadly vandalised 100 km marker, that is, the point where there are 100 km more to walk to Santiago. It was a milestone for me. 700 down and only this few to go!
 Convent garden, Sarria. We stopped to get our credencials stamped, use the toilet and buy Aquarius. Not necessarily in that order.
 Typical track on this part of the Camino

We all met up again in Portomarin and Clemency and I had the most wonderful pub meal with new friends: a couple of Irish and one Dutch . Today I set out again on my own, leaving Clemency to have another quiet rest day busing to the next destination. At least that was the theory. For Clemency it was an interesting day, with interesting being used in the sense of the old Chinese proverb. The bus didn´t go directly to Palas du Rei but through Lugo, and no one spoke English and....
 The way is regularly punctuated with small country bars where you can buy coffee, food, beer or wine Many have rooms if you don't feel like going any further today.

 Portomarin

I entered the track with many hundred new pilgrims. Ahead and behind as far as I could see they stretched out in an unbroken line. The gear was new and often ill chosen. Physiques looked unweathered and sometimes unsuitable. People moved in large groups so were not inclined to interact. And the whole Camino experience changed. The locals, getting on with their lives while literally thousands of strangers passed by looked through me when I smiled or spoke. The usual conversational openings between pilgrims: "Hola. ¡Bien Camino! Where are you from? Where did you begin? Going far today?" simply did not happen, let alone the invitation to a deeper connection: "Why are you walking the Camino?" The track was flat and dull. There were no churches or monuments. There were few cafes and those that were there were crowded and fuggy.

I struggled with myself and two thoughts recurred. One was "how great a crowd of witnesses..." The other was the parable of the labourers in the vineyard. I found myself in the place of the early employed. How dare these latecomers crowd in on my camino, I who have crossed the Pyrenees and struggled up to O Cebreiro! Who do these people think they are with their fresh, unweathered clothing and their new shoes? Don't they know how pilgrims are expected to behave? I didn't much enjoy my day and things didn't improve when around mid day it started to rain. I walked into Palas du Rei around 2, having covered 26 km largely on my own and with only the briefest of stops for food. 

From Sarria onwards the Camino changes. I would guess that about 60% of those who make this pilgrimage walk only the last 100 km. It is different, and I don't much care for the difference but who am I to judge? All the old truths of the Camino still apply, including the fact that no one walks it by accident. God has called each one of these new thousands there for a reason, whether they quite realise it or not. Each one is going to be profoundly challenged and changed by the experience of this walk even if it is only going to be for a few days.
 Horreos, food storage places similar to pataka. They are everywhere in Galicia.
A busy day on the Camino Santiago
Clemency will walk the last part of the track into Santiago. How much of the last part we don't yet know. For me, I am longing now to finish. There is only about 74 km to go, or 3 easy days (or two heavy days) walking left. My legs hurt and my clothes could do with a decent wash but we will dine soon with the same interesting people from last might and the next town beckons. ¡Ultreya!
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
'.... corramos [o andamos] con perseverencia la carrera que tenemos por delante. Fijemos la mirada en Jesus, el iniciador y perfeccionador de nuestra fe ....'

Enjoying your posts! Every blessing on you both.

Brian
3 October 2012 at 09:54
Wynston said…
May you both find the last stages of the walk recuperative for both body and soul.
Every blessing.
Wynston
3 October 2012 at 21:00
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
10 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more