Pilgrim's Road

short forthright entries had taken on a more emotional tone in this monastery. She had arrived in the dark after a hard cold day. Night had fallen as she was still plodding through the forest. She had nothing to eat and was just resigning herself to a lonely hungry night in her tent when the dim lights of St Juan de Ortega had suddenly opened up before her. After being fed and pampered by Don José her sense of thankfulness sang out of the page.
    Don José, his football match over, called me into his wildly untidy kitchen. ‘No woman to care for me,’ he joked, pushing a few things aside to make space at the wide cluttered table. This was one of the occasions I most regretted my lack of Spanish, for it was evident that Don José possessed a keen sense of humour, as well as having a wealth of information to impart. Even with our minimal communication he had managed to tease me unmercifully about travelling by bike, claiming that it was not a real pilgrimage unless done on foot. And actually, judging by the bits of the walkers’ route I had managed to ride, I couldn’t altogether disagree with him. With so much of the Camino under the tarmac of a busy main road, it felt more in keeping with the spirit of medieval pilgrimage to take the alternative routes right away from traffic. An ideal solution, I thought, would be to upgrade these tracks to make them suitable for cyclists. But Don José had been talking about something more subtle than enjoyment or evocation of the past. It was the inner experience of pilgrimage that he felt was easier to come by on foot, particularly for the young who were his special care. He admitted, however, with a rare note of seriousness, that some people could walk the whole way to Santiago without ever knowing the meaning of pilgrimage, while others could be true pilgrims even travelling there by bus. It was all ‘in the heart’. There was something about pilgrims, he said, that he had come to love: they were ‘the salt of the earth’.
    It transpired that apart from the relics of San Juan de Ortega in his splendid sarcophagus on the other side of the wall, and the spirit of the Jeronymite monks who had lived here for four hundred years (and the camaraderie of my invisible army of pilgrims), I was to spend the night alone in the monastery. Don José is not a young man and he finds the chilly altitude of San Juan de Ortega far too severe until somewhere near the end of June. Until then he returns each night to Burgos down on the plains. Before he left he made me a supper of eggs deliciously fried in olive oil, followed by yoghurt and fruit, with a glass of his rough red wine as a barrier against the cold. After this I was escorted into the monastery and instructed on how to lock myself and Roberts securely in there for the night.
     
    ‘Brethren, be sober, be vigilant.’
     
    He was right about the cold. As I climbed the stairs to the dormitories the chill seemed to seep out from the walls. It is a fifteenth-century, two-storey structure built around a small central well, with a narrow balcony running around the upper floor, a completely utilitarian building making no concessions at all to weakness or comfort. The dormitories are bare-floored and furnished only with black iron bunks. But if the recent restoration had done nothing to dispel the primitive simplicity of the place, neither had it robbed it of its essential character. It was indescribably peaceful and again there was that indefinable sense of rightness about it. Not for a moment did I wish myself anywhere else, even for the sake of a hot bath. I went to bed wearing silk long johns, cycling tights, socks, silk vest and sweater, and piled blankets over and under my sleeping bag. Had I brought a woolly hat I would have worn that too. It was ridiculous really, lying there bundled up against the cold, my nose freezing, and yet hugging the knowledge of how privileged I was to be there, and conscious of the same warm happiness I had felt the entire day.
     
    ★ ★ ★
     
    The long freewheel down from the Montes de Oca started well on another cold sunny morning, but it became progressively less pleasant as I hit the spreading outskirts of Burgos, the city of El Cid, frenetic with its Monday morning traffic. I had been looking forward to Burgos as one of the highlights of the pilgrimage, but only when I reached the ornate stone bridge opposite the splendid Puerta de Santa María did I feel able to relax for a moment from the