For all of those generous people who sponsored me to do the Camino de Santiago walk for Multiple Sclerosis Ireland, I must say a heartfelt “Thank you“. It was an amazing experience and one I would recommend, if you can make the time.
h4. Fit 80-year-old
One of our group of 57 walkers, was aged 72 and there was talk of a man who had walked it aged 80. Mind you, he must have been a jolly fit 80-year-old because this is a walk that extends, in all, 750 kilometres across the top of Spain.
With MS Ireland, we walked 25km sections of the Camino every day for 10 days. The other 500 kilometres, we covered by bus. The Camino de Santiago (or way of St James) is an ancient pilgrimage route– marked by yellow arrows– which extends all the way from St Jean Pied de Port (on the French side of the Pyrenees) to Santiago de Compostello on the north west corner of Spain. It was awarded World Heritage status in 1998 by UNESCO as the Camino has been a pilgrimage trail since the 8th century.
h4. Walked from Belgium
We began our walk in the Pyrenees at San Jean Pied de Port which is the traditional starting point of the Camino Frances. But we met people who had walked from Belgium, Holland and Portugal all the way to Santiago de Compostello, carrying every stitch they wore or slept in, on their backs.
These are the real peregrinos who stay in small hostels, or Albergues, every night. As they passed us on foot or by bicycle, everybody greeted us with the words we would hear from local people and other peregrinos alike, Buen Camino.
The weather was cool in the Pyrenees. Good Irish walking weather. And the landscape was also familiar; forests of deciduous trees with deep fields indenting the steep slopes; the odd house with barking dogs and the whole mountain covered with sheep.
But once we moved on to the high, dry, parched plateau of the Meseta, where there is little or no shade, the going got hotter though the hills were less vicious.
h4. Grunts of anguish
Nevertheless by day three, most people could not get out of bed in the morning without grunts of anguish about the pains in their calves, ankles, knees or muscles that they had previously never known existed.
After hobbling down the stairs clinging lovingly to the banisters, breakfast was followed by stiff doses of non-steroidals, liberally dispensed by both medic and non-medic alike. Day four marked the end of the worst of the lactic acidosis for most people and the onset of the heat.
It was 33 degrees one afternoon on the flat open plains of the Meseta, where you can see the white, chalky path ahead of you meandering across the plain and over the hills for miles and miles ahead.
You can stop to admire the fields of red poppies dotted amidst the blue-green prairies of wheat and barley. You can stop to empty your boot of yet another small stone. You can stop to take a photograph. You can take another great gulp of water from your platypus.
But, eventually, you have to walk on and on… and on. Arriving in a small town at the end of the day, with a café/bar that charges typically €1 for a coffee or a beer, was akin to arriving in heaven.
h4. Some just swore
Feet became an obsession on the Camino. Some people swore by Vaseline. Some people swore by their special, double-layered, thousand-mile socks. And some people just swore because they had already developed blisters. And walking 20km or more on a blister is murder.
Rashes on the legs became very common, just above the sock line. We found it hard to diagnose the cause; it was a red, livid, non-itchy rash that seemed to spread up the legs.
We decided it must be a reaction to weeds or crop sprays as we all had to dive behind bushes or wade into the weeds, quite unceremoniously, when nature called. We invested in a huge tube of steroid cream when we hit the next big town and, like most rashes, it seemed to respond beautifully.
My special memory of the Camino is of the days we walked over the mountains of Leon, on tracks first made by the Roman’s, through forests of beech and fragrant eucalyptus, uphill until the effort of the ascent silenced even the most chatty amongst us.
Finally, we reached the ‘village in the cloud’ or the village of El Cibreiro. And there we had a Mass in a tiny stone church with the shafts of sunlight piercing the blessed, cool shade from windows set deep in the ancient stone.
There was a feeling of the fellowship of new friends; of being part of a family– a Camino family– whose trials and tribulations we shared and whose troubles we had tried to leave behind with the stones we left at the iron cross of Foncebadon.
h4. Irish tricolour
Our eventual arrival into the rainy, albeit beautiful city of Santiago to the tunes of a flute and the waving of a huge Irish tricolour and greeted with a glass of champagne was triumphant for many, but for me it contained a hint of sadness.
We had stepped off the world for a while and now we were back. As we ran up the steps of the cathedral with our new-found fitness, one of the group strained her Achilles tendon and muttered darkly in annoyance, “I’m going back to being my agnostic self… tomorrow.”
Who knows why over 200,000 people walk the Camino every year? No doubt many do it for religious reasons. Some walk it for time out of their increasingly frenetic lives. Some do it for the physical challenge; some to experience the beauty of this remote part of Spain; some for the sense of history as the whole area is steeped in the history of the Spanish Civil War.
h4. Who knows?
Or maybe some do it for an amalgam of all these reasons. Who knows? But we do know that millions of people have walked this path over the centuries. It may be my imagination, but there is a wonderful feeling of healing on the Camino de Santiago, as though the spirit of many, living and dead, linger lovingly in this place.
The Camino de Santiago walk took place from 2 June to 14 June but Multiple Sclerosis Ireland has two other walks coming up this year: in Peru from 7 to 20 September and Nepal from 18 November to 1 December. If you would like more details please contact Catherine O’Leary, the walks co-ordinator on: 1850 233 233. Or send an email to: walks@ms-society.ie.
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