Day 6: Somewhere on a Hill to Markina-Xemein (21,9k)

The next morning I’m awakened by the usual rustling of bags and zipping of zippers. Outside, I can hear the coffee machine whirring, cutlery clanking, excited voices sharing plans for the kilometres ahead. I take my time getting up, although the absence of Gertrude in the bunk beside me gives me some alarm. How is she up this early? Somewhere outside I can hear her husky voice, her smoker’s laugh, her cough.

I have my yogurt and granola outside, feeling like a Total Breakfast Queen next to the suckers who bought the hostel’s €5 ziploc bags of bread, jam, gummy apples. Gertrude appears and asks if I’d like to start the day walking with her. Reassured by her insistence that we can abandon each other at any moment, no explanation needed (told ya we had a connection), I agree. I finish my coffee, stroke some cats, and slowly get my things in order. Which is when I realise: Gertrude is a chaotic packer. Her things are strewn all over the living room, and she’s chatting away happily to passers-by with no plans, seemingly, on getting her stuff into, as she calls it, her “hammersack.” It’s half past eight. Only her, me and the Italian remain at the hostel.

This explains a lot of the connection. I fucking hate packing. It gives me anxiety every time. Which is another way the Camino has already been helpful – as I have to pack up every morning, I’ve started getting good at it. I know where each thing goes. Zip, zap, done! And yet, every morning, I feel like it’s a small miracle when my backpack finally closes and shrinks to a manageable size beneath the straps. What can I say, it’s been good to me.

G-Boz clearly has not arrived at this stage yet, so I head out to the terrace where I continue plotting the novel as I wait. About twenty minutes later she comes out, smokes a cigarette and starts looking at the route ahead. I finally tell her we cannot plan any more than we have (Me! Telling people to plan less!) and we set off, with the Italian joining us.

I’m excited to get G’s story and it is great. The chat is great. Her personality is great. But her walking is wayyyy slower than me and Italian Girl. By eleven, when I’m normally 15k deep, we’ve only walked seven. So I take G’s number, wish her the best and set off with the Italian girl, who we can now call Lucia.

We have a good time. We walk and chat. We overtake everyone who passed us that morning. We stop for lunch on a hill overlooking the sea. We laugh. It’s nice. But about a kilometre into the final descent into Markina I feel the need for solitude, so I set off again, saying I’ll wait for her in Merkina so we can walk the remaining 7k to the monastery together.

Well, by the time I reach Merkina, my feet are telling me to forget about it. I’ve had to walk the last 5k in scorching heat without any water, and I am knackered. I find a beautiful albergue with a garden full of flowers and vegetables, and luck out – though they’re fully booked, they’ve just had a cancellation. Better yet, Cute French Guy and his maman are here, too. I text Lucia that she should try her luck, and she, too, manages to get a bed.

Partly because my feet are too beat to walk back to the supermarket in town but mainly because I heard Cute French Guy and his maman are doing the dinner, I ask about the menu. It’s definitely an indulgence to eat a pilgrim’s menu two nights in a row, but when I hear there’s going to be pasta AND chicken it’s not even really a choice anymore. I go for the breakfast, too, cause there is no way in hell I’m walking back into town now.

Until dinner, I do some yoga in the garden and look at my next steps. Guernika seems to be a cause for alarm, as the albergue is shut, and alternative lodging starts at €120 a night. Wtf!? Where was this warning during my Camino Forum glory days?

At dinner, we discuss best ways to get to Gernika. It’s confusing. It seems like we may have to take a bus in order to bypass it and reach the next affordable hostel. So much for the Picasso pilgrimage.

After dinner we finish the wine while looking at the full moon from the garden. G offers me a job. She says I can live in her house. She wants me to meet her spiritual teacher and the manager of the art show she works for and lots of people from what might or might not be a shamanic cult. These all sound like very cool things but it’s only week one and I don’t want to make any decisions. Still, it’s a seed of an idea. Is running shamanic women’s circles in Austria my next step? She shows me photos of the house. There’s a lush garden, space for meditation, Buddha statuettes. Psychedelic mushrooms grow in the grass. They have a sweat lodge.

I always wanted a sweat lodge.

#albergues #avoidantattachment #searchingforahome #CaminodelNorte #packingblues #travel #BasqueCountry #travelfriends #hiking #CaminodeSantiago

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

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