Day 4: Orio to Azkiku, via – dare we say it – Some Healthy Realisations? (18,1k)

Although I’d told myself the night before that my reasons for not getting the albergue breakfast, in addition to not wanting to spend €5, was that it was served at 07:30 – basically midday in pilgrim terms – I don’t actually leave the albergue until 07:50, after checking out the breakfast spread (soft yellow apples, sugary supermarket yogurt, basic bread and pre-sliced cheese) and after almost everyone else has left. By the time I go, only the handful of pilgrims who opted for bed and breakfast are left, among them my new bestie Gertrude, and a Spanish guy who looks to be in his thirties but who wears braces and is here with his mum. He’s got long hair and a beautiful, tanned face and a big laugh. I like him.

I head out of Orio and up into the mountains that lead to Zarautz. I pass a cafe serving delicious-smelling tostadas and coffee but tell myself I can’t afford such luxuries. Instead, I pick up some chocolate de taza on the insistence of the lady working in the tabac and look for a place to eat it with the leftover bread I bagged after the communal dinner last night and the orange I bought at EROSKI City.

The path is not as wild as it was the first two days, and I struggle to find anywhere that isn’t basically on the road. I can’t sit on the road, can I? The only option seems to be to climb a fence and sit in a field of donkeys, cows or sheep. I walk on. Gradually the cow and sheep and donkey pastures give way to fields of vines and a huge house appears, presumably the residence of the wine maker. My heart sinks as I realise I’m basically entering someone’s private property for the foreseeable future. You can’t sit and eat your packed breakfast on someone’s private property.

Right outside their gate, I find what at first inspection looks like a shrine – a sort of totem pole, a bench, a box with a cross on it, a few small structures. An altar, I think as I approach cautiously. For religious people. Not for people like me. As I walk closer I realise one of the small structures is a box of plasters and stuff – the cross on top is not a symbol of Christianity, but of First Aid. And on the totem pole are carved only two symbols: the pilgrim shell, and a backpack. The bench has beautiful views of the rolling vineyard hills.

I walk on. Surely, the bench is meant for worship. Not eating.

Only five minutes later does it hit me how stupid I’m being. That the bench is clearly for pilgrims who need to sit down, for whatever reason. Someone put out a bench and decorated it with pilgrim symbols. And I, a pilgrim, think “not for me” and walk on. How bloody welcome do I need to feel!?

It hits me that maybe this is relevant to how I felt in San Sebastián. To how I felt in high school. To how I feel every time I walk into a bar, see a guy I fancy, or join a new group.

People with low self esteem are hard to love because they are so used to monitoring others for signs they are not wanted that they need twice as much love as a securely attached person to feel loved. To feel welcome. And so believing yourself unloveable becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because constantly providing someone with twice as much love as usual is exhausting. So a lot of people give up. If your partner is insatiable, how will you ever be enough?

As I continue walking away from the bench that was put there for people exactly like me, stomach rumbling and legs aching, I pledge to pretend I’m welcome from now on. Just for a week. Who knows what miracles may await if I stop shutting people out in a pre-emptive strike against the rejection I’ve somehow tricked myself into thinking is inevitable?

Encouraged by this new plan, I sit down and eat my orange and DIY pain-au-chocolat in the last field before the cusp of the hill. The chocolate de taza is awful. Dry, crumbling and way too sweet. Maybe the lovely lady in the shop saw an opportunity to shift a never-ending stack of ill-advisedly purchased goods. Bad thought. She probably just has terrible taste. Nonetheless, I wolf down my breakfast as a half dozen pilgrims pass by in front of the wine country vistas. I offer one of them, an exhausted French woman in her fifties, some chocolate. She takes it, gratefully. Sucker recognize sucker.

In Zarautz, I stop for a cafe con leche on a terrace overlooking the beach. It’s full of waves and surfers and people who don’t push away love. Presumably. I call up the tourist office in Zumaia, the next stop, where a very helpful lady tells me the albergue is shut for repairs and gives me the numbers to two options I know I can’t afford. Realising I must go onto Deba, I phone up the albergue to ask what time they usually fill up: “around four,” and I should try to get there by three to be sure. It’s ten fifteen. There is no way I can walk 22k over mountainous terrain in less than five hours. Seems like Azkizu is my only option, but that’s only 7.3k further on, which would bring my daily total to a paltry 10,9k. Even for a lightweight like myself, that’s a laughable Camino day.

I pay and start walking. There are so many surf shops. So many waves. If I’m only going to Azkiku I should definitely stick around to enjoy the beach, rent a board, actually do this surfing that I keep saying I love. But one look at the waves and I know I won’t. I’d have to paddle really far out, and then, this is the kicker, I’d have to surf. Who am I kidding saying I like surfing!? I hate surfing! It’s hard and terrifying and definitely dangerous.

And I can’t do it. Like with so many things in my life, I’ve tried. I’ve really tried. But I lack whatever muscles or coordination or sexy carefree can-do attitude it is that the others have, those out in the waves, tanned and happy and loveable. Fuck it all.

Not knowing what to do, I walk on. In just a few days I’ll be heading inland, away from the coast. Rain is forecast. This is my last chance. And I’m not doing it. Fuck this. Fuck me. My mind tries to feebly say, “But we’re here to walk the Camino! Not surf!” But I’ve heard it all before. I know a pathetic excuse when I hear one. Self-deception, as Joan Didion poignantly observed in her essay On Self-Respect, does, indeed, remain the most difficult deception.

More road. More coast. More surfers. More psychological self-flagellation. I run into the mother and son from the previous night’s albergue, who face the same dilemma of albergues and distances and surf options. We chat for a bit and as I say I’m going to walk on they praise the choice. “The Camino will show you!” they shout. I move on, thinking, “I fucking hope so.”

Eventually, I get to the small seaside village of Getaria. It’s cute and full of tourists languishing on a long, shielded beach with flat water. I buy a baguette, some smoked salmon, cream cheese and an ice-cold coke from a lady who’s so lovely I forget all about my self-hate for a hot second. She tells me how to get to the village’s second beach, which turns out to be as wild and surfer-strewn as Zarautz, only much, much smaller. A ridiculously hot lifeguard is sassily walking up and down the beach, swinging her hips and long brown hair and Baywatch-style, life-saving flotation thingy. In my best Spanish I ask her if it’s safe to swim, when high tide is, and which way the sun is moving. All answers are good, so I lay out my new travel towel on the sand and sit down to eat. The sandwich and Coke come in no short of epic. Around me, surfers look at me and smile. Caffeine high, or self-acceptance? Whatever it is, I’ll take it.

As I now feel welcome in the world, I decide to spend the day on the beach and call up the albergue in Azkiku to reserve a bed for the night. That leaves me with hours on the beach, which I pass swimming topless in the waves and napping in the sun. The hot life guard comes over and chats for ages about tides, waves, her friend who’s doing Erasmus in Stockholm. I’m liking this new pretend-I’m-welcome game. Is this how normal people feel? Should I go on antidepressants? Take more acid? Or even – dare I say it – experiment with feeling the social fear and doing it anyway? After all, that is definitely how someone defined courage at some point in Game if Thrones, or maybe it was Winnie the Pooh, or someone on Instagram. The point is – maybe I’m not crazier than other people? Just more chicken-shit? I ponder these questions for a few hours, and then I put my pilgrim clothes back on to make the final hike up the hill to Azkiku.

The walk goes through fields. Cows. Stone houses. It’s pretty but hot. So fucking hot. Luckily, I arrive at the albergue after only three quarters of an hour. I’m the second person to arrive, after a tall and pretty German who seems to be the same age as me which probably means she’s five years younger. When will I grow up. We get two beds in the same three-bed room, a first at this trip which has hitherto seen me share sixteen bed-dorms as standard.

“Great,” I tell Tall German, “I’m so tired of hearing old men snore.”

“I snore,” she replies, unnecessarily.

Despite these difficulties we decide to split the €2 cost of using the washing machine, and I wash my clothes properly for the first time since I started walking. Even though I’ve hand-washed them every night, they have started stinking. How much of a technique can there be!?

There is no kitchen, aka no fridge, so I turn down the €12 pilgrim’s menu (even though it’s the first one I’ve found) as I’m not sure the leftover salmon and cream cheese that have just endured five hours of hiking and beach life would taste all that great after an unrefrigerated overnighter. The kitchen doesn’t open until 19:30 (midnight in pilgrim time!) but there’s a vending machine, so I buy and Amstel Radler – beer with lime juice – and sit down in the albergue car park to eat my dinner before remembering that I’m actually on a hill overlooking some of the most beautiful coastline in the world. So I grab my bits and continue along the Camino until I find a field overlooking the ocean, technically fenced, but with the gate left open. In Spanish, “hacerse la sueca” (pretend to be Swedish) literally means to pretend not to understand something because ignorance serves you, so I grab my dumbass reputation along with my ever-growing welcome-in-the-worldness (How long until self-acceptance turns into entitlement!? Get your bets in!) and sit down in the shade of a Persian walnut tree (thanks, PictureThis) to eat.

The Radler is ice cold and the sandwich as epic as it was at lunchtime, even without a band of possibly-imaginary surfers smiling at me. I watch the sea and wonder what the farmer would do if he found me. Am I trespassing? Am I a hobo? Sitting barefoot with a can of beer in a field where I (quite objectively, now) do not belong one could certainly be forgiven for assuming so. But surely I’m doing no harm? Just the same as with my previous Nomadland epiphany, empathy for the bums of the world suddenly flares up within. Why are we not allowed to be free?

We should be, but I’m also rather scared of being accosted by a suddenly rerouted herd of Basque sheep, so after finishing my sandwich I abandon my recently-acquired compassionate hobo fervour and head back to the albergue. This one, though in no less beautiful a location, doesn’t have a paradisiacal garden with sweeping views of the surrounding sea and mountainscape, so when the others head to dinner I just go to my room and read. CanBrit has recommended How to Be a Free-Range Human, which feels particularly apt after my complete failure to go free-range in the field.

As I read, I find myself missing the other pilgrims. No communal kitchen and three-bed dorms does not suit my new free-range persona. A notification drops in saying the Queen is dead – HUGE – and I almost run downstairs to announce it before remembering these are actual strangers, and none of them are British. Instead, I WhatsApp my family, and then fall asleep at eight o’clock.

Maybe the Camino is like partying after 25 – one day on, one day off?

#oneofmyselvesisacunt #surfinganxiety #selfflagellation #faith #CaminodelNorte #travel #anxiety #moneyworries #attachment #Nomadland #hiking #CaminodeSantiago #amIahobo #antidepressantsornah #unwelcomeness