First Day of Hiking. August 7th 2012.
A shaven headed young man with a Chicago twang and a backpack is eying ours and yelling, “Hey, are you guys going to Saint Jean? Wanna split a cab?”
“No thanks, it’s only an hour on the train”, I reply.
“Suit yourself,” he smiles, as a car pulls into the lay-by beside him, “I’ll see you there.”
That afternoon, in picture postcard market town of St Jean Pied-de-Port (Saint John [at the] foot of the pass), Rob and I join the queue at the Pilgrims Passport Office; a small community hall furnished with foldout tables. It is best, a leathery old woman with a clipboard informs us, in broken English, to avoid the full force of the mid-Summer sun. Starting early each day will ensure us a place at the next hostel and help us avoid sunstroke so we must not walk now, but get a bed for the night and rise with the birds.
Actually, they say a pilgrimage begins at home, so for me it started in Brighton, but I’m not counting the Easyjet flight to Biarritz, or the train to Bayonne and then on to St. Jean. That was just preparation for ‘The Camino de Santiago de Compostela‘ or ‘The Way of St. James Under The Stars’: a 500 mile trek from the South of France, up and over the Pyrenees and then all across Northern Spain. No planes, trains or automobiles between the first and last stamp on your pilgrims passport. Final destination for Catholics: Santiago Cathedral. Final destination pour moi: Finisterre – translation – ‘the end of the known world’. (Online pictures of clover-clad rocks, parting to reveal white sand flats against a topaz sea appeared worth an extra 54 miles of blistered heels and sunburn.)