Burgos; The Meseta

 Burgos

It’s a nice walk from wherever I was to wherever I was going. I have almost entirely lost my grasp on the names of the various beautiful Spanish villages I pass through. I just came back to this to edit and I still can’t remember. I could go back and check but I suspect it would slither from my brain again almost immediately. Should I be trying harder to engage with the history of places? I realised today that I’ve hardly been inside any churches. And the thing about the pilgrimage is that you go past thousands of them, the trail stretching out to meet them. I have an itchy feeling that someone is going to ask me to pray in there. Of course they fucking won’t! I make a resolution to go inside more churches.

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There are some Americans you meet who affect this awful glassy insincerity. They talk like they're always expecting a tip. Are they all bad liars? Is anyone meant to take seriously the idea that these fries represent delicious local cuisine? All the cooing and flattery and bright smiles. Maybe it's just total cultural exhaustion. I've not had sufficient opportunity to develop opinions about Anatolians or Eritreans. The rhythms of American English are already well worn. Some of them really are like that though. 

Counterbalance: several Americans here are sitting together and having a grand old time. I'm sitting alone reading Le Carré and pausing every so often to type out some more spiteful invective about the warm, friendly pilgrims I share the road with. I need a brain transplant. Cynicism shouldn't be possible here.  I’ve met lots of very charming Americans as well, but for some reason it’s only the nasty little thoughts which make it as far as the page. I think I'm going to make a really concerted effort towards good faith. The first moral lesson of the pilgrimage. God bless America and all of her many children. This is the last time you’ll read me say a bad word about them. 

In fact I’ve decided in general that I’m not approaching the Camino properly. I’m in regular contact with my friends, Whatsapping every day. I look at the internet and social media (though not as often as I did before). I walk with music and audiobooks. I am not spending a lot of time in contemplation. Part of the problem is that I spend a lot of time on my own anyway. I tend to hike alone, I live alone when I can, and my hybrid job meant I wasn’t even in the office most days (though always attached to the social media umbilical cord so never truly alone). I’m going to try and go the whole hog next week. See how I get on with just my own mind and the road and other pilgrims.

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Burgos is very beautiful. It’s Pentecost today (Sunday) so they’re making a right old racket. Bells and drums from all across the city. I try to get into the spirit but I’ve got a semi-serious hangover so I’ve climbed a big hill overlooking the city and I’m having a restorative coffee. Here’s a question I’ve had to grapple with, having been writing fairly freely about people I meet - I now know names, faces, personalities. It’s harder to adopt the kind of wry observational tone when it’s people you’re going to see again the next day and who you actually quite like. They might even end up reading this! Maybe this more than anything else will convince me to be nicer. 

Last night’s expedition was to a live music bar which didn’t exist, but turned into a good night anyway after we accidentally crashed a Spanish family party. The hosts were very friendly and welcoming. I drank several glasses of this awful thing which is 50% Coca Cola and 50% red wine at the insistence of - I think - Roberto, the brother of the birthday boy, an archetypally handsome Spanish man in his 40s with white shirt and salt and pepper stubble. I did a lot of dancing and delighted several further older women with my snake hips. It is a gift and a curse. One of their husbands shook my hand. I’m not sure what this means but I choose to take it as a mark of respect. 

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Burgos cathedral is a strange experience, more like a museum than a place of worship, though mass is still held regularly. Roped-off sections force you to take an ordered pathway around it, following standing boards with QR codes and numbers for the audio guide. There’s a ticket office inside the cathedral itself. Flickering electronic lights are meant to look like candles. A choir practices in orange lanyards and jeans. It almost doesn't sound real. Too perfect in this space. The acoustics of churches and cathedrals - what astonishing art. I like the smell of them too, cold stone and polished iron. Some of the reliquaries and shrines are stunningly gaudy, and I toy with embracing my inner Calvinist, but over the course of the tour I am won around. I like the older reliefs the best though. There are clearly many phases of development here. I can't get the audio guide to work so I don't know what they are, but stone carvings faded almost into incomprehensibility sit side by side with painted plaster figures on rich red cushions. 

One room is filled - wall to wall, ceiling to floor - with portraits of former Archbishops, most of them looking extremely forbidding and faithful. There are a couple who threaten a smile. I pass a row of sepulchres, bathed in coloured light from stained glass. On several of them there is a carved dog at the feet of their departed former owner, curled up and gently resting their head. One room is filled with people groping around blindly with their hands held out in front of them, a VR headset strapped over their eyes. I suppose these things are always falling down - they have to make their money how they can. In fact Burgos Cathedral is one of the few I’ve seen which isn’t marred by semi-permanent scaffolding, so they must be doing something right. 

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Day two in Burgos is largely uneventful, except to note that it’s nice to have a group of friends and friendly faces and that the experience of the Camino has sharply improved since this happened. It seems to have taken me longer than some others but we got there in the end. This was probably always the missing piece - easy to get lost in your own tiredness without anyone to commiserate with. But this is what it’s all about.

The Meseta

The next day out of Burgos I do something I’ve been avoiding. The great temptation. For just 6 euros you can have your bag delivered to your destination and just walk with a day pack. I can’t tell you how good this feels. Some days even putting your backpack on in the morning is a mood killer. This fucking thing. Without it I’m walking on air. I float through the first 20km. I skip. This is partly because I packed my bag like an idiot and I have my laptop but still. Still. It’s addictive. And I still feel like enough of a pilgrim because I still walked 32km you know? It’s not nothing.

I have entered the Meseta. And - perhaps liberated by my baglessness - I have no idea what all the dire warnings were about. Oh it’s hot, it’s extremely hot, and we’re getting into the guts of June now in inland Spain (whose stupid idea was that?), but the habit seems to be to start at dark, or even pre-dawn, head-torch hours, so I’m going to make a start on that. As it is I get a smattering of burn and a slightly gasping last hour but I’m fine, unlike two of my unfortunate new friends who have to buy a pair of new shoes and don’t leave until 11am, meaning they’re walking through the appalling oven of a late-Spanish summer afternoon, when the rocks and the dirt have sucked in heat all day and now bleed it all out. It’s also beautiful. The flatness and the simplicity - fields, rocks, dirt track, blue sky - I am charmed immediately. And it’s not boring. It’s incredibly colourful. Purple thistles and red poppies line the road. Stone cairns are dotted along the trail. Some fields of wheat are already turning golden, others are a deep, rich green. It’s nowhere near boring. 

I ate the second fly of the Camino today. Possibly because I am surging forwards with such abandon. I cut through the air like a missile. I have important business to attend to and nobody is getting in my way. I wash the fly down with a gulp of water and I keep going. I am developing a pronounced westward tan - every morning the sun is behind me and my shadow stretches out front. It remains this way for 6 hours. The back of my legs and neck and a patch at the top of my forearms are markedly darkening. I have to wear my hat backwards like some sort of fucking skater; it’s undignified.

I arrive in a small town (it’s called Hontanas, I remembered this one, though only because it amused me to refer to it as Hot Nanas) which doesn’t have a shop, so it’s the pilgrim meal for me - the communal one, served in whatever makeshift canteen or dining area is available. This one is beautiful as it happens, under sagging wooden beams and plaster walls. It has the feeling of an old chapel and there is a smattering of religious paraphernalia. 

I sit next to Sascha the German who looks like Steve Albini, and a Slovenian man whose name I did not catch in time who looks like Willy Nelson. And Mauricio the Italian who looks like either Santa Claus or all of ZZ Top, a ponytail and a huge white beard. I passed him making his steady way up a hill earlier. “Qui tal? Okay?” I asked. “I am okay, just very slow.” This was the first disappointing meal in quite a while, but hearty enough. Likely identical to the sort of lentil stew that pilgrims will have been eating for centuries. Conversation is a little forced (I bring my Kindle but it feels too rude to get it out), I really appreciate the spirit of the communal meal though. Everyone gets the same food. Everyone cleans their plate with some bread. Everyone is highly pragmatic about it - nobody is fussy, nobody wastes a drop, everybody makes a game attempt to speak to their neighbour in whatever mutual half-spoken language they can summon forth between them. 

I say there’s no fussy eaters - they’ve likely been forced into eating something terrible or expensive elsewhere. New Friend Frankie is a vegetarian and simply doesn’t bother, and has been having a nightmare finding stuff to eat. I respect that he’s holding the line and living off tortilla and limp salads, I didn’t have the fortitude. I’ll switch back again once I’m done, I tell myself. But outside of big cities I cannot live on the vegetarian options available. They’re terrible at salads in this country, with the exception of some seafood-adjacent ones nearer the coast. It’s the best combination of bread, cured meat, cheese and tomato you’ve ever had but I’m on the verge of contracting scurvy.

Actually the tortillas are almost uniformly shit anyway, as they spend all day congealing on a counter. Spanish omelette should be eaten hot from the pan or not at all, much like falafel. Keep to that principle and you won’t go far wrong.

There’s a family with a donkey on the trail. I saw it in Pamplona and then they got a day ahead of me. I never quite catch it up, but there is a fresh trail of turds which can only have one culprit. I toy with sticking my finger into one like a tracker from the veldt to determine how long ago it passed based on the lingering warmth. But it’s 3pm and everything here is the temperature of a fresh dropped turd. 

Someone said to me after a previous entry that I’d managed to put them off the Camino entirely (I think it was after all the nightmares and the motorway). So look: these were good days. The Camino is good again. I’m past the wobble and I see Santiago in my mind’s eye, somewhere through the heat haze.