Camino countdown

The apple of anticipation is being nibbled to the core

In the main street of St Jean Pied de Port one year ago.

I can hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner upstairs. 

Cathie is getting the house ready for the house sitters, who will arrive in a week or so.

I’m messing about with credit cards, making sure our meagre stash is in the right place when we get to France on Monday morning.

Yesterday we packed the bags. It was a bit premature, but a good chance to check if our bags are the right size (small if possible) and to see if we can remember what we may have missed.

At 7am Sunday we leave Nelson for Auckland, Singapore and then Paris, landing at Charles de Gaulle at 7.35am Monday.

At 7am Thursday we leave Paris by train, heading for the French village of Hendaye, on the Spanish border. Across the river is Irun, the Spanish town where our walk begins.

It’s all about the Camino.

Most people have heard of the Camino - el Camino - The Way of St James - The Camino de Santiago.

Many have seen the movie, The Way, with Martin Sheen. We watched it again a couple of days ago. We found it on YouTube, in Spanish, with Spanish captions.

It’s an entertaining enough movie, but gives you no idea of that particular Camino trail - the Camino Frances.

The Camino is a slippery beast to tie down. There isn’t a definitive Camino, although if you were asked to nominate the most recognised path, it would be the Frances route.

One thing all Caminos have in common is that they finish in Santiago de Compostela.

Destination - the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela.

Last year, close to 440,000 pilgrims arrived in Santiago to receive their Compostela - the official recognition that they’d completed at least 100km by foot or 200km by bike. This is the biggest number on record.

Recently, the pilgrim office in St Jean Pied de Port, starting point for the Camino Frances, reported that daily numbers setting out on their walk were about 200 a day higher than last year.

Statistics are abundant and hard to pin down, but it seems about 60 percent of those picking up their pilgrim certificate walk the Frances route. However, nearly half that number start in Sarria, just over 100km from the finish. 

Those that start in St Jean Pied de Port, the small French village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, face just under 800km of walking over several weeks.

To carry on the statistics theme, about 30 percent of walkers follow the Portuguese route from either Lisbon or (the shorter option) from Porto.

Six percent walk the Camino del Norte and that’s us this year. The route is generally regarded as the hardest because of the multiple ascents and descents along the way. From our start point of Irun, it’s about 850km and follows the northern coast of Spain along the Bay of Biscay, before ducking south to join the Frances route for the last couple of days.

These are not the only options. Many pilgrims (or peregrinos) start further north in France from towns like Le Puy, adding more than 200km on to the Frances route.

In 2019 I was halfway through the Frances route when I met a man who had started in Zurich, three months earlier and had covered something like 2000km

Spiritually, it’s said that your Camino begins when you conceive of the notion, or perhaps when you walk out your door.

Regarding spiritual. We’re not religious, yet we find a lot of happiness and fulfilment in these weeks of walking.

In 2019 I first walked the Camino Frances alone, or as alone as you can ever be on the trail.

I planned and had booked to return for the del Norte in 2020 and again in 2021, but Covid put paid to both those sets of plans.

By the time 2022 came around, I’d met and married Cathie and we decided that the best introduction was the Frances route. You can read the full report of that trip here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mxyQUvgpV-GwNqGXuwIg2P1EuFvC45nGPvREdbNN-aI/edit?usp=sharing

Before we finished that walk, we’d decided to return and tackle the northern route.

So here we go. Bags are packed, all the organisation is done. As previously, we have bed and breakfast hotels booked all the way through - for 49 nights. We have tried to limit the distance each day to 20km as befits my antiquity. As well, our bags will be carried, so we just have a small day pack.

It’s said that, as with the Frances route, the first day is the hardest. That’ll be Friday next week. By the end of the day we’ll be in San Sebastian.

I’ll be sitting down with a beer every day to describe how things are going.

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Not long now.