Camino del Norte - Part I: The departure
(Irun - Bilbao)
I am getting old. After a bus ride on a broken unreclinable chair, my neck is sore and my head heavy and I haven't even started walking. My toiletry bag is lost and I gotta run buy a toothbrush. Alzeihmer's advancing. I even have walking sticks now and I caught myself choosing icecream over beer (in San Sebastian). But the old principles hold: I am still refusing to book accomodation on the camino ! I'll hold to what's left of my physical integrity and vigour to enforce this ancient rule and show my devotion to the Goddess of Chance.
Arrival in Irun is a mess, random roads, highway junctions. On a huge road full of cars I met a Canadian dude, he's distressed by being lost and stressing to get to the hostel as soon as possible. His impatience irritates the hospitaleros, who at some point conclude their welcoming to the donation-based hostel with a laconic sentence: "we don't want your coins, offer with the heart". Not knowing if such threat was universal or custom-made for us, we bow in a guilty way and whisper something like "of course". Then my Canadian friend is off the door in a flash, heading to the nearest supermarket. He comes back with an incredible amount of shampoos - definitely more that I thought resonable for a bald person- and an even more incredible amount of food, which he sprinkled with a full bottle of wine. For the short time we were together I saw him drinking one bottle per night (gulping directly from the neck of the bottle), commenting on how cheap wine is in Spain, on how the camino del norte is not a joke but like a super difficult military track, and generally not displaying a very impressive knowledge of European geography..
This was the perfect introduction to the Norte: a phyisical more than a spiritual exploit. Soon I noticed that this was no Camino Frances: here's a poverty of arrows and a richness of (unexplained) variants...The one I took was ending into nowhere. After walkin around astonished for some time, it occurred to me that the solution was simply catching a boat to cross the unsourmountable tongue of water laying ahead of me.
Quite early on day 1 I get to S. Sebastian, where I decide to stop. An authentic vanity fair is played in the high streets, with a couple busy doing photo shootings in a bench in front of mine for a good half hour. Pilgrims are not kings, here. Tourists having disgusting tapas are!
Day 2 is an epic day, where mortals and wine drinkers are left behind.
"I don't ask anything more: the Way under my feeet, the Sky above my head" says a sign along the road. Near a comunity along the way, someone offers me coffee. Why didn't I stop and have a chance encounter? I am on fire and feel I ache to go.
Lots of tarmac today, long stretches of road... with open views on the hills, the background mountains on one side, the sea on the other...
Lovely stretch along the coast before Getaria, finally meeting some peregrinas... with their mum! I kept mysterious and silent and when a pretty peregrina told me "see you!", I simply looked at her bandages, swooshed past her and engaged in the road with an overflow of leg power, thinking "I don't think so". They will surprise me shortly afterwards by catching me while I was napping in the meadows, but that was a short-lived fire: I never saw them again.
From tomorrow, I'll slow down (maybe), trying to enjoy life, but without being too much of a consumer (which the impression that many pilgrims give me). I wanna take time to bring my awareness where it belongs: up there to the skies, or at least dig myself out of the mental hole I am currently stuck in.
At the arrival to the hostel I am playing the good pilgrim role, fraternizing with a red-faced north-american woman..complaining about the heat, the pain and the miracolous benefits of a shower... and dispensing health tips to a young lady with feet pain. After doing two stages in one, it's nice to still see some old faces: a young spanish and a greek guy have also pulled it off, and we are now toasting around a bench with some beer.
I am grateful for this huge day. I have the privilege that my body can still hold the water and bring me through such a day! My body went through thick and thin with me and it always amazes me. It is such a wonderful machine, expecially in its ability to fix wounds or recover from pains. One night of good sleep is all it takes for this miracle to happen again and again..
As I nudge into bed, I take a mental note for tomorrow: "Get into a state of gracefulness ... oups ... gratefulness (are they related?)"
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