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

drinking too much. This Swiss girl who speaks exceptional English kept taking the piss out of him saying she needed someone to translate his Scottish accent. Every time he said something she’d say “Translation? Translation please.”, and did it like a hundred times. He eventually got so mad and said “You’re just like my girlfriend, you never know when to stop!” Then he saw me looking at him all shocked and goes “Not you, obviously”, and it all went downhill from there. He tried to cover his tracks a bit by rambling on about monogamy and how unnatural it is and loads of other rubbish. What an asshole. Can’t wait to see you guys.



The Physical Challenge
    The first question a lot of people ask is a fairly logical one – how hard is the Camino? Excellent question, and I applaud your thoughtfulness in considering that element in advance rather than five days in with fourteen different ailments and a completely bewildered look on your face. The short answer – it’s really hard. I mean, you have to hike for eight hundred kilometres. Eight hundred! Just take a moment to sit and ponder that number for a minute. Still not sounding that bad? Well, why don’t we try to give it some perspective for you? It is roughly the same distance as New York to Cleveland. Or the bottom of England to the top of Scotland. Or Amsterdam to Milan. Or Saskatoon all the way through Alberta to the British Columbia border. So, yeah, it is going to be a challenge.
    On the other hand, the terrain is not particularly difficult. From a sheer thigh-burning, ass-crack sweating, collapsing in a destroyed heap sort of way it doesn’t compare with really strenuous mountain hikes like you might find in the Himalayas, Andes or Rockies, or even any number of Central American volcanoes a person can climb straight up and straight back down if so inclined (and cursed with poor decision-making skills). There are definitely some demanding sections, first and foremost being, both literally and chronologically, day one from St. Jean Pied de Port across the Pyrenees to Roncesvalles on the Napoleon Route. And even the infamously flat, boring areas have their fair share of hills to climb and descend (which is often worse than going up) in any given six-hour stretch of hiking. And once you make it as far as Galicia it is more or less all hills the rest of the way. So I don’t want to give the impression it is a gentle stroll at the country club, sipping gin and tonics while admiring each other’s creased white tennis shorts and discussing the latest problems in hiring illegal immigrant gardeners. It isn’t nearly that leisurely, and I can tell you from experience that by day three your white tennis shorts will be off-white at best and starting to develop some troublesome wrinkles.
    However, the main difficulty of this hike is the sheer enormity of it. It is just SO long. So many days of hiking under the hot sun, so many days hiking in the pouring rain, so many mornings when you would rather be forced to see your dorm mattress under a black light than get out of bed and face that backpack for another day, so many times where you find yourself saying “I can’t believe I’m already out of band-aids again”. And most people are very reluctant to take rest days because they are afraid of losing touch with the friends they have made along the way. So you hike through the pain, the exhaustion, the mental fatigue, and sometimes it passes and things get better, and sometimes it doesn’t and they just keep getting worse. But eventually you reach the end, and you find yourself thinking about those days three or four weeks ago when you were questioning both your ability to finish and how much you really gave a shit if you finished or not and, well, they just seem like part of a strange dream, followed by some foggy stuff, then you’re done. Except that for some reason you have twice as many photos of yourself in farmacias than churches, and even though you still don’t know how to request a bottom bunk in Spanish, you do know how to ask for eleven different kinds of painkillers fluently and can accurately describe crotch-rot. There were evenings along the Camino where we would gaze around the dorm room and simply marvel at the amount of medical attention being paid to such a shocking variety of body parts, all in very amateurish fashion. At times it felt like we were living in a hospital ward, except it usually smelled less like disinfectant than