bling

700+ Km done 0 Km to go. Blisters 1 (new). Waist-hip ratio 0.80 (slinkier)

All done. I arrived first thing on Monday morning with a bit of a sense of anticlimax as I walked through a normal European town starting the working week! But the cathedral square was empty and the old city just waking up. I presented my ´credencial´with all its stamps documenting my journey (picture), picked up my certificate and headed for the Pilgrim Mass at 12md. The cathedral is old (11th and 12 the century) quite beautiful and austere but with lots of modern (17th century) bling - gold paraphenalia, stucco figures etc. There are various things a pukka pilgrim has to do, including hugging the figure of the Saint (from the back) and butting the tower of Jesse with your head. During the Mass with a big team of priests doing strange rituals up front, I really felt alienated from the whole biz. But I was tired (actually strangely and VERY tired) and spent much of the rest of the day doing not-very-much and wondering what I was doing there.

But I woke up today after 10 hours sleep and headed off to the cathedral in a better mood. I unexpectedly hit a service during which I felt completely overwhelmed. Exactly the same service as yesterday (and in Spanish of course) but at the point where everyone is asked to greet the people around them, I felt that the United Nations was there and got all tearful. Then (again unexpectedly) they swung the botafumerio. This is an enormous silver censer; it takes two strong men to carry it and 8 to swing it. They swing it high over the north and south trancepts, 40 feet in the air like a huge pendulum, spreading incense over the whole congregation. I have to say that it was an absolutely amazing sight and I suddenly felt part of history.

I know you´ll be interested

587Km done 113Km to go, Blisters 0. Mantras lots

Well I know you will be interested in my feet. Thanks for your concern but the blister is fine. But a few days ago, I got dressed in the dark (as usual) but within a few hours realised that something very exciting was going on under the sock of my right foot. It wasn´t until the toilet of a bar some hours later that I peeped and what I saw made me hurry to the next hostal (ie place where I would get a room to myself). When the compression of 2 pairs of socks came off, some little lumpettes grew in front of my eyes to really dramatic vesicles. Others went a strange purple colour. It was briefly quite mesmerising, unfortunately I didn´t take a picture at the time so what you see is a couple of days later. Bed bug attack, I think. Putting my shoes on the next day was interesting and slow, but once they were on, strangely comfortable, like a baby enjoying a wet nappy. And all is getting better.

Rest of the body is fine and I´m charging along. Km markers have started appearing by the path so you really have the feeling of clocking off the distances.

The other picture is of a mini-Pamplona in a village I spent a night in. Mini because the village was small (one street, one square) and the bull was small (but nifty). Poor creature wasn´t very cross and didn´t seem to understand what was required of it. I found the whole business hard to watch.

I´ve booked my ticket home (next Wednesday) and absolutely longing to be back!

Much love

C15: proper pilgrim

390Km done 309Km to go. Blisters 1. Mantras 8900

I´ve (at last) passed the half way point. It´s been a bit ghastly thinking that it would be quicker to go back than to go ahead, but no longer. But I´m tired and am now a proper pilgrim, having cultivated a blister. The monastery I was planning to stay in is closed with bed-bugs, so pretty mediaeval still. There are pilgrims hospitals and cemetries all along the way. Its not so long ago that lice and fleas carried typhus and plague and not just annoyance.

The scenery has been of enormous wheatfields and long (very long) Roman roads. One picture (disappointing) shows ´houses built into the hillside, with chimneys coming out of the grass like hobbits homes and (you probably can´t see it) TV aerials just to show what century we are in. The fiddle playing family are Canadian, travelling with donkeys along my route, sweet kids, crazy parents.

love to all

C8: hit the wall and bounced

216Km done 488Km to go. Blisters 0. Wonky knees 0

Well, I´ve walked for 7 days. Hit the wall yesterday, tired and dragging myself along but seem much better today and walked 40Km into El Cid´s city, Burgos. I think if El Cid were alive now he would be wearing cool shades and carrying a kalashnikov over his shoulder. I´m staying in a bottom-of-the-range pension rather than another refuge.
Picture 1 is me pulling wine from the wine fountain (the fountain to the right provides water) in Rioja country. Charity to me and other pilgrims from the producer
Picture 2 shows a proper pediatrician (foot doctor) at work. He is a volunteer Dutch evangelist who helps run a refugio for people like me....
Picture 3 shows a different refugio, inside a church fills up with pilgrims who are given mats on the floor and a meal (but no earplugs)
Picture 4 shows the sign at that refuge (´give what you can, take what you need´. Its so strange being the object of all this charity but very wonderful. And the people on the way look out for you. One day I met 3 bodhisattvas before breakfast who set me on the right path (its hard to get lost, but possible...) Usually when you are just about to feel adrift you notice a yellow arrow on a post or on a rock or on the road, and you are off again.

I´m missing people a lot...and our soppy dog who is always please to see me. There is not much English spoken so I put together all my non-English (mixture of French and Italian) and try my best. The other pilgrims are mainly Spanish and French though there are a sprinkling of other languages. I had supper the other day with a Canadian and an Italian, we opted for French as the least-worst compromise.
Its quite hard work, no doubt about it. Set off in the dark at about 7am and the Spanish bars don´t really open till 10 for the first cafe con leche when you hit a village. But the scenery is great. The Rioja winefields are groaning with grapes, the effort of getting them all picked seems superhuman. But we are in wheat and sunflower country and its all brown and dry. I usually walk alone - but walked this morning with a man with bilateral hip replacements - and he really was going!

Love to you all

camino 1

Day one Homage to Brigit Jones
4Km done 702 to go. Blisters 0. (waist hip ratio 0.86....Ann Louise, this is really embarassing. I wasn´t goint to publish my weight on the internet so your suggestion seemed good, but I hadn´t measured my waist for YEARS. Thats so what middle age is all about!)

Anyway I´m on my way. After the 4Km (itself after the flight to Bilbao and the bus to Pamplona) I picked up my credencial from a rather stern but holy lady and set off. I spent my first night at a refugio run by the Knights of Malta which has crusade era roots when they specialised in moor-killing. Several firsts today. First long conversations with fellow`pilgrims, first outdoor wee, first cafe con leche.

The picture is the best my little eBay camera could do in the mist. Its at the top of a ridge near a forest of wind turbines. The ´horses´are metal, the little pilgrim is me!

So far so good

david the groucho

This is just to show you David outside his comfort zone! On the back of a real horse on a real estancia. We had a wonderful day: boat trip to yet another glacier (Upsala) then a stop at an estancia that was set up by English immigrants in the early 1900s, about 3 hours on a horse (not moving v fast but crossing deep cold rivers) and a wonderful meal. Top of the range tourism for our last jaunt of the holiday! Starting the long trip back tomorrow.

under the radar

We have just come out from under the radar in the Torres de Paigne National Park (Chile). 5 days trekking, rain, snow and occasional sun, staying in refuges. We arrived after 8pm, wet and tired at the first one on the first night and they had run out of beds, offered us a tent. I must have looked crestfallen (and very old) because they rustled up two bunks in the staff quarters, and very comfy they were too.
Spectacular scenery and pretty spectacular tiredness by the end of some days! The mountains there are high enough to attract their own weather (and lots of it!) so we didn´t always get the brochure views. Added disadvantage was that (after weighing every last toothbrush in the backpacks which to carry them from A to B) David brought along 800 pages of biography of Shackleton. So however cold and wet we were, Shackleton was always orders of magnitude worse off.
But there were real highlights, a pisco sour ón the house´at refuge 3 and the little colony of icebergs nestling in the lake by refuge 4, amazingly blue and cute.
Yesterday came back to Argentina, lots of border bureaucracy in true S American style. And today a beautiful sunny day and an addition to the wonder of the world list, right up there with the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls: the Perito Moreno glacier,
Its one of the last still-advancing glaciers in the world, moving quite fast- 3m per day in some places and 5Km across, and very clean (unlike most other glaciers in my experience). This adds up to truly spectacular view of the top of the glacier (pointy bits and crevasses like villi)and the side which advances into a lake. So a bit of patientce is rewarded by huge slabs of ice 200 ft high shearing off into the lake with a crack that arrives perceptibly after the slo-mo fall of the ice. Really amazing - so we waited for another and another. But with my companion wittering about stochastic processes and me always looking in the wrong direction, I missed the best bit of drama. Like watching cricket, I think.
Long bus journey tomorrow.
Wonderful news from home: it seems that Lorreta got an offer from Keele after her interview last week!

march of the penguins 2

We are staying in the Antarcticia Hostel, highly recommended in backpacker circles, quite rightly. Good grapevining. Rented bikes in the morning and headed up the coast till the road ran out. Boatride in the late afternoon timed to intercept the arrival on shore of the local (2 hours away) penguin colony. Very cute and astonishingly unconcerned about the looming boat beaching on their shore. The juveniles are still fluffy/scruffy while the adults are terribly smart. The water is very clear all the way up the Beagle channel so you could see the penguins swimming underwater, which seemed much more their element!
Barbecue in the hostel in the evening - but nobody eats before 10.30pm at the earliest, which pretty much counts me out! Nice to hear from Gik yesterday.
Off on a little plane tomorrow.

theendoftheworld

Well here we are at the end of the world. We travelled for a day and a half and it really felt like it!. Overnight to Buenos Aires - David just put a blanket over his head like a canary and slept through, while I squirmed and watched the hours pass slowly. Buenos Aires is a very functional city. We had a few hours and a change of airports to negotiate so managed a pilgrimage to the (British built) railway station and a ride on the underground (mosiacs, tiles, lovely)
Here at the very bottom of S America, the sun is shining. Ushuaia was the Argentianian gualag. Convicts built the railway which is now transformed to a bizzare touristique attraction, with station-masters dressed as the Fat Controller and menials as convicts. After a bit of ostentatious poop-pooping, the train rumbles into the local national park, where we walked for a few hours through Hobbit-y forests before missing the return train.
Ushuaia is a bit like a frontier boom-town - tin shacks next to concrete buildings, brothel bars next to souvenier shops.
Off to sea tomorrow!

off to Patagonia tomorrow

Backbacks bulging. Leaving 3 girlz behind to look after house and dog