Taking a Break

I am taking a break in Santo Domingo de Calzado. If you know something about the Camino de Santiago you will know that this is the place where they keep two chickens in the cathedral to commemorate a miracle that happened here in the middle ages. It involves a hanged man and a roast chicken both coming to life again. Despite the oddity of the chicken coop, the cathedral is very nice. I am spending an extra night here because after 9 days of walking, I suddenly developed a blister on my right little toe. I struggled with it for a couple of days but yesterday I decided, and other pilgrims strongly agreed, that I needed to rest for a day. Dennis is walking on ahead. I am not sure where and when we will meet up. If all else fails, we have a date on October 4th in front of the cathedral in Santiago. Other than the toe, I am feeling fine. I had a couple of days when I felt as if I had no stamina, but in spite of the toe, yesterday I felt fine. I hooked up with a great woman from Australia whose husband died recently, and we walked and talked and cracked jokes and she cried and told stories about her husband whom she called ¨my lovely boy.¨ It was just what I needed right then. I do best when I am helping other people and she helped me more than I think she realizes. She has also gone on. One never knows on the camino, if one has seen another pilgrim for the last time or if they will show up again, but I am trailing behind the first people I met.
I left my journal behind at an ATM yesterday. I had made notes of things I had left out of my previous blogs that I wanted to write about. Somethings I remember. In the story about the woman from the Czech Republic, I forgot to mention that she speaks only Czech, Russian and German so we communicated in my minimal German and very minimal Russian. However, with the help of a great deal of mime, we managed. I am turning into a linguist. People can understand my French without much problem, which is nice. I have moments when Spanish flows out of my mouth, but most of the time people cannot understand anything I am trying to say. I can understand people speaking Spanish some of the time, but there is a wide variety of accents here and often I don´t have a clue.
Before I go any further, I want to say a word or two about Olkhon Island in Lake Baikal in Russia. It is a great place. If you are ever wandering up from Beijing through Mongolia, do stop. It is a very calm and beautiful place. Caroline and I stayed in a Russian bread and breakfast because the international place was full and I felt very lucky. Most of the time, we were the only non-Russians, but there was always someone who could speak English and translate for the owner. Most often it was the man who looked after the small church nearby. He lived there with his wife, baby and goat and was very helpful. The church had four bells and he rang them frequently during the day. The church was on a bluff overlooking the lake. Amazing. Olkhon Island is a center of shamanism and I had my own healing experience there. When I arrived the ankle I had sprained in the Altai mountains was quite painful. We stopped off at the contact we had on the island and I talked about sprain and Kolya, who is a masseur, whipped out a small battery-run machine and gave me a treatment. He gave me four more in the following days and in the morning, Caroline treated me with Polish snake venom salve and massage. It worked and although the ankle still doesn´t like going downhill very much, it is fine. Then I had a headache for four days and on the last night, Vika, our contact, gave me a treatment for that and I haven´t had trouble with headaches since. Well, once after a glass of red wine.
The experience of the camino is indescribable. That is why there are so many books about it. Everyone tries to get it right. I am thinking of a book to be called ¨Conquering Christianity: Walking Beyond Belief.¨ The camino I think is both pre- and post-Christian. Most of the Christian artefacts seem to be pasted onto the essence of the walk. There are some churches and monuments that to seem to be of the nature of the camino, the octagonal church at Eunate, for example, and odd corners of the churches. There are prehistoric settlements at most of the stops along the way so people have been walking for a long time wondering what in the world they were doing. I also don´t have a clue but I think it has something to do with going beyond belief, beyond faith, beyond disbelief. At the very end, after Santiago at the end of the earth (Finistere) at the edge of the ocean, you are supposed to burn the clothes you wore on the way. I think the earlier pilgrims who did this thought they were burning the sins of their past, but I think it is about revealing the naked present.
Well, so much for my trying to make sense of all this. I enjoy walking. The landscape keeps changing and keeps being beautiful. The people I meet are great. The food is interesting and often good. Yesterday for the midday meal I had calf cheek cooked in red wine. Quite good. Today I saw a sign outside a restaurant that offered salt-cod.
This is day twelve. I think I have walked about 240 kilometers which is about 20 a day. Not enough to reach Santiago in the time I have but I will catch up by taking a bus or taxi, or else I will chuck it altogether and find a beach in Portugal. Stay tuned.