Limping with the bulls

The group awoke to a COLD morning in Roncesvalles. A lot of peregrinos get up before dawn and head out into the freezing cold while it´s still dark out. Jeremy and I are not like those people. We like to lie in our warm sleeping bags as long as possible until the sun rises or the owners of the albergue start dropping hints that we need to leave. We´re usually the last ones out. We figure the camino isn´t a race, so what´s the rush?

Day two´s hike consisted of walking down the mountain we climbed the day before. Nothing big to note other than what seemed to be a pleasant dense wooded forest for a 3 mile stretch at the beginning of the day. In a clearing outside the trees, Jeremy and I saw an official historical marker declaring the forest we just walked through to be haunted by persecuted witches from the Spanish Inquisition. Suddenly didn´t seem so pleasant.

As we continued down the steep trails my right knee began giving me some problems. At first it just ached on downhills but as we approached Larasonia I was limping significantly on a level surface. Larasonia is tiny but apparently has a bus come through each morning so I planned to take it the next day and give my knee some rest.

The next morning myself, Jeremy, and the Maine guys Adam and Chris went to the only cafe in town for some breakfast before they hit the trail for Pamplona and I´d wait an hour for the bus. They left and I stayed busy trying and only semi failing to read a Spanish newspaper. Five minutes later the woman who ran the shop approached me and asked what was wrong. Again, through a conversation of Spanglish and gestures I was able to convey that my knee was hurt. She thought for a moment and directed me to stand so that she could study my posture. She then knelt and held her hands about six inches from either side of my knee as she mumbled something to herself. She continued by moving her hands up and down my body at a safe but uncomfortable distance of six inches as if she were trying to measure a sway in my balance to diagnose my problem. Theis process lasted over a minute all the while as she mumbled something to herself. We were the only people in the cafe. She was harmless, but it was a little weird.

The mystic healer then stood and told me, ¨30 minutes, you be fine.¨ Uh, come again? She walked back behind the bar and began to do dishes as if everything that just took place was normal. Fifteen minutes before the bus was scheduled to arrive I paid my tab, said my thanks and goodbyes, and walked the quarter mile to the bus stop. I noticed my knee had begun to loosen just a bit and didn´t hurt quite as much as it had an hour ago...which was a good thing because that damn bus never came.

I waited another half hour before I came to the sad realization that the bus was just not coming. I weighed my options. I could either take a taxi to Pamplona (about 25 euro) or I could suck it up and walk the 20km to town. I walked around in an effort to loosen my knee up and to my surprise it started working. So I started walking. I couldn´t believe it, I could barely walk the previous day and here I was hiking through the hills to Pamplona. That day I was a believer in small miracles. Now I know there are several logical explanations for this: my knee had several additional hours to rest, I simply willed myself to the next town, etc. However it was hard to shake the idea from my head that the shaman bartender had somehow affected my knee. One of my goals for this trip was to deepen my relationship with God and I´d like to believe that somehow He helped me walk with less pain that day. Whatever it was it only lasted to the suburbs on Pamplona as once again I limped into town and joined the guys in Plaza Mayor for a much needed beer.

Jeremy and I went to the ER that night to get my knee checked out. The doc told me I´d strained some ligaments in my knee, presumably on the first day´s hike through the mountains, and I was not to hike for a week. It seems I´m destined to never finish a long term endurance event, my body won´t allow it. To add insult to injury the doc said I needed a shot for pain/inflamation. She smacked my ass (which I´m told tenses the muscle to aid the affectiveness of the shot? I have my doubts..) before sticking me with the needle. I deemed this whole process completely unnecessary but Jeremy thought it was funny as hell. I´ve since been given the trail nickname Slapshot.

So I´m off the trail for a week. Don´t feel bad because I sure didn´t. Instead I got to explore a really cool city for a few days as the guys continued on. First Ichecked into a new albergue run by two sweet old German ladies. I stayed three nights there and had a great time getting to know them and the other peregrinos who came through each night. During the day I´d explore the city and take frequent breaks in cafes. As a result I´ve become addicted to cafe con leche. Also I´ve noticed that Spanish cafes play terrible American music. I heard this song three times in one day alone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUKq7DLo6Ko

People of my generation, remember that one? Yeah, I was a little surprised to hear it too. At night I´d go out for some dinner and drinks with people I met at the albergue. I´ve met some really cool people from all over: Germany, Korea, Italy, Australia, Venezuela and more. I have become good friends with two Slovenian brothers who are cycling the camino but took two days in Pamplona to see the city.

During this time I´ve experimented with not shaving. The results? It accomplishes little more than making me look homeless. It comes in as a goatee with sad little sideburns. On St. Pattys Day I went out with a big group and this sweet talking German girl said my ¨goatee¨ made me look like Robert Downey Jr. I laughed because let´s be honest folks, I don´t look like Ironman, even a homeless version. She either a) had no idea who RDJ is b) was trying too hard or c) a combination of the two. You decide.

My extended stay in Pamplona was a blast. This is the city where they do running of the bulls every July. I found the half mile route and walked in to the Plaza de Torros. I´d love to come back during the weeklong festival sometime, I´ve heard it´s one huge party. There are also a ton of cultural sites to see and when I needed to give my knee a rest I´d lay out in the park and read a book. There´s a very limited selection of English books in Spanish bookstores but I got lucky and have been working my way through Stieg Larsson´s Millennium series. After three days I bused ahead to Logrono, spent a day there and then bused again to Burgos to meet the guys and resume hiking. It´s a little disappointing to not have hiked every kilometer but experiencing a city like Pamplona was a nice change of plans.

Hubris, meet humility

The Camino has a couple starting points but the one Jeremy, myself, and many other pilgrims took begins just over the French border on the other side of the Pyrenees in Saint Jean Pied de Port. It´s a pretty, rustic town at the base of one of the region´s major ranges. Day one is also the most physically challenging stage of the entire journey. The plan was to hike just over 20 miles and gain a net 1200 meters, about 3,700 feet...and that was before our unplanned detour.

You see, there are two routes from St. Jean to Roncesvalles, the ending point for the day. One parallels the river and main road and the other is a more challenging route through a higher mountain pass. This more technical route was temporarily closed due to heavy snowfall and dangerous conditions. We certainly planned to take the safe and recommended route but right out of town we unknowingly took a left instead of a right (I´d try to defend myself and say it was an ambiguous turn, but it was pretty easy to read) and started climbing up the wrong path. About 10km later and 300m higher, Jeremy and I began to notice our directions were a little off. We stopped to talk with a farmer on the side of the road and eventually found out we were on the forbidden path. Through a awkard exchange of french meets english that consisted mostly of exaggerated gestures and over-emphasizing certain syllables, (which never helps but we all seem to do it anyway) we think the farmer told us there was a shortcut to meet up with the proper path. Jeremy and I thought about it but decided it was best to backtrack down to the town and start again. Halfway back down towards Saint Jean we managed to hitch a ride with a guy who told us we made the right decision to start over. He told us the other route was closed for good reason, four people had died in the high mountain pass within the last year alone after failing to heed the warning and getting stranded. That made us feel significantly better about our decision to go back.

Once we were on the right track we started moving quickly to make up the lost 2 hours. The trail wound through various towns and wilderness as it followed the river up the mountain. The scenery was gorgeous, some of it reminded me of the Smokies in Tennessee until we´d see a towering white capped peak just a short distance away. As we made our way closer to Roncesvalles, we crossed the snowline and the temperature dropped pretty significantly. I´m now very glad we were able to borrow some warm gear from Inigo. It was also funny to see pilgrims´ unwanted gear strewn to the side of the trail as they tried to shed weight while climbing the mountain. We found extra tennis shoes, large hardcover books, and even a handcart (really?) on the side of the trail. Towards the top I really began to feel the physical strain of climbing so far with 25 extra pounds on my back. I made the mistake of not training at all for the hike. I figured I was able to cycle much greater distances through much higher elevations so simply walking seemed easy! Hah, man I was wrong. It didn´t help that all the waterfountains along the trail were frozen and out of order so I was pretty significantly dehydrated as my liter water bottle was finished miles ago. That climb through the mountain pass was one of the most physically and mentally challenging experiences I´ve had in a long time, JOH included.

Once we finally crossed the peak of the ridge and descended about 200m to Roncesvalles, it was around 6pm and I was exhausted. I lied in bed til around 730 when we had dinner reservations at the restaurant for peregrinos, spanish for hikers. We ate with two other Americans, an Italian, and a Korean we had met the night before and we´ve stayed with most of them for the past week. Dinner on the camino consists partly of all the wine and french bread you want, something I´m going to miss when I get home. We ate fish, fries, soup, and more as we joked about how little we had all trained and how good the wine tasted. Shortly after dinner around 9, we all passed out with no trouble at all. I´m really starting to enjoy this carefree lifestyle.

El Camino, translation: The Camino

Even before I graduated this past December, I have been looking for an opportunity to travel abroad for an extended period of time. One of my good friends and I had tossed around the idea of backpacking through Australia and New Zealand but when his job started in February, this was no longer possible. Since then I´ve spent some time volunteering at Shortridge Middle School downtown and doing a great deal of sitting around, still interested in travel but no opportunities presented themselves. That is, until one night I got a text from one of my teammates from this past summer´s bike ride. He had some free time and was looking for a hiking partner to trek across Spain. I was very interested and less than a week later had booked tickets to Madrid for 5 weeks in Spain.

Jeremy sold me on the traveling "El Camino de Santiago" or The Way of Saint James. It´s primarily a Catholic pilgrimage from the French/Spanish border to the far northwest corner of Spain in Santiago de Compostela, where the remains of Jesus´apostle Saint James are rumored to lie. The trail has a pretty interesting history. It has been traveled by pilgrims off and on since the 10th century. It is an established route that has hostels or albergues in every town for peregrinos (hikers) to stay. I have always been interested in seeing Spain since taking a few years of Spanish in high school and the camino travels through small villages, large cities, and some pretty spectacular scenery.

The flight to Madrid was pretty uneventful. I got to see NYC for the first time via the airplane which was pretty cool. The route then backtracked to Philly where I made the most of my 3 hour layover by drinking Yuengling and watching spring training baseball in the airport bar. That made the trans-Atlantic flight to Madrid seem effortless. Once there, Jeremy met me with a scribbled sign that said POOLBOY and and 3 week beard that made him look homeless, more on that later. We only planned on spending a day in Madrid so that afternoon we took a foot tour that covered most of the major monuments, cathedrals, etc in town. Along the way we witnessed some of the world´s worst street performers. Ever. My favorite was a noticably overweight man dressed in a homemade form fitting Spiderman outfit who would strut a few steps, strike a majestic pose while pretending to shoot webs, and then call out people watching and ask for money. Naturally, we took a picture with him.

That night we met up with one of Jeremy´s good friends from Duke who lived in the city. Inigo was a great host who met us at a pub for a Real Madrid game then took us to a hole on the wall restaurant for platter after platter of delicious tapas. By the way people in Spain take their jamon (ham) seriously. It´s definitely not the stuff you find at a grocer in America. It´s cut in thin slices from the original hunk of meat, heavily salted, and delicious. Inigo told us the top of the line jamon could go for well over 150 euro/kilo. I can´t possibly justify laying out that kind of cash for some ham but the lower end stuff we had was still delicious. When Jeremy and I asked where we could find cheap, warm clothes since we both didn´t prepare for the unseasonably cold weather, Inigo took us to his place and let us borrow some of his gear for the month. Great guy.

That night on the walk back from Inigo´s to our hostel, I had what can only be described as a naive American tourist moment. It went something like this... Me: "Jeremy, see that girl over there? No not her, the one with too much makeup who's agressively pursuing any man that walks by. It's freezing out, what's she doing wearin a skirt that short in this freezing weath- ooooooooohhhhhhhhh." Yep, Jeremy picked our hostel that was right next to a prostitute hotspot. Way to pick em Julio.

The next day we left for San Sebastian, a town on the northern coast of Spain less than an hour from the French border. On the six hour bus ride (on a suprisingly nice bus, made Greyhound look like a schoolbus) Jeremy put his Spanish skills to good use and made friends with a local who was staying in San Sebastian for the night as well and traveling right near St. Jean Pied de Port (start of our journey in France) the next day. She offered to give us a ride there which saved us four hours on various trains. I´ve also been trying to brush up on my Spanish and been having short conversations with locals to mixed results. I guess that´s what happens when the most I did to prepare for the language in advance was to watch this video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEoHz56jWGY
Gets me every time. Rest in peace Chris Farley. That night Jeremy and I took another foot tour of the town and had American sized helpings of tapas that night, all of which were delicious but one. Jeremy decided to try what can best be described as fish sausage which tastes as bad as it probably sounds. Tastes kind of like finely ground fish mixed with sawdust for consistency. And it´s wrapped in a white casing with blue veins. To say the least I would not recommend it.

The next morning we rode with Jeremy´s new friend and her other friend who drove us to St. Jean in his beautiful new Jag. Unfortunately he was an older guy driving an extremely responsive car and we jerked and lurched all over the road as he was apparently unable to adjust to his new ride. Now I know what a driver´s ed instructor feels like when taking a new 16 year old out for their first spin. I spent my first half hour in France trying to keep down my lunch. We arrived in a small village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, said our thanks and goodbyes, and set up shop in the hostel. The next day marked out first day of 30 on the trail so we briefly enjoyed the nightlife then went to bed.