Pamplona - Zariquiegui - Puente la Reina

The bus journey from San Sebastian to Pamplona is astonishing. Not simply through mountain passes but tracking along the very top of valleys, the highway vaulting between peaks. How they engineered this is beyond me. It seems like the sort of thing which should have been left by a progenitor civilisation for the apes to follow. I experience a brief period of annoyance before leaving as I try to work out why the hell there isn’t just a train, but clearly this is why: you try laying a fucking railway through a mountain range. 

On the way into Pamplona I see a billboard on which a man pours olive oil onto a slice of bread and grins maniacally. And why wouldn’t he be? Olive oil and bread. God but they know how to live here. I once made a sandwich out of yoghurt and jalapenos and it upset someone so much they actually raised their voice. 

You hear all about the bed rush, which is the race to reach the cheaper, unbookable municipal albergues (a pilgrim hostel: expect to hear this terminology at length). But two things become abundantly clear in Pamplona. One is that it is almost impossible not to wake up with everyone else, earplugs and eyemask or not, so you’d better make damn sure you’re going to sleep when they do as well. We are slaves to the early sleepers. And I mean early early - bed at 9pm. The second is that the average age is somewhere in the upper 50s and believe me that’s being dragged down a lot by me. If these are my competition I imagine I’ll scorch past them. If anyone’s worried about beds it won’t be me. Eat my dust you charming, respectful, ancient motherfuckers. 

They take orange juice seriously in Spain. Order it in any cafe and they're getting the juicer out. Much more tart than from the carton, much less smooth. More orange somehow. The platonic form of orange. I've been a little slack on breakfasts lately, sleeping in and emerging late. Coffee on a sunny terrace before the morning chill has quite cooked away feels good though. Makes me want to read a newspaper. I went to Café Iruña yesterday of Hemingway fame. I can see that it was beautiful once. The bones are still there but they've been varnished in plastic. Today I pass a street named after him next to the bullring. Curious for a foreigner to have such an outsized impact on a city.

I sit in dappled shade outside the bullring reading W.G. Sebald and waiting for the Decathlon to open so I can buy some ankle tape. I like Pamplona. I think I've been as lucky with the start of this trip as I was unlucky with my first day in San Sebastian. It has been calm, quiet, medieval. The mountains are visible in the distance and my hostel is in the shadow of the cathedral. The orange juice cleansed my palate of the coffee and soon I am going to go and look at the fortifications. It's a slightly eerie coincidence to be reading Austerlitz as I arrive. The central character is preoccupied with grand architectural edifices and star forts in particular, just as I find myself beside one. Specifically their pointlessness and their vanity, and sure enough this one is ruins now, fit just for tourists to idle along and try pointlessly to imagine how one would have assaulted it while enfiladed from multiple angles, trapped in kill zones under bare rock walls. I simply wouldn't bother.

Pamplona is Hemingway, and Pamplona is the civil war (you can still see the bullet holes in the town square), but above all Pamplona is the bulls. Bulls in statues, bulls in tourist tat, bulls carved into ham. And walking up the narrow medieval streets, overlooked by balconies and steep terraced apartments, you can instantly picture it - shouting onlookers, young men desperately pressing themselves into shallow doorways, dark raging things propelling themselves up and down thoroughfares carved for man but now thoroughly possessed by beast. 

Today in Pamplona the streets are full but not with bulls. There is a Palestine solidarity demonstration. I hear the chanting from a long way off. Only when it turns a corner does it resolve itself: ¡Palestina Askatu! I finish my beer and I join the march. It is different from UK demos in a couple of ways. The first is that it is minimally policed. The second - and possibly related - is that it is overwhelmingly elderly. It is a march of the silver-haired. I doubt I am the youngest there (at a spruce 33) but I am very close to it. There are speeches which I don’t understand when it comes to a halt in front of a municipal building, but I am happy just to swell the crowd. 

I’m only here for a day or so, because Pamplona is the first major city on the Camino Francés, the French route which commences in the mountains of St-Jean-Pied-de-Port and ends in Santiago de Compostela. I am somewhat off schedule, but it’s time to strap back in again. Achilles tendons are like badly behaved children. They just need discipline.

The first day is a short ankle-tester. Just 11km with the full bag (there are luggage transfer services but I don’t have the energy to work out how to do them), and a good chunk of that through the outskirts of Pamplona. They say leaving cities is the worst part. Not too much in the way of industrial estates here, but several km of highway, under- and over-pass, bollards and traffic. Eventually it breaks out into the countryside, a village called Cizur Menor acting as gateway. I buy orange juice from an extraodinarily old man who shuffles slowly behind the bar and generally moves as if he’s just been defrosted from an iceberg. A woman outside complains that he either didn’t understand her or didn’t sell toast, but she has a thick Derry accent so truly who can say. I drink my OJ and pour the ice cubes into my water bottle - there’s a top tip from an experienced road warrior. 

The trail opens out after Cizur Menor, and you realise you’ve been surrounded by mountains the whole time. It is baking hot and the walk is mostly alongside fields of wheat which blow in the occasional relieving breezes. I have my first serious conversation for what must be weeks, with an extremely handsome Mexican man called Daniel who looks like the footballer Cesc Fabregas (or how Cesc Fabregas looked when I was younger and the world was still full of possibilities). 

The albergue is halfway up the hilltop in a town called Zariquiegui.There is a terrace with plastic chairs, a dining room with red tiles, shutters on the windows to keep the sun out. It seems to be run by two brothers who alternate taking pilgrims up from their base in the village shop. The one who does the cooking occasionally lets the kitchen swing open and raucous Spanish metal spills into the dining room. Some vegetarians attempt to navigate the fact they'll be eating three courses of salad (and one of them doesn't like olives). I respect them for holding the line. Obviously I have given up. 

This albergue is full of Australians. Not entirely unexpected in Europe but this one seems to have exceeded the usual quota. I fall in with three of them, all women from Adelaide who have known each other since university in the early 90s, and we run into each other several times more the next day. I'm enjoying having full conversations, they are funny and easygoing, and they give me a slice of pizza which endears them to me no end. This kind of thing is why I'm here (the easy companionship of the road, not free pizza).

The final destination of the day is Puente la Reina, which has a very beautiful bridge and more narrow streets overlooked by balconies. The doors are all the kind of iron-studded portal you expect to see in a medieval castle. God help any invaders who hope to break into this physiotherapist. I've started drinking radler because it satisfied the urge for something cold, refreshing and passingly alcoholic on arrival but is only about 3%. 

At about 2 or 3pm the heat becomes simply unmanageable. I begin to see why people leave at 6am and pay careful attention to cafes which open early. If you're doing a 6 hour day starting at 10am, you're going to be in difficulties. I've never had heat stroke. Don't plan on starting. All of this does entail going to bed at about 9pm though (or earlier) in what is usually still glorious sun outside. Doesn't feel right. I'll just have to get over it.

A drunk man in Puente la Reina blasts Tina Turner from a blown out speaker on the street. The bar has a betting terminal showing what looks like Icelandic football. The Pilgrim Menu is €13 for three courses and it starts with garlic soup. My plans to cook in the hostel are sorely tested indeed.

676 kilometres to Santiago de Compostela.