I START OUT EARLY WITH YANNIK, a big Danish fellow. He has the most impressive Viking beard I’ve ever seen. He tells me he started to grow it back in Le Puy, over a thousand kilometers back. The streets here are an awesome spectacle with so many lovely buildings, fountains, and statues. Maybe I should just stay in Spain after the Camino. Maybe get a camper-van like Pugwash and try to stay below the radar. Every time I think of Scunthorpe I feel hopelessly depressed and wonder what I’m going to do when I finish. We pop into a café and have a nice cup of coffee and then I realize I’ve lost my wallet. So I run back quickly, hoping for the best but also planning for the worst, while foolishly getting a cod liver oil tablet lodged in my dry throat, which then melts and leaves me burping horrible cod liver breath all the way back to the hostel. One idiotically excitable graybeard tells me I’m going the wrong way as I come face-to-face with him in the narrow streets.
Back to the hostel, I find my wallet where I left it, underneath my pillow, and walk out of town relieved. But it doesn’t last long, as I feel a huge cold sore building up on my bottom lip. That’s all I need right now! A facial sore to go with all the rest of them. Great!
I wonder how Cocker’s getting on. I haven’t seen him this morning, but he’ll be there somewhere, ambling along slowly with Belen and hopefully putting in some serious groundwork now with Julio out of the picture. It’s hot, hot, hot, and my heat rash is growing and spreading daily, now finding its way onto my lower back where my pack has been rubbing. The approach into Nájera is uninspiring, and at a rusty old bridge the arrows completely disappear!
Which way now? I wonder.
The midday sun is taking its toll, so I go with my instincts and end up walking half an hour in completely the wrong direction, ending up at a solitary farm. A fat man in a dirty egg- and wine-stained vest points me back the way I came. Sweltering heat waves rise from the road and I watch as a miniature Clint Eastwood figure approaches me with his poncho blowing in the wind. When he’s at my side, he stands about four feet tall. Mini Clint speaks Spanish and has a quick word with the dirty fat man and we both walk back together in total silence.
I leave him staring at a wall with some pilgrims’ prayers in every language but English and after crossing the bridge there are arrows all over the place.
I arrive in Nájera with a terrible thirst and drink two icy cans of cola as Mini Clint comes steaming past, totally ignoring me, obviously on a mission from God. An idiot pilgrim stops just to tell me that drinking cola will only make me thirsty in the long run.
“Thanks for that!”
* * * *
Today my guidebook talks of yet another medieval miracle.
Not far from here was the great battle of Claijvo (834), associated with the beginnings of the reconquest of Spain and the intervention of Saint James the Apostle, who appeared for the first time dressed as a Moor slayer. Here, Ramiro I of León defeated Abdurrahman II of Abdurrahman, and in the middle of the battle Saint James turned up on a big white horse and steamed into the Moors. He slew a thousand Moors to the right and two thousand Moors to the left. Then he returned safely to their homes “a hundred vestal virgins.”
“Good-old Saint James!”
* * * *
Inside the pilgrims’ hostel the hostelero looks perturbed at my passport and credentials, and relations are becoming strained.
“But where have you come from?” he asks quite angrily.
“Well, I was born in Dublin, but I live in England,” I stupidly reply.
“No! Where have you come from today?”
His piercing eyes stare right into my soul. One wrong answer here and I’m out on my arse. “Where the fuck have I come from today?”
Err . . . the clock is ticking, pressure building, what’s the name of the fecking place!”
“Logroño!” shouts Yannik, overhearing my plight.
“Yes, yes, Logroño, Logroño, that’s the place!”
The Spaniard shakes his head and stamps my credentials. As the doors open, I realize that I never had my passport stamped in Logroño due to the rude pilgrims’ Boxing Day “sales-style rampage,” and this is apparently what all the fuss is about.
Whilamena invites me for a beer along with a stout Dutchman called Theo. We find a nice quiet plaza in the middle of town, and Swiss John joins our group with an old Belgian pilgrim called Eric.
The Euro debate soon becomes heavily focused on how much weight we will lose throughout the journey as Theo clutches his well-fed midriff and laughs. If he wasn’t a teacher in Holland, he could well have made a great bare-knuckles boxer, as he has the biggest hands I’ve ever seen and he’s louder and more excitable than Swiss John. With my sparse knowledge of the Dutch language and the few English words that Theo knows, we get on like a house on fire.
“This is the second time I have gone to Saint James and I never lost any weight,” moans Eric.
“Yes, but look at you! You have nothing to lose! He has nothing to lose. Look at him, nothing to lose!” says Swiss John back to our group, and our table erupts into fits of laughter as Eric shrugs and rolls a cigarette.
Later in a bar across from the hostel, the French biker and I watch the film The Battle of Britain dubbed in Spanish.
I’d been hoping the French biker would be a bit more like bikers I know back home, but alas, he has only two bottles of low-alcohol beer and then goes onto sparkling water, the lightweight!
Back outside the hostel I spend the rest of the evening with my new Dutch friends, with my mastery of the Dutch language improving slowly again. Theo has the loudest, most infectious laugh I have ever heard. I would also imagine he has the loudest snore to go with it, and as the night draws to a close I ask a very important question.
“What room are you in, Theo?”