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It's possible to walk any of the many routes of the Camino Santiago by following a simple sign.  Siempre sigue las flechas amarillas - always follow the yellow arrows. They're there wherever and whenever you need them: painted unobtrusively on the back of a street sign or on a rock or gutter; emblazoned on the side of a building; handwritten by a member of the local Camino Committee, or expensively produced by the provincial junta. By following the yellow arrows it's possible to walk the breadth (and, indeed, the length) of Spain without GPS or map or guidebook.  Over the course of the Camino they came to symbolise for me, the presence of the Holy Spirit: usually unseen unless you pause and take the time to look; always there when you need them most; a faithful guide in unexpected places leading inexorably to the holy destination. They are like the myriad little promptings and leadings and coincidences and "chance" encounters, which anyone on a Christian pat...

El Camino de Santiago isn't one route but a network of routes stretching across every part of Europe. When the paths converge in Spain they make their way to Santiago de Compostela in a variety of ways: I have walked all of the Camino Frances, all of the Camino Primitivo and part of The Camino del Norte. As well, I have driven parts of the Camino Ingles and the Camino Portugues. All of the routes are well maintained, clearly marked and have an infrastructure for pilgrimage that will sustain pilgrims on a daily basis: there are pilgrim hostels or other accommodation options at regular intervals, fountains providing drinkable water, shops and cafes and bars. All have a plentiful supply of interesting things to see and do and on each of the routes there are fellow travellers who will provide congenial company. No matter which route is chosen, the experience of pilgrimage will be constant: you will walk a long way and find yourself profoundly changed by the daily encounter with a...

It was my call and I decided that whatever happens next we do together. None of this one of us bussing while the other one walks lark. We walked into Santiago. Embraced the apostle. Prayed before his relics. Went to a pilgrim's mass. We queued at the Pilgrims Office and got our Compostela certificates. And then made a decision about Finisterre. There was 85 km still to walk, Clemency's ankle wasn't great and the forecast was for 3 days of rain. So we hired a car. And I use the term "car" in its broadest sense. I thought I was renting a Fiat 500 but what I got was a Smart Fortwo which is actually half a car; a whole car cut in half just behind the front seats and fitted with half an engine. It's ugly. It's noisy. It's slow. With its tiny wheelbase it handles bizarrely. There is nowhere to put anything  But it's surprisingly comfy and oddly endearing and we've put a fair few km on it. The first day we drove it to Portugal. Then A Coruna (Oh ...

So here we are in the Hospideria; a sort of upmarket pension built into the old seminary, just across the square from the great cathedral of St. James in Santiago de Compostela. We've made it. Both of us. I'm writing this on my phone. Don't expect technical accuracy. A lifetime ago, on July 14 we walked from Irun on the first day of our intended journey along the Camino del Norte. Of the approximately 800 or so fellow pilgrims setting out on the Camino Santiago on the same day, 700 would have been starting somewhere on the Camino Frances and the rest of us were scattered over the other dozen or so routes. About 30 started the day on the Norte. We started early on that first day with the temperatures rising from the early 20s to the mid 30s by the early afternoon. After a gentle start, the path climbed and dipped alarmingly. I sweated. I swore. I rued my lack of preparation. We climbed through a forest and down through a fishing village of simply ridiculous quaint...

So I fill my pack. The buckles snap shut with a familiar click. The textures of clothing and folding metal; the rounded shape of the top pocket; the light press of the straps on my shoulders ; the weight of it; they are all so known and so redolent with the feel of senda under my shoes and the heat of the Spanish sun on my back. I am longing to be there, where each step is a simultaneous welcome and farewell. To hear a dozen different languages everyday and have my English met with uncomprehending stares.  Where everything I encounter will be seen for the first and for the last time. Where I am surrounded with antiquities and walking with familiar strangers. This time I wish to enter as fully as I can into the path. I have a deep sense of call to this journey. I don't know what it is going to mean but I know that it is something about endings and that will be significant.  So I don't intend to blog or tweet or facebook. It was difficult deciding whether or not to take a...

This morning I assembled the gear I will be taking with me on the Camino del Norte in just under 2 weeks time. My gear list is: 1 Osprey Talon 44 pack, with hydration bladder, pack liner and pack cover 1 pair Salomon Cosmic boots. 1 pair Teva sandals 3 pair socks 2 pairs lightweight hiking pants with zip off legs. 3 T shirts (1x merino, 2x polypropylene) 3 pairs underpants (polypropylene) 1 lightweight merino pullover 2 lightweight hiking shirts Waterproof jacket (lightweight Marmot  Goretex ) Waterproof overtrousers 1 season sleeping bag (packs down REALLY small) Oilskin hat 2 neck scarves Large enamel mug Folding cutlery set Headlamp Clothespegs Lightweight hiking towel Toiletries Cell phone and charger Waterproof, shockproof camera and charger Small notebook and pen 1 copy of Perazzoli and Whitson's The Northern Caminos Various documents Small medical kit to treat blisters, headaches and other ailments I might be prone to. I also need a knife...

Immediately after the apostle James, the brother of John, was killed, his disciples placed his body in a stone boat that had no oars and no sail and no crew. Guided by Angels the vessel traveled to Tarshish,  that is, to the end of the world. There, in the place we would now name the North Western coast of Spain, the miraculous craft was met by two disciples who took the body and buried it. The resting place of the great apostle was forgotten until, in 813, a monk named Playo had a dream in which a star fell to earth and landed in  a certain field. When Playo went to the field he had dreamt of and dug there, he found the remains of the apostle. The timing was perfect. The Moorish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula was almost complete, but the discovery of these important relics emboldened the Asturian Christians. In a battle at Clavijo, which took place soon afterwards, James himself, mounted on a white horse, appeared before the Christians and led them to a glorious victory...

In exactly five weeks time we will be in Barcelona. The hotel is booked, though bookings for the train for the journey to Irun won't open for a week of two yet. Five weeks tomorrow we'll be on that train heading North to the coastal route of the Camino Santiago. It'll be hot but I hope not too crowded, at least until we join up with the Camino Frances at Arzua, which is about 40 km from Santiago. We should be doing that about 4 or 5 weeks after we start. Sometime in the next week or two we'll need to go through our Camino gear and see what needs replacing. After walking the Path of Miracles we'll be doing a few other things, including a pilgrimage to Auschwitz. I've looked at the best ways of getting to Krakow and we're trying to figure out how to fit all we hope to do into the time available. In the next day or two we'll have a schedule, will have decided between train and EasyJet for getting about in Europe, and will have made the necessary commun...

Early morning in Timaru while waiting for the hospital to be ready for me to visit Clemency.  Nikon D7100 set to Sunset Scene mode; 18-200 Nikkor VR zoom @ 95mm. f5.6 1/125 @ iso 250  A package arrived for me this week. It was a pair of Salomon Cosmic 4D 2 GTX walking boots. They are the shoes I will wear when Clemency and I walk El Camino Santiago del Norte in about 6 weeks time. A pair of boots like this will last about 1000 km on hard surfaces. My current ones were bought halfway through last year's Hikoi and while they are still in pretty good nick (my guess, about 250 km of wear left in 'em) they won't carry me the almost 900 km from Irun on the French border to Finisterre on the Atlantic coast. Just to make sure they were OK, I wore them for a stroll around the block, about 6.5 km, and put them back in the box. What with one thing and another, I don't feel nearly ready, this time around. Clemency has been assured her sternum should mend in time, and she...

I didn't take a lot of photos on the Camino; as often as not, taking snaps just didn't seem appropriate, but some of the ones I did take I am now putting into my Camino posts. Actually, the pictures are a mix of mine and Clemency's. For those interested in that sort of thing, the camera I used was a Nikon Coolpix P7100 . It is an excellent camera, though very prone to water damage. Clemency began the trip using a tiny Samsung point 'n' shoot, but after a very short while put it in the bottom of her pack and used her cellphone, an HTC One V . Her results were pretty impressive. You can check our photos out by looking at the older posts, below. I hope to finish posting pictures in the next few days. And in the meantime, here are a few others: A view from the city wall, Astorga Complicated overbridge specifically for the Camino, just before Astorga local bodies take the Camino and its infrastructure and also care of pilgrims very seriously. It is, after a...

We had an easier than expected flight back. Clemency sat in a wheelchair which meant we went straight to the front of the queue when boarding or going through customs, and there was always some pleasant person who knew where they were going to push her around the miles of airport corridors. We arrived home late on Thursday afternoon, and on Sunday had a pretty full day. In the morning we went to Oamaru for the 150th anniversary of St. Luke's parish, and in the evening to the cathedral so that I could dedicate the wonderful stained glass window donated to the cathedral and to the city by the Cullington family. The window is a truly magnificent piece, crafted by local artist Peter MacKenzie from Stella Cullington's ideas. Kiri Te Kanawa was the model for St. Cecilia who frames the right hand side of the window and modesty forbids me from telling you who was the model for St. Paul who stands on the left. Apart from rushing around the countryside and blessing windows and so fo...

The trick to seeing Santiago Cathedral is to get there early. It opens at 7.00 am every morning, though it is the back doors that are open, not the big front ones. We got there around 8.15 and basically spent the morning there. The first thing for me to do was to visit the crypt and pray before the bones of St. James. I´m not entirely sure why, as readers of previous posts will know, but somehow, for me the Camino was not complete until I had done this. There in a small cellar, down a flight of steps was a silver casket containing James´ mortal remains. A young woman prayed before them and then pushed several copies of her CV through the grill to lie before the coffin. Unemployment is high in Spain, and I guess both her faith and her intention were obvious, and I found the sight intensely moving. I knelt there and remembered several things. A parish priest who, at the end of his pilgrims blessing had asked us to pray for his parish when we got to Santiago. Then a farmer tending ...

   Track on the last day I spy with my little eye, something beginning with... Waiting on the Cathedral steps... encountering angels... The final walk into Santiago was, in many ways anticlimactic. From Arca I walked in the dark along the soft earth of a path through an oak forest and began a gentle climb. By the time the sun rose the towns were becoming frequent and had taken on a particular character, that of subsidiary settlements to a large city. Around 11.00 I passed the Santiago city limits but still had 11 km to go before I hit the big smoke. Soon it was kilometre after kilometre of senda path following a straight two lane tarmac road, then an amazingly ugly sculpture on the top of Mt. Gozo, then the suburbs. I crossed motorways, walked past and through shopping centres, waited at pedestrian crossings, dodged cars on roundabouts. And without much warning, after an hour or so of suburban trudging there were the towers of the cathedral looming o...

A few people asked me before I left New Zealand how I intended to continue my spiritual practice while walking. The answer which I have arrived at over these past couple of weeks is that the Camino IS my spiritual practice. I go to mass but don´t take the sacrament. I pray daily and when I can manage, use the Jesus Prayer as I walk, but these are secondary. I repeat: the Camino IS my practice. Now I suppose I have to explain what I mean by that, and I am writing this after four hour´s walk through some very beautiful Spanish countryside and after a Spanish beer. Spain serves the largest beers in the world: ¿ will that be a bucket or a rather unmanly half bucket sir ? and today´s was the coldest in the world, I kid you not; the foam froze to the side of the glass between the bar and my table. A day or two ago I became very annoyed at some English graffiti. An adolescent hand had written on a wall, "Go home tourism "pilgrims" ". A crude picture pointed out that t...

Yesterday wasn´t a great day. Clemency felt so much better that she decided to walk on, and even to carry a pack. So, we set out early from Palas du Rei and walked slowly out of town intending to stop at the first cafe for breakfast. The trouble was, we moved just a little bit too slowly and by the time we got the requisite 2 km down the road the cafe was overwhelmed by pilgrims and had put out the Sorry Full signs. So we walked on to the next one, which didn´t turn up until around 11:00. All our carefully worked out rules of hydration and nourishment were torpedoed and we paid for it. Clemency, with an amazing show of courage, walked for about 10 km before she had to sit down on a farmer´s stone wall at about 11.30 and ask a passing Spaniard to phone her a taxi. The taxi indicated it would be there at mid day, and we decided she would take the packs in back seat comfort to the next town, Melide, while I walked on. Clemency was in considerable discomfort, but I was not far behind ...

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 o...

  Fence, Samos  Samos Monastery When we arrived at the monastery of Samos we took the 3  euro tour, which was money well spent. A young woman showed us around the five storied cloister and the huge chapel with its statuary and relics and vast spaces. At the end a little monk in his Benedictine habit admired my staff, joking that it looked like a bishop´s crozier. I then showed him a photo of myself in the full rig, looking very episcopal indeed. "Oh", he said in Spanish, "you are a bishop! And you", he said, turning to Clemency, without the slightest hint of embarrassment, "you are the bishop´s amiga?" His reading of the situation was plain: some foreign bishop touring the world with his floozie. I responded quickly " ¡Oh no no no! Yo soy protestante! Esta es mi esposa !" and we laughed it off, but I was very surprised at his lack of surprise. It set me thinking for the rest of the day about marriage. Later we checked into the alberg...