El Camino del Norte de Santiago

For 28 days this September, I walked from Bilbao to Finisterre, Spain. The route I took is one of the Caminos de Santiago, ancient pilgrimage routes from all over Europe to the city of Santiago, where the apostle James is said to be buried. In total, it was 773 kilometers (about 480 miles). The Camino del Norte, the northern route of the Caminos de Santiago, took me along the Iberian coast for about three weeks, leading me through Pais Vasco, Cantabria, Asturias, and Galicia, before turning southwest through miles of rolling farmland and forests toward Santiago. Like many pilgrims, I continued three days past Santiago to Fisterre, a small village once thought to be the end of the earth.

The first week I planned to walk with my German buddy Jakob, who, after we met in Syria a year and a half ago, remains the travel friend I’ve seen the most over the last two years, but I was looking forward to the rest of my journey as a solitary, meditative mental and physical exercise.  As all travel adventures tend to do, the camino confounded my expectations. I ended up walking alone for only two of the 28 days. I met dozens of kooky, inspiring, at times annoying, and always interesting folks along the way. By far the two I bonded with the most were two Norwegian medical students. The three of us walked together for more than two weeks.

There are dozens of tales from the walk that I could fill pages with, but for once I’ll let my photos tell most of the story. Ask me about it sometime (and really listen, as I’m finding many people back home have a hard time doing) and I’ll tell you about the grunting Danish woman and her ‘sexy underlegs’ (it sounds far worse than it was), Ian the always-drinking Englishman, sunrise just outside of Arzua, Maggie the sweetest Canadian nurse/CEO you’ll ever meet, the dog pissing on my only pair of pants at 6:45 in the morning, and a young American woman who, upon being asked her name, replied, ‘oh, they call me Gypsy.’

All in all, in many the same ways as my trek in Nepal, it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. I ended the camino feeling more confident, clear-headed, and more at peace than I’ve ever been before. It’s difficult to describe exactly what made the walk so profound. It was the opportunity for reflection that walking six to nine hours a day provided, the stunningly beautiful vistas, the immediate sense of community and comradery with other pilgrims, and, strangely, the simple daily routine that I came to expect and in which I found great satisfaction: waking early in the morning, walking almost immediately, the mid-morning snack and rest – usually on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic or in a small town cafe with a small cup of espresso in front of me, lunchtime on the beach, afternoon naps under scraggly trees, chance encounters, fun chats, and deep conversations with locals and fellow pilgrims, the glorious arrival in the albergue, taking off my shoes after a 20-plus mile day, and evenings spent at the hostel washing clothes, grabbing a simple dinner, exploring the surroundings for a short time and perhaps the most fulfilling part, falling into a deep sleep at the ripe hour of 8:30.

For many years it’s been a tradition for pilgrims to either leave or burn their clothes at the precipice of Fisterre’s peninsula, just past the lighthouse. Along with a couple fellow pilgrims, I made my way down the rocky peninsula through what was quickly becoming an ominously dark night. As dusk crept overhead, we arrived at the final distance marker. These cement signs, all sporting a concha shell pointing left, straight, or right, had shown us the way and told us how much farther there was yet to go for nearly a month, so to see the last one was a relief and a shock. Its finality –  that I wasn’t going to be walking for eight hours the next day, that I would actually be taking a bus, of all things – was suprisingly gripping. After taking photos with the marker and singing a few celebratory songs, we walked further, past the lighthouse to the end of the end. There, next to a radio tower with hundreds of pieces of pilgrims’ clothing tied to it, looking out over the vast Atlantic, we had our last peregrino dinner of bread, cheese, and fruit with a dessert of Milka chocolate and a bottle of wine. The sun fell nearly to the horizon and, confounding all of our expectations, pierced through dense layers of cloud to present, what seemed to be just for us, a whisper of a sunset. After a period of stunned silence, we decided to complete the final task of our journey. We sat for a while as the shirts we had used for nearly thirty days and, in my case, a torn and ratty pair of pants burned. We waited for the embers to burn out completely, the wine keeping us warm, before heading back to our hostel and back to our separate lives.