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Santiago de Compostela

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The Camino in Spain: Trod, Trek, or Trudge

I’m out on a dusty trail in Spain where pilgrims have trod for a thousand years.

We’re filming, and we debate words like that. Do pilgrims “trod,” “trek,” or “trudge”? They don’t trudge — that rhymes with “grudge.” Trod sounds a bit dreary; trek sounds a bit light. We end up saying “walk.” The trail — the Camino de Santiago a.k.a. the Way of St. James — is really full because this is a Holy Year, and the feast day of St. James is approaching. Pilgrims are timing their journey to arrive on that day in Santiago, where the remains of the saint are supposedly buried.

Witnessing this timeless quest and its elevated thinking is inspirational…and in striking contrast to where I was just one day earlier — Pamplona — for the crazy running of the bulls. (In Pamplona, a drunk guy in a bar explained to me that each of the six bulls that run in the morning meets its matador that evening in the bullring. Then, as if sharing a priceless tip with me, he said, “But a bull can escape that fate by simply breaking his horn on one of the barriers during the stampede.”)

Meanwhile, on the Camino, pilgrims come in all types. Prepackaged groups, which I think of as “pilgrim teabags,” have clean, matching T-shirts. Each hiker is issued a mass-produced walking stick with a decorative gourd tied to the top; each stick also has a dangling scallop shell with a brightly painted cross of St. James.

Other pilgrims are humble church groups from distant Catholic lands. We encounter an otherworldly group from Lithuania with its raspy, amplified chant-leader shuffling along. The group members are carrying an old boom box, a nearly life-size cross, and various statuettes. Eager to film them, we drive ahead and wait — as if preparing an ambush. Our cameraman scampers to get just the right vantage point while I sit in the car. Then, a few minutes later, with their intentionally monotonous chant, they walk by my open window — just inches from my eyes. I wish my eyes were a camera. While we get a great wide shot, that close-up pilgrim-pass-by is one of the most vivid images we’ve ever missed while shooting.

We stake out a position in a medieval village. This is the standard, ghostly quiet village pilgrims pass all along the route. Its only shop is a vending machine cut into a stone wall. An ancient woman scrubs her laundry at a creek-side place where women have done this for centuries. A shepherd scoots his gangly flock over a tiny bridge.

In this peaceful corner, our mission is to interview pilgrims about their experiences. We meet a New Yorker who has just hiked for days across the vast Spanish plain and learned nothing about life or himself. He is, in his words, “a little pissed off with it all.” And we come upon a bouncy flower child from Berlin — a 20-year-old girl hiking alone, singing to herself, and radiant with the value of this personal journey. She speaks to us as if she were a real saint come to earth. Talking with her, I feel like I have just entered a Botticelli painting.

An Englishman we meet is doing the trail in three successive years because he can’t get enough time away from his 9-to-5 job to do it in one 30-day stretch. While he walks, he has been reflecting on simplicity. Everyone we meet (except for the one pissed-off guy) is having a richly rewarding time. I keep thinking how a standard RV vacation — with its Swiss-Army-knife of comforts — couldn’t be more different than this chance to be away from the modern world with all that it entails.

Of course, I’m in the fast lane of normal, workaday life and just observing. (And my mind is in a completely different space compared to the pilgrims. Last night, as I was crowded by my hotel’s shower curtain, it occurred to me that no hotel in Europe has invested in the wonderful bent curtain rods that arc out — giving big Americans in need of elbow room a more spacious place to shower.) Each time I talk to someone on the Camino de Santiago, I’m inspired to find a way to set aside the month it takes to walk from France to Santiago. Someday I will.

In Santiago, we greet pilgrims as they enter the last stretch. A bagpiper stands tall under an arch, reminding us this is a Celtic corner of Spain. Playing the theme to Star Wars adds an incongruity to the ambience — reminding me of the challenges a pilgrim encounters as he or she struggles, often in vain, to leave the modern mindset.

But then, on the square in front of the cathedral of Santiago, I witness joy and jubilation sweep over those who finish this journey — as I do each time I’m here. Whether religious or personal, the commitment required to do this trip is great…and the rewards are even greater.

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Translucent Pigs’ Ears and Eating the Sea: Good Morning in Santiago

I’m tucked away in Santiago de Compostela, in the northwest corner of Spain. It’s my last day here before flying to Rome. I have a three-part agenda: see pilgrims reach their goal in front of the cathedral, explore the market, and buy some barnacles in the seafood section — then have them cooked for me, on the spot, in a café.

Whenever I’m here, I make a point to be on the big square, at the foot of the towering cathedral of St. James, at around 10 in the morning. That’s when scores of well-worn pilgrims march in triumphantly from their last overnight on the train — most finishing a 30-day, 500-mile hike from the French border. They finish their camino by stepping on the scallop shell embedded in the pavement at the foot of the cathedral. I just love watching how different people handle jubilation.

If Europe had a rain forest, it would be here. But instead it has a city made of granite painted green by moss. The historic and stony buildings of Santiago come in a watercolor green. Rainy as it often is, this morning the church is back-lit by the rising sun and, looking up, the weary pilgrim squints…small before God.

Routinely, pilgrims ask me to take their photo and email it to them. Then they say, “I’ve got to go meet with St. James” and — as has been the routine for a thousand years — they head into the cathedral.

Two blocks away, the market is thriving, oblivious to the personal triumphs going on over at St. James’ tomb. There’s something about wandering through a farmers market early in the morning anywhere in the world. It’s a chance to observe the most fundamental commerce: Salt-of-the-earth people pull food out of the ground, cart it into the city, and sell what they’ve harvested to people who don’t have gardens.

 

A yummy box of pigs’ ears. Buy them tonight at your favorite tapas bar.
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Dried-apple grandmothers line up like a babushka can-can. Each sits on a stool so small it disappears under her work dress. At the women’s feet are brown woven baskets filled like cornucopias — still-dirty eggs in one; in the next, greens clearly pulled this morning, soil clinging to their roots. One woman hopes to earn a few extra euros with homebrews — golden bottles with ramshackle corks — one named “licor café,” the other, more mysteriously, “oruzo casero.”

Another row of babushkas in shawls sit before rickety card tables filled with yellow cheeses shaped like giant Hershey’s Kisses…or, to locals, breasts. The local cheese is called tetilla — that’s “tits” — to revenge a prudish priest who, seven centuries ago, told a sculptor at the cathedral to redo a statue that he considered too buxom. Ever since, the townsfolk have shaped their cheese like exactly what the priest didn’t want them to see carved in stone. And you can’t go anywhere in Santiago without seeing cheese tetilla. In fact the town is famous for its creamy, mild tetilla.

Stepping further into the market, I notice spicy red chorizo chains framing merchants’ faces. Chickens, plucked and looking rubber as can be, fill glass cases. The sound of cascading clams and castanet shrimp — red, doomed, and flipping mad — greets me as I enter the seafood hall. Fisherwomen in rubber aprons and matching gloves sort through folding money.

There’s a commotion at the best stalls. Short ladies with dusty, blue-plaid roller carts jostle for the best deals. A selection of pigs’ ears mixed with hooves going nowhere fills a shoebox. The ears, translucent in the low rays of the morning sun, look as if someone had systematically and neatly flattened and filed conch shells.

 

Barnacles are very expensive unless you buy them in the market and have them cooked to order. They’re worth both the expense and trouble.
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I buy my percebes(barnacles) — at €25 a kilo, they’re one-third the price I’d pay in a bar. I get 200 grams for €5 and hustle my full bag over to the market café called Churro Mania. There, Ramon and Julia boil them for €3 per person, plus 10 percent of the cost of whatever you have them cook up. Feeling quite like a local — sipping my beer so early in the morning — I wait for my barnacles to cook.

Then, the climax of my morning: Julia brings my barnacles, stacked steaming on their stainless steel plate, as well as bread, and another beer. I’m set. Twist, rip, bite. It’s the bounty of the sea condensed into every little morsel…edible jubilation.

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Euro Experiences from NW to SE — Part IV

Let me stoke your travel dreams for 2009 by sharing some of my favorite European experiences, roughly from northwest to southeast. Maximizing the experience is a dimension of smart budget travel that’s just as important in challenging times as saving money. Imagine these…

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Many abhor the French passion for la gavage — the force-feeding of their geese. To learn about the tradition, walk through the idyllic French farmland with a Dordogne farmer, surrounded by a hundred happy geese, dragging their enlarged livers like loaded diapers. On a visit to a gavagefarm, feel the rhythm of life for a goose…taste a slice of that glorious foie gras…and be thankful you’re tops on the food chain.

People visit Paris’ St. Sulpice Cathedral to worship, to track down a scene from Da Vinci Codelegend, and to climb into the loft to see perhaps Europe’s greatest pipe organ played by Europe’s greatest pipe organist. After Mass, a tiny green door in the back pops open. Join a gang of organ aficionados and scamper like sixteenth notes up a tight spiral staircase to the dusty loft. Pass 19th-century Stairmasters upon which men once tread — filling the billows that powered the mighty organ — and enter the ramshackle loft where a venerable lineage of world-class organists have performed. The current organist, Daniel Roth, graciously welcomes visitors each Sunday. Rest your chin on the historic organ, and watch as Mssr. Roth powers an entire church with his mastery of the mighty bank of keyboards.

You can read about the carnage as German and French soldiers slaughtered each other day after day on the Western Front. Or you can wander silently through fields of white crosses at the vast World War I cemetery at Verdun — realizing that less than a century ago, that horrific battle of attrition left half of all the men in France between the ages of 15 and 30 as casualties. You’ll come away with a deeper understanding of why, to this day, France is reluctant to go to war.

In Beaune, surrounded by the hallowed vineyards of Burgundy, the venerable Marche aux Vins (wine market) welcomes serious wine buyers and tourists in a subterranean, candlelit world, where fine wines sit seductively on old oak kegs, just waiting to be tasted. Pick up a tastevin(shallow stainless steel tasting dish) and a shopping basket, descend into dimly lit caverns, and work your way through the proud selection. Sampling a world of $100 bottles in the company of people who live for their fine wine can be both inspirational and intoxicating.

Summit the Rock of Gibraltar by taxi or cable car to find yourself at a unique perch: the only place on earth where you can see two continents and two seas come together. Gaze out at Africa and notice the energy in the straits. Ponder the action where two bodies of water meet, creating choppy riptides where little fish gather, attracting big fish, who attract fishermen. Consider the action at this meeting point of two great civilizations — Islam and Christendom — rubbing like cultural tectonic plates for 1,300 years. Then ape with the monkeys who call the Rock home and couldn’t care less.

In Santiago de Compostela, in the northwest corner of Spain, stand in front of the cathedral at mid-morning to greet the daily batch of well-worn pilgrims completing the Camino de Santiago. For centuries, humble seekers have hiked from Pairs and points all over Europe to this spot. With leathery faces, tattered pants, and frayed walking sticks, they plant their hiking boots victoriously on the scallop shell symbol of St. James imbedded in the square, look up at the cathedral that marks the end of their journey, and are overcome with jubilation.