PAUSE

Here is where we’ve been, minus the three concluding days in Spain. This blog is now put to bed. Some time in the next couple of years it will be continued, as I trace my steps from Pamplona to Compostela. Please feel free to make any comments on any of the posts, regardless of date. [...]

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JAMES

What remained of my trip was an evening in Paris. The Place des Vosges area is where I like to hang in that city. It’s compact, unreconstructed, lively. I’m not meant for the big, wide end of Paris, which always seems to be triumphing over something or other. Here in the Marais I find a [...]

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BORDEAUX…MIND THE SCALLOP SHELL!

I like walking, dislike travel. The exception is that heady moment of departing from Sydney airport, family around me. In general, though, people who can city-hop, cover lots of bases when travelling, have my admiration but not my company. Visiting a place as interesting as Bordeaux, I would normally stay for a week or more, [...]

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SAN SEBASTIAN…AND MESSIRE JACQUES?

The way home. I’d decided on a bus to San Sebastian and some time by the sea before joining the train at nearby Hendaye, just over the French border. The view from my bus: a real sierra, a saw-toothed range such as I hadn’t seen to this point. The vivid aquamarine was also a first [...]

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COLLAPSE THOSE TREKKING POLES. IT’S OVER.

I was a civilian. The Hotel Eslava, where I rested for some nights, was near to the Camino’s continuation out of Pamplona. Several times I gestured to pilgrims passing through, said things like ultreia!, bon chemin!, buen camino!. Some of them seemed to understand I was also a pilgrim…or had been. Damn. It’s July as [...]

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IN OLD NAVARRE

It looks different to the French side. Is it a gun-metal colouring in the hills, or the sleeked-down shape of those hills? The different way the snow finds the creases on this side of the Pyrenees? It’s still Basque country, still Navarre. Yet, with that suddenness with which the language changes, everything changes. Spain looks [...]

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SANCHO: GREAT FOR PILGRIMS

Walking off into Spain in fine weather, belly awash with cafe con leche, I was exhilarated. Arroyos! Montañas! Pueblos! Just the words! But now I’d been pulled down a level. All through France I was able to talk with anyone. Spanish, however, is a language I’ve read often but seldom spoken. I could only speak [...]

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RONCESVALLES. FRIENDS. AND THE OTHER CHARLES.

When dramatic landscapes are drenched in history, I’m your typical gaping, gibbering tourist. But for an hour or so, after arriving in Roncesvalles, I had some practical problems which grounded me and silenced the gibbering. After being processed as a pilgrim for accommodation at the famed Conventus Hospitalis, I went in search of our lodgings, [...]

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OVER THE TOP

It alarms me that I can slot in more easily with the Irish than with some Australians. It seems to take no time till irony, gossip, and teasing become the quick-set but firm foundations of a friendship. Our first stop on the road toward Spain was a little bar with a mountain torrent under it. [...]

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STILL A PILGRIM

Here the French way ends; and here many, for whom the Camino is a Spanish experience, start their pilgrimage. Maybe the nearby and older site of Saint-Jean-le Vieux was thought less strategic after Richard the Lionheart demolished its fort. (Yes, another English king with claims over south-west France. And Richard, like so many boys from [...]

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