Behind the Albergue Door: Inspiration Agony Adventure on the Camino de Santiago

still looks like he’d be right at home wearing a varsity jacket and eventually confronting Judd Nelson.
    Wherever you choose to start your Camino, the first step is to acquire a pocket-sized passport referred to as a “credencial”, either in advance or from the Pilgrim’s Office in the town you start out from. This booklet is used to collect stamps at albergues, hotels, restaurants and bars a long the way and it serves as an official record of your pilgrimage. You must have a credencial to stay in the albergues. Each location has its own unique stamp depicting something descriptive – usually the name, along with a symbol of some sort, and occasionally some added creativity such as a photo of a winking harlot or a self-congratulatory story about how the owner passed his driving test on the first try. Some people only collect the bare minimum of stamps, generally just where they spend the night, others seek them out at every café, bar, farmacía and candy store along the way as though the development of their callouses depended on it.
    It is also customary to purchase a palm-sized scallop shell and attach it to your backpack to denote your status as a pilgrim. A long time symbol of the Camino de Santiago and an emblem used in countless different variations along the Way, there are a number of theories regarding the exact origins behind the shell. For some it is a metaphor, with the many grooves signifying the many different pilgrimage routes that all come together to share a single destination point. Another, rather confusing, story alleges that the remains of St. James were shipped to Iberia on a magical crewless ship while a wedding was taking place on the shore, spooking the groom’s horse and causing it to dive into the ocean with him still clinging to its back, which apparently caused quite a stir as one might imagine, only for both man and horse to emerge from the ocean some time later mysteriously no worse for wear. It is suspected that the bride then called the wedding off, deciding against marrying someone who wasn’t smart enough to jump off a horse before it dove into the ocean, and the general consensus seemed to be that she dodged a real bullet there. Yet another legend claims that the ship carrying the remains, just a regular ship this time, was destroyed in a storm and the body lost at sea, only to show up later on the Galician shore completely intact but covered in scallop shells and, some claim, with a fistful of bar receipts and a tattoo of a butterfly on the small of his back.
    Other enduring motifs of the modern-day Camino are the omnipresent yellow arrows serving as informal directional markers. These arrows can take the form of anything from large solid signs to rough paintings decorating weathered rocks and fences to haphazard graffiti found sporadically on sidewalks, walls and lamp posts throughout bustling cities. Regardless of size, shape or precise shade of yellow, these frequent reminders form a rigid pilgrimage guide and ominous warning of all the myriad dangers that can befall a careless wayward pilgrim - from adding unnecessary kilometres to your already full hiking schedule to losing touch with fellow pilgrims to missing second breakfast to accidentally laying eyes on a mosque. By the end of the first week you’ll be seeing yellow arrows in your dreams, and not just pointing the way to the all-male sauna the way you normally imagine them.
    The final physical representation of the Camino, besides your irreparably damage d feet, is the “compostela”, an official certificate of accomplishment presented to weary hikers at the Pilgrim’s Office in Santiago upon completion of the route. In order to qualify your credencial must have stamps proving that you travelled no less than the final 100 kilometres for walkers, or 200 kilometres for bikers and those arriving by pogo stick. There are many benefits to earning a compostela, including priority enlistment at Catholic schools in the greater Santiago area and thirty seconds alone to do anything you want with the strangely lifelike statue of St. James inside the Cathedral, although previously the big draw was a reduction of your time in purgatory. Few Catholics actually believe this anymore, considering it more likely to simply engender God’s goodwill toward you and put you in the good books so to speak. Which could come in pretty handy if you’re trying to get bumped up from purgatory to the pearly gates and you’re competing