Walking to the end of the world

It was on the 11th day that I allowed myself the question I’d been asked consistently — what am I doing here? The June sun was baking the skin on my neck and back, rivulets of sweat were flowing down my body, and the right strap of my backpack was pushing so deeply against my shoulder blade that my entire back was wound up into one tight knot of muscle. The trail was an endless asphalt ribbon with no trees on either side. I had last walked past a hiker a couple of hours earlier and the water in my bottle was barely above the first groove from the bottom. My hiking map showed a café ahead, but without really knowing where I was, I couldn’t figure out how much further the café was. “What am I doing here?” I screamed with no one around to hear me, “what am I doing here!”

‘Here’ was somewhere between the towns of Albeiroas and Cee in Galicia in Spain. Twelve days ago, I had gotten off a bus in the tiny town of Sarria, 170 km away, and checked into a tiny bed-and-breakfast. The following morning, Javier, who owned the place, loaded Robert, an Australian who had arrived the previous afternoon, and me and our backpacks in his car and drove us a few kilometres away and dropped us at an otherwise inconspicuous turn of the road. Backpacks on, Robert and I walked away from the road, down a dirt track and were immediately on the trail.

The ‘trail’ is a rather obscure description for the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route that has been operational since the early medieval times, with the first recorded peregrino (pilgrim) going as far back as the ninth century. The Way of St James, as it is called, comprises the various routes to the cathedral at Santiago, believed to be the final resting place of St James. There are about five ways to walk to Santiago, and I was on the Camino Francis, which starts at St Jean Pied de Port in France and, with over 1.5 lakh visitors a year, is the most popular route. Robert had started his walk in St Jean, more than a month ago, and he promised to walk with me for a couple of hours until I got a feel of the way. The scallop shell is entwined in the legend and is the icon of the Camino de Santiago; the route and distance to Santiago are marked every kilometre or so, on little pillars bearing the sign of a yellow sun-like scallop on a blue background. Robert pointed out that between two pillars, ubiquitous yellow arrows pop up, on trees or rocks, to keep pilgrims on the right track.

When we had settled into a rhythm, Robert asked me what I was doing on the Camino. I am not Christian, I don’t believe in god, and so I didn’t have a one-line answer to that question. “I am turning 40,” I started a long answer, but before I finished the sentence, he nodded as though he understood. Like travelling all the way from Delhi to North-western Spain and then undertaking a 250-km walk all by myself was the textbook definition of a midlife crisis.

Capriciousness notwithstanding, I did have a somewhat tenuous reason. When I read about the Camino, what fascinated me was the fact that some pilgrims, on reaching Santiago, felt the the urge to walk on. And so they did, for another 90 km, until they reach the place where Spain ends and the Atlantic Ocean begins. They called it Finisterre, the end of the earth. For many centuries, until Galileo and, later, Columbus set it straight, pilgrims genuinely believed they had reached the end of the world. Here, they burned their clothes and their shoes, left their material possessions behind, and started a new spiritual life. The idea of walking to the end of the world appealed to my sense of story. I didn’t explain any of this to Robert; somehow, it wasn’t necessary. Of the millions of feet that have in the thousands of years pounded the very track I was walking on, some may have had better reasons and some worse, but what was important was that no reason was too bad to walk the Camino.

In a couple of hours, Robert decided to hurry on ahead and we parted hoping we would meet again. The trail fell and rose and curved ahead. The section of the Camino I was on twirled through the Pyrenees, past wooded forests that would eventually open into serene pastures. The only sounds were birdsong. An occasional farmhouse, with well-tended vegetable patches, was the sole sign of human civilisation. After three hours of walking, in what was to eventually become a routine, I stopped at a café for an energy drink, a chocolate and a chat with other walkers. Then I set off again.

An average day’s walk on the Camino is about 22-25 km. By 12.30 or 1pm, just as the sun gets blazingly hot, you emerge from the woods to the service lane of a highway and then walk into the town. Portomarin, where I stayed the first night, was on a hill. As I crossed a long bridge over a wide river, Miño, and then looked at the prospect of climbing up 52 Spanish steps, it was with a mixture of exhilaration at having finished my first day on the trail and the weary recognition that some kind of karmic retribution was being played out. A hot bath, a hearty lunch and a wonderfully restorative stroll around the beautiful town square later, the joke was on the universe.

That first day was a pretty accurate blueprint of the days to follow. My body, accustomed as it was to sitting — at office, in cars, in the Delhi metro — adapted surprisingly quickly to the task of transporting myself from town to town. Sometimes I’d walk with someone, the conversation invariably starting with the ‘why are you on the Camino’ question and then progressing to an exchange of stories of our countries and cultures. There was Nancy, a 76-year-old from Washington, walking with her grandson; 19-year-old Cressida, from Holland, who was learning Spanish in her gap year; Mark, from Munich, who boasted about his blister-free socks; and Peter, from Minneapolis, who had a terrible toothache and who, when the dentist did a root canal and refused to charge a peregrino , walked on to the next town and got a second tooth fixed too.

Often though, I’d walk alone. I’d stop whenever I wanted to, to admire a flower, or dip my feet in a stream, or just to pause and look around me. Like vignettes from a particularly bucolic fantasy, herds of massive cows often thundered past. Sometimes, a stallion or a mare gambolled along. There was even an incredulous ostrich, hissing away behind a fence. The only buildings other than the occasional farmhouse were granaries, 800 or 900 years old, elevated from the ground to protect the produce from rodents, with a pagan symbol on one end of the roof and a cross on the other. I stopped to drink some water once and a chatty farmer, with a lavish stomach and smelly overalls, came and sat next to me. Between my phrasebook Spanish and his broken English, we managed a few sentences. “Why have both — a cross and a pagan symbol?” I asked him. They were both pagan initially, he told me with much gesturing and long pauses, but when Christianity came, they replaced one with the cross. And they let the other one stay, “just in case, just in case this Jesus was not coming to save us. Like a battery back-up!” he exclaimed, with a thump on my back and a wink.

It was exhilarating to know nothing, to only ever worry about spotting the yellow arrow.

I wasn’t expected anywhere, I wasn’t needed to do anything. In the city, walking is the thing you do between leaving where you are and worrying about not being where you should be. Yet, no one asks you what you are doing. In the city, thinking is by force a passive activity; not something you should be actively ‘wasting your time’ on. On the Camino, this is marvellously reversed. Walking is passive here, thinking active.

As a person who’s lived a life driven by self-imposed accomplishment targets and work-enforced deadlines, my daily life is an endless chore of making choices. Between editing a paper and raising a child, it is a constant battle of guilt and responsibility. When I am at home, I wonder if I should be at work. When I am at work, I am certain I should be home.

By that 11th day though, I had walked nearly 200km, most of it alone. Mindful of expenses, I hadn’t taken a single rest day. My left knee was wobbly and painful. At times I was desperate for a friend or a phone call. I missed my kid intensely. I had been on the trail for six hours, and at 2 pm I was still walking, in 32 degrees Celsius under a hot Spanish sun, not knowing how long I had to go. That was the first time I truly wondered what I was doing here. I sat down for a bit, trying to talk myself into carrying on. I wanted to take off my shoes, dry out my socks, find some water. But it was too hot to sit, there was nowhere to linger.

Despite myself I drank the rest of my water in one long gulp. I’d scratched the back of my neck and ripped the skin off, it felt like the sun was burning a hole through the wound; each of my toes acquired individual blisters, I could feel my knee click precariously with every step, I stuck out my dry tongue, not knowing how that helped. And suddenly, enveloped by this intense misery, for the first time I had a clear answer to why I was there. Unlike my real life, on the Camino, there were no choices to be made. There wasn’t a question of this over that, would this be better or that? On the Camino, despite the pain, the heat, and the intense exhaustion, all that I really had to do was put one foot in front of the other. In a way, that’s the life to aspire for. Carry a backpack, drink your water, and take one step after another.

Two days later, I hobbled up a high cliff, as tourist buses and fancy cars zipped by. At the top of the cliff, just past an ancient lighthouse, is a crop of rocks and then the bright blue ocean stretching up to the horizon. Day-trippers got off their vehicles and posed by the lighthouse and on the rocks. Despite everything we now know about the shape of the earth and the geography of continents, Finisterre really looks like the end of the world. I sat there for a long time, feeling centered despite being on the edge. It felt embarrassingly momentous; a personal triumph so joyous that I did not for a second wonder what I was doing there: 40 years old, alone, at the end of the world. Then, I stood up and walked back.

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