Day 5: Solitary Self-Hate to Team Triumph, via Azkiku and Somewhere on a Hill (24,9k)

As I’m already in the habit of squandering friendships, it’s not hard for me to leave my two new roomies and head for Zumaia in the early morning. It’s rained in the night but looks like a mostly dry day ahead. Cloud cover but no rain. The minute I leave the hostel I’m surrounded by a near dozen middle-aged and very loud French hikers, so I haul ass up the first hill to get some privacy. Soon enough, Zumaia opens up below – an ugly industrial port with a small, oily-looking beach. I walk for ages without finding a cafe. Finally, I sit down at a chain with a 3.8 Google rating right before the end of town. I order orange juice, coffee and toast with olive oil and tomato from a lethargic teenager and sit down outside. Within minutes, I’m joined by the middle-aged Frenchmen. Fantastique.

The breakfast is disappointing and – at €6,45 – more expensive than I would’ve paid at the albergue. It is possible to have €2,50 breakfasts in Spain, but not healthy ones. €2,50 will usually get you a cafe con leche and bread with jam or a sweet pastry – tasty, but not exactly the breakfast of champions. Lots of cream and sugar there. Then again, maybe walking this much none of that matters. Still it’s hard for me to unlearn a lifetime of being taught that you need to eat sauerkraut, knäckebröd and kale every day or your body will FAIL. Thank you, #SwedishMother.

The road from Azkiku to Deba is easy. I want to do the coastal alternative, which, “while more strenuous, offers some of the Norte’s most spectacular coastal scenery,” but realise when I reach Itziar that I must have missed the turn. This sucks, cause the next stage of the Camino heads inland and I won’t return to the coast for several days. By then, who knows if we’ll still have clear skies.

I walk fast, passing a dozen pilgrims from Spain, France, Japan, England. “Condolences on your Queen,” I say. They thank me and we chit-chat a bit. They’ve only got day packs and are only walking for a few days. Posh pilgrims.

About a kilometre above Deba I stop for a break. Sat above a field of baby lettuces, I wolf down my doughnut peach, a piece of rubbery bread leftover from the salmon party, two pieces of the drinking chocolate and hand-me-down nuts that were too “bitter” for Gertrude. Heaven. I leaf through the guidebook and make a plan for the next couple of days.

Tonight I’ll stay at an albergue some five kilometres past Deba with a fireplace, so tomorrow I can easily make the hike to Markina-Xemein. In fact, I’ll probably go further – to the monastery 1.3 km further on, ideally – but I leave the detailed planning of that for tomorrow.

I don’t like the reservation culture that’s taken root on the Norte, but the difference in stress levels between knowing you have a bed and racing to beat the competition is too huge to ignore. Maybe once I get off the coast, and get further into my Camino self, I’ll be more open to the turns of fate.

For now, I want to avoid blisters, tears and sleeping outside in my barely-there silk bed liner, and so call up and book my bed for the night. Check-in starts at three. It’s only twelve thirty. I stay in my fieldside spot for half an hour, writing up my expenses to date and thinking about a meal plan. I haven’t had anything other than bread with fish in twenty-four hours, and had hoped to eat the pilgrim’s menu at the albergue. Not having it the night before made me feel a bit left out, and I would like to give my body some nutrients before the long haul to Markina-Xemein the next day.

But at €15, it’s way steeper than I had expected. Most blogs I read said that the Norte, while definitely the priciest Camino, could still be done on a budget of €20-25 a day. Despite eating almost every meal from a supermarket, I’ve been spending way more than that all days but one, and that was only because I ate leftovers from what I’d bought the day before, when I spent €45. Almost all albergues are minimum €15, dinners €12-15, breakfast €5. That brings you to €32-35 a day before you’ve even started thinking about lunch, which could either be a bocadillo or supermarket bits (around €5-10), or a menu at around €12. That’s too expensive! Certainly if I’m to do this for six weeks. Plus, another problem with taking it slow: sure you may avoid blisters, and no, you’re not here to “prove anything to anybody,” but walking half as fast does mean paying for twice as many albergues. That’s just math, kids.

I’ve also started suspecting that I slow down to shake off the people I meet. Which would be fine, at thirty-five why stop being a hermit if a hermit is what you want to be. But the problem with being a hermit on the Camino is that near everyone else seems in it to make friends. So even if you let one group slip away, inevitably, a new one will show up.

Found a pic of me running away from all my friends

Tonight’s albergue will be €15. Dinner would be another €15. It would be nice with nutrition. It would be fun to socialise. But that’s €30 in a day, without either breakfast or lunch. There’s no kitchen but there is a fridge. I could buy some yogurt and bananas, then I won’t have paid for lunch today and will have breakfast covered. I also need to buy lunch for tomorrow cause there are no facilities between Deba and M-X. I almost always buy for two meals at a time, so that would either be dinner tonight or tomorrow. Maybe the every other night trick will be okay.

I find the albergue on Google Maps and read several raving reviews of the food, which settles it. In Deba I’ll pick up breakfast and lunch for the next day, and tonight I will enjoy a hot meal and company. I even send off a text to the girls I left behind that morning, informing them of my plans. Am I healing already!?

Deba is popping. Again, a festivo has the shops closed and the plazas filled. On my way to the beach I pass a beautiful park full of old ladies drinking wine and eating olives with their besties. By the time I reach the beach, the Italian girl has replied that they’re booked into the same hostel. Content, I lie down on the sand and listen to some medicine music as I watch the surfers.

The waves are absolutely perfect for beginners – small, regular and wide apart. Even I would love surfing here. But I feel none of the regret from the other day about having booked an albergue out of town; after all, I’ve come here to walk. If I keep stopping it will take forever, which would be alright if it wasn’t for the fact that everything costs a third more than I expected. So I’ll just have to surf another time. The waves will still be there after I figure out what to do with my life.

Hell, if I wanted to I could move to Deba. At 14:20 on the beach in Deba in early September 2022, everything is possible.

Getting to the albergue is a hike and a half, and I get lost three times as I have started to think about the plot for a new novel and, as always with a new project, it contains within it the possibility of EVERYTHING EVER since I have not yet started tarnishing it with my attempts at realisation. It’s a great time.

When I finally get to the albergue it is absolutely stunning, with a big garden overlooking the valleys below where I do an hour of yoga and meditate beneath a tree until the only child in Basque Country comes and starts fucking climbing it. Love and light does not cut it, so I go back to the albergue where I run into GERTRUDE – my FAV! We sit together at the (yes, great) dinner and drink all the wine while talking to the German and Spanish pilgrims around us.

Our server has a funky haircut so after dinner I obviously decide to ask him for weed. Gertrude, who was married to a Caribbean man for a decade and who used to run a reggae bar in Vienna, is predictably in on the plan. But how to go about it? In my fuelled wisdom, I crack an infallible plan: I’m going to sit down at the table where he’s just sat down to share a plate of potato crisps with a friend, ask if they’re from around here, and when they inevitably say yes, I will casually, as if for STATISTICAL PURPOSES ONLY, ask if “much weed is smoked around these parts.” This, I reason, will yield one of two replies: a) yes and here you are, or b) nooo we don’t do that, at which point I will, again very casually, excuse myself to “watch the sunset,” at which point, again, only two further options are possible: a) funky haircut will find me and hand me a joint explaining he couldn’t say yes in front of his boss/father in law/whatever, or b) absolutely nothing. Like I said, after a botella of finest albergue red, this seemed to me a FOOLPROOF plan.

I approach. Can I sit down? Sure. They are from here. Grand. Feeling like my plan needs a bit of stuffing, I freestyle: What do they do? Funky haircut says he’s the boyfriend of the albergue owner, a pretty woman I only then realise is watching us intently.

“Cool,” I nod and turn to his friend. “What about you?”

“I’m the village police,” Friend proudly declares.

“Okay,” says my brain. “Breathe. Abort. Just without making it seem like you only came over here with criminal intent.”

It goes so-so. I blabber on about who knows what and eventually I manage to extract myself from the table, and I manage to do so without seeming like a thought criminal, but only at the expense of seeming like I came over exclusively to pick up Funky Haircut. So now he keeps glancing at me flirtatiously, while his girlfriend, aka the owner, keeps scowling at me belligerently. Not great.

I go out to the garden to regroup. The family of the tree-climbing devil child are sat at the exact spot where they intercepted my lovingkindness meditation, so naturally I go over to get revenge by intercepting their fun family camp time by sitting down right in front of them to watch the sunset.

As I do, I smell it. Weed. Sweet dreams. No calf-cramps. Salvation. For a minute, I think it’s the family, and I almost walk up to them to ask. “Spain has a chill attitude to weed!” I keep hearing. Maybe here it’s a family affair? Thankfully, I diverge at the last minute as I realise the smell is not coming from the family of four playing Tic-Tac-Toe, but from a couple some tables behind. Said and done, I befriend them, and get a few tokes.

Smoking turns me into a hilarious genius, so I find a secluded sunlounger by the washlines (secluded, at least, from the paranoia-augmented scowls of the landlady) where I plonk myself down and proceed to writing what, in the moment, feels like sure-to-be-Oscar-winning, groundbreaking comedy on my phone, all the while laughing my head off as timid pilgrims come up to grab their laundry.

Unfortunately for posterity, Evernote experiences a syncing error, and after an hour of frantic writing I lose it all. Oh well.

In better news, smoking makes me uncharacteristically accepting of fate and stuff, so I move on from my Oscar plans to join Gertrude at the bar. Everyone else has now gone to bed, but a few tables away Funky Haircut is sitting down with two friends and – you fucking guessed it – smoking weed. I knew it. No straight person goes for a partial dye job with shaved sides.

Long story long, Gertrude and I now have weed! Buenas fucking noches, amigos.

#CaminodelNorte #travel #anxiety #moneyworries #hiking #CaminodeSantiago #rainnnnfeelitonmyfingertips #SantaMaria