Skip to main content

Caminho Portugues

The Camino is an addiction. Last time we were in Spain we met a bloke who'd walked it 32 times, but he was Spanish and didn't have to pay airfares. We've walked it twice, or three times, depending on how you count, but the call of the Path of Miracles won't quite go away. Of the dozen or so main routes, I've walked all of the C. Frances and C. Primitivo, and part of the C. Norte. I'd like to have a crack at the longest and hardest route of all, La Via De La Plata, but Clemency doesn't like the sound of the long hot slog through the dry heart of Spain. She would like to do a leisurely repeat of the Frances, but we are both a bit wary of how popular it has become. So, we're thinking that the Portuguese Camino might be a good option and April might be a good time.

Most people who walk the Portuguese route start at Porto, about 200 km from Santiago,  There are several possible routes, including a couple beginning on the South Coast but we are looking at starting in Lisbon, which is a 632 km walk. I quite fancy the Coastal path as far as Porto, and one of the interior ones from there on, but that won't need to be decided until we are actually stepping out of the alberge door early on an April morning in Porto, en route to Spain. The Caminho Portugues crosses the Spanish border at (appropriately) Tui, and maybe I'd prefer to go from there to Finisterre or Muxia instead of Santiago de Compostela.
 We don't want to rush this one. The plan would be to fly to Madrid, and spend a few days travelling to Lisbon via Seville. Then walk at a pace slow enough to stop and smell the lavender. And having already acquired a couple of Compostela certificates we feel no great compunction to finish: if it all got a bit much we'd hire a car and drive.

So, there's about 34 weeks to prepare.

  1. Budget. The section from Lisbon to Porto might not have many alberges, so we might need to use B&Bs. I originally thought we'd drive from Madrid to Lisbon, but trains and/or buses will be far cheaper. I'll need to check that out.
  2. Physical. At the moment I walk, on average, about 7,000 footsteps a day. 632 km in 4 weeks is about 23 km, or about 30,000 steps a day. So I've got to bring that average up  until by April  it's nearly at the required number. Some cycling is a good preparation for walking up hills.
  3. Gear. All the major bits and pieces - packs and sleeping bags and so forth are fine. We'll need to replace clothing and boots. I would like to try and track down some Altus ponchos to take instead of Goretex jackets. 
  4. Research. We need to swot up on Portugal, and on the things it would be worth making a detour to see. 
  5. Other things. This is going to be more of a walk than a pilgrimage. Unlike last time, I'll blog about it, and take photos. So I'll need to work out the lightest way to do that - at this stage my phone and  a little folding keyboard seems a reasonable option. 
I'll keep you posted on how it's all going. 
Labels:

Comments

Kay said…
Bom Caminho!
23 July 2018 at 19:07
Elaine Dent said…
Sounds fun and definitely something to look forward to...I write as I lie here in my tent with it raining outside. Hiking buddy and I are starting our 4th and last week for this year if the rain doesn't conquer us. I should have found more time to stay in shape!!! Climbing is harder. Won't make it to the big Whites this year. But even if older and slower, the walking is good for the soul. Met "Kiwi Legs" from your part of the planet. She was definitely a contemplative walker, a person of faith and shared in our morning walking prayer before leaving us in the dust...or mud as the case is here in New England. (She didn't know you, but thought she might have heard of you.) Don't neglect the getting in shape like I have!
23 July 2018 at 19:55
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