After all that build-up to the grand firework display on the night of the 24th, the pilgrim party in Santiago was a little underwhelming. I suppose, like most things, it simply couldn’t live up to the hype. In some years, the entire facade of the cathedral is lit up with a phenomenal son-et-lumiere show while pyrotechnics close the fifteen minute performance. This year, however, the fireworks were set off from six different points around the city – but not the Praza do Obradoiro. I’m glad I gave up my three-hour vigil and went back to the albergue for something to eat at ten thirty or else I would have been pretty cranky! Fortunately, though almost all the fireworks were obscured behind the huge Concello building (meaning the crowd which had previously filled the square wound up massed into a thin wedge overlooking the park) I managed to find a good angle to remedy the situation.
I’m glad I got to see the cabezudos in action, though. I’ve often heard of this farcical summer festival but I’d never seen them in action until yesterday. It beats me how the dancers were able to move so easily with such huge objects on their heads, but they did. At one point they even invited the children in the audience to dance with them. My mother said she had always been a little scared of them, and it’s not hard to see why – they really are grotesque. I could see some of my contemporaries back home immediately assuming the festival to be racist, due to the over-exaggerated features on the two black cabezudos, but if you compare them to the others, they’re no more or less ghastly. I think it’s just the Spaniards laughing at the world and everyone in it as they always have done – and after their most recent car crash of a general election, who can blame them? Context is everything.
I set off relatively late this morning, leaving the albergue just before seven. If I was expecting a quiet escape from Santiago, though, I was mistaken: all of Galicia’s youth had descended upon the city last night (the 24th/25th being a national holiday, after all) and, in true Spanish fashion, they had made a full night of it. So when I descended into the city proper, the streets were packed with hundreds of twenty-somethings having breakfast in every available bar, café and pastelería. Unlike England, there were no scenes of drunken behaviour at all. The Spanish drink about as much as we do on a night out, but as their nights out last a full four hours longer than ours, it tends to work its way out of their system. And don’t get me wrong, but a Spanish breakfast of Cola Cao and a tostada is a much better end to the night than a dodgy kebab!
Leaving my long-buried memories of clubbing in my university days behind, I set off under a clouded sky toward the west. The cement Camino waymarkers helpfully reappeared, together with the yellow arrows, guiding me on to Finisterre, the end of my journey.
After the tedious stretch between Arzúa and Santiago, it was a welcome relief to rediscover some of the magic of the old Camino on the westward road, devoid of the post-Sarria stampede. Oak forests, Roman bridges and stepping stones replaced eucalyptus plantations and ironworks, and the merry stonechats who have been with me every day of the Camino reappeared, as though the same family had accompanied me all the way from Burgos.
Finally, as I reached the riverside haven of Ponte Marceira, I saw something I have been looking for since León: an otter. It was only a brief glimpse, and from a fair distance, but it was enough to be sure. For me it was exactly the reassurance that I needed after two days in a city that I was back where I was supposed to be: in the countryside again, doing what I do best – that is, walking and watching the world go by.
Having left my iPhone/earphone connector on the bus at the very beginning of the Camino (one of a number of accidentally jettisoned items including my sunglasses, shampoo, gloves and scallop shell) I have done most of the Camino without any kind of soundtrack whatsoever beyond the silence (or birdsong) of the world around me. There have been a lot of pilgrims on the road with AirPods in, which is a little sad to see, and more still talking of the podcasts they’ve been listening to. I really wanted to take in the meseta, silence and all, so I have deliberately saved an audible treasure for the final stages of the Camino: the BBC Radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.
Brian Sibley’s take on Tolkien’s masterpiece has a longstanding association with travel in my head, as my dad used to put it on when we went to the Lake District when I was a child. Consequently, though I must have listened to it in its entirety some twenty times since, there are still fragments that give me visions of the Lakes as crystal clear as the waters that lap upon their pebbled shores (the last march of the Ents in particular always conjures up the thundering falls of Aira Force).
I’m deeply attached to the films, but the BBC Radio version is something all Tolkien fans should know. Peter Woodthorpe’s Gollum is so good it puts Andy Serkis’ interpretation in a firm second place (and that takes some doing) and the Shakespearean majesty of Michael Hordern’s voice makes for a phenomenal Gandalf.
But it’s the firmer focus on the road and the journey that makes the radio adaptation so special when you’re travelling. The films glaze over it with stunning New Zealand visuals, but the radio drama gives Tolkien’s poetry and song the airtime it so richly deserves, and several of his walking songs have been staples of mine this summer.
I got as far as the attack at the Ford of Bruinen before arriving at my destination of Vilaserío today, where I had lunch with Liza, a chirpy Belgian pilgrim I keep bumping into, and three Ukrainian pilgrims from Lviv who had run out of money in Santiago but continued their Camino to Finisterre anyway, foraging and sleeping rough for the last forty eight hours. We bought them lunch to keep them going, and I hope others extend the same helping hands wherever they end up!
Tomorrow is another day. If I do as well as I did today, I will shoot for the coast and the old whaling town of Cee, but if I only make it as far as Buxantes, then that is no bad thing either. Before then, however, I have my second communal dinner of the Camino (I have managed to miss most of the places that do these somehow) with my old friend Simas. It’s good to have company once again. BB x
The Book of Barnabas 