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

straight. It took about ten days but eventually music became a fixture in our daily routines. I think we really just started to run out of things to talk about – Laynni and I by the afternoon of day two, the rest of our on-again, off-again walking companions after a week or so together. It’s not like people became anti-social or anything, we’d generally still chat it up in the morning while we were all still relatively perky and painless, but by the time we reached the Afternoon Doldrums* most of us were in dire need of some sort of pick me up or inspiration and in lieu of a syringe of Adderall or the latest copy of The Girls of Jai Alai we usually resorted to inserting the ear buds and letting our eyes glaze over for a while.
    * The last hour of hiking, regardless of the time of day. Over time we learned that the y could be greatly alleviated by taking a good long break around five kilometres out, no matter how badly we felt like “just getting it over with”.
    Does Spain follow the metric system?
    They do, which turned out to be a never-ending source of chagrin for our American friends. The entire first week was filled with tedious conversions and explanations.
    “So we’ve hiked how far? 25 kilometres? So that’s like , what, 12 miles? No? 16 miles! Oh, well, that makes sense then. What do I mean? Well, I mean that’s pretty far. No, of course I’ve never hiked that far before. Why don’t I just think about it in kilometres then? Well, I don’t know, because 16 miles seems really far, I guess.”
    By week two most had managed to adapt their thinking to the metric system, putting each day into the perspective of the Camino, previous days along the hike and how we tended to feel after certain distances. Since none of us routinely walked that far, though, all the numbers felt rather ludicrous and arbitrary anyway. Although there is certainly something to be said for being able to say we would walk 500 miles instead of 800 kilometres. Although I’m not at all sure that I would be willing to walk 500 more , and as for doing all that just to be the man who walks a thousand miles to fall down at your door, well, I think I might just rest a while instead, have a Snickers and maybe send you an email, if it’s all the same to you.
    What is that smell?
    That, my friends, is almost certainly cow shit. Maybe real cow shit, just dropped steaming out of the ass of some or another of the roughly seven and a half million cows living, loving and staring vacantly along the trail once you reach Galicia. Or maybe some version of cow shit. Maybe under the slightly more palatable guise of “manure”, covering the fields for some agricultural reason I’ve never completely divined. Maybe just stuck to the bottom of farmer’s boots. Or maybe nothing more than the smell itself, slowly but steadfastly having seeped its way into said farmer’s clothes, the wooden walls of nearby restaurants, the fur of roaming dogs and the very fibres of passing backpacks and unkempt hair. Insidious would be a fair description. Although before you get your nostrils all worked up, for the first few weeks or so it’s really only the occasional manure-covered field and even that can often be a welcome distraction from those wafts of your own pungency.
    Is that why there are so many flies?
    That’s definitely one of the reasons. Another is that flies are native to this part of the world and typically get very active in the autumn in preparation for winter’s hibernation. Another is that pilgrims rarely do a very good job of cleaning their clothes, or their hair, or anything really, and the resulting cornucopia of smells can prove irresistible to scavenging flies in search of refuse, decomposition and filth. Those are three things most pilgrims have in abundance thanks to their remarkable assortments of half-empty bags of chips, long-forgotten sausage stumps and musty underwear, respectively.
    And why are there still mosquitoes around in October?
    There is no easy answer for this one. Usually once overnight temperatures start dropping close to freezing the time of the mosquito is long past, a small measure of consolation for mornings spent gingerly tiptoeing across frozen hardwood to shiver through a long pee before rushing to the nearest vending machine for some second-rate hot chocolate or café con leche. However, the mosquitoes of Northern Spain are apparently made of tougher stock than those giant lazy behemoths that plague Northern