Across the Pyrenees

Day 1 (Wednesday 8 May). Travel on foot is usually cheap, and my 3 train trips with SNCF (the French inter-city service) to get to St. Jean could have been too. A conductor never appeared to validate my ticket. If I had cared to risk the fine, I could have travelled for nothing.

I have done reasonably well for sleep. Five hours in Bayonne and 4 in St. Jean (my second night in Europe is always the worst). I might have done better on the second night, but, towards dawn, someone in the next room began barging about just as I was drifting off again. Packing a rucksack? They repeated the drama twice more at intervals of 15 minutes. Drunk and packing a rucksack?

I'm out the door at 06:25 and clear the town wall to the south at 06:40 after a quick stop at a bakery. I'm alone in the dawn twilight. The sky is a patchy overcast and the temperature is perhaps in the low teens. I pull the rain cover up on my rucksack as a precaution and choose the steeper but more visually appealing Route Napoleon rather than the bad weather route along the highway. I'm wearing shorts and a merino wool T-shirt. Walking is akin to x-country skiing in this respect: if you're not cold at the trailhead, you're overdressed.

As I ascend up the quiet country road, I remember that Mark Bucken walked this same route a year ago and Napoleon's army many decades before that (the former is more fearsome). I have 25.1 kilometres to go, with an ascent of 1390 metres. My guide book says that the flat ground equivalent is 32 kilometres.

One of my father's favourite expressions was: first there's the image and then there's the reality. Today, unusually, the 2 largely coincide. The Pyrenees are not the Alps. I see one distant peak with rock and snow at its summit; these high hills are challenging but not intimidating.

I chat with lots of people as I overtake them or vice versa. Our overlap is usually quite short, however, as walking paces and languages differ. At one point I come across a young man who is re-arranging the stones on a small Inukshuk in the center of the trail. He says he's from South Korea. A passing Dane says that he's never met anyone from North Korea and the young man replies that he hasn't either. For about one hour I walk with Lise from Calgary and Christian from Devon. The latter informs us that he was supposed to walk the Camino with a mate but the "useless wanker" (I think that's a derogatory term) backed out at the last moment. As we near our high point the temperature drops, the wind picks up, and light rain showers begin. The weather progresses to steady light rain and the temperature to the low single digits. I don full rain gear and press on. There is wet snow alongside the trail near the summit.

After I clear the watershed, I start steeply downhill toward Roncesvalles (Valley of Thorns). The trail is often slippery with the rain. As my son Tom says: going uphill is harder physically and going downhill is harder mentally. I rouse myself to pay attention as I place each step. If I slip, gravity will not be working in my favour.

After 7 hours, I make it to the 100 bed hostel in Roncesvalles. A hostel (albergue in Spain) is like a 2-legged-ant colony and also a low-rise, co-ed Tower of Babel. There are walkers here from all over the world. I share my bed quadrant with an Italian and 2 South Koreans.

I am mildly foot-sore (no blisters though, thanks primarily to lubing my feet before donning my socks) and leg weary, but I've made it. My Lowa boots from Germany have done a good job of keeping my feet dry (natturlich mein Herr). After putting my boots in the boot room to dry, and dumping my gear alongside my bunk bed, I head over to a nearby cafe to book the 19:00 sitting for their evening meal (having been forewarned by Christian of the need to do so). Then it's line up for a shower, followed by hand washing the clothes that I wore today. This albergue offers a clothes spinner for 1 Euro - luxury.

I dine pleasantly with an Aussie couple and a lady from Germany. Judging from the mildly stunned looks on some of the people without reservation tickets (they clearly didn't get the memo) in the cafe lobby just before 19:00, there's going to be some fervent hopes that the 21:00 sitting still has some vacant spaces. If not, they could go hungry. Rocensvalles (population 30) only has 2 cafes and there is a small horde of people here. It's a congregating point for those who have crossed the Pyrenees and for those who avoid that particular leg of the Camino. Over the next few days we'll space ourselves out owing to different destinations and walking paces, but for now there is a small crowd in residence.

 

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