Travels with my Donkey

girls were entranced, and launched enthusiastically into the grooming process, but to me there seemed something oddly lobotomised in his demeanour. I found out why as I untied him: beside that restless compressor sat a gigantic floodlight, and the poor sod had spent the hours of darkness in a soul-numbing halogen supernova.
    With the children in convalescence from the combined rigours of a long journey and a night largely occupied purée-ing fixtures and fittings into a kind of room soup, Birna and I agreed that it would be best to leave most of the donkey work to me that day. She handed me one of the two mobiles she'd come equipped with, then crammed our offspring into a tiny Toyota amongst all the stuff I'd not be needing during the day. Stripped of everything but his bowl and a pannier half full of food and sun-cream, Shinto was down to his fighting weight, and after I'd waved the family off he set forth across the sun-polished flagstones with spring-heeled gusto.
    More wide eyes in rear-view mirrors, more pavement conversations cut off mid-syllable: Shinto chewed up León's guidebook reputation for haughty implacability and left it steaming behind him in a gutter. A filthy face shot through the fly curtains of a sunless bar and smiled in childish wonder,- I smiled back. In the end I just smiled all the time, and began firing out a 'buenas dias' to anyone who passed. I was a better citizen, and the pilgrimage and my donkey had made me so.
    The shops gave way to half-built high-rises, a kitchen sink agleam in the rubble, a tiled splashback on an unrendered wall. And so León said its muted farewells, outside a desolate industrial estate whose nocturnal ambience was neatly encapsulated in the generous sprinkling of lipsticked cig butts at the foot of each streetlight.
    Next up the road was Virgen del Camino, which sounded beguiling but wasn't, the first of a succession of small towns angrily split in two by the N120, its traffic-soiled pavements stalked by Don Mueble and his warehouse brethren. Here the camino forked, offering pilgrims a choice between cowering all day in a cloud of diesel, noise and mortal danger, or tripping gaily along quiet tracks through an unspoilt rural landscape. The first was 3 clicks shorter; I hung a right and cowered.
    In half an hour we were deep in many-laned madness, not quite as desperate as the approach to León but not far off. It was hot and I was scared, but Shinto was only hungry. The bamboo evidently hadn't sated his need for living matter: even as a sweep of lorries bore down on us up the slip road we were preparing to cross, he was trying to wedge his snout under the guard rail to get at the crisped-up, peed-on, hard-shoulder brownery. A fraught minute later, for the first and only time, I saw him snap the head off a thistle and effect its weary ingestion. Shinto never spat anything out — it was as if doing so would involve an unacceptable loss of face. Once I saw a thick reflective wedge of a shattered CD smuggle itself into his gob with a fat mouthful of roadside barley; he registered its discovery with a look of embarrassment, then defiantly prepared it for his oesophagus with half a dozen ice-cube crunch-squeaks.
    The only hill of the day lay just beyond a church crowned with a precarious profusion of hay wired stork's nests. If you had a recently fed donkey you pulled, and if you had a bike you pushed. Six Dutchmen doing just that caught me near the top. 'Oh, but he is ill,' said their leader, assessing Shinto's hung head. 'You must let him rest.' I was wondering whether to go for words or upgrade straight to the sticks and stones when a clang followed by three ghastly wet chokes had us looking back down the road, where his most elderly colleague had dropped his bike and was vomiting copiously into the desiccated vegetation.
    My phone warbled into life soon afterwards, and within the hour Birna was ferrying children across the siesta-quiet tarmac. With the car empty she U-turned bumpily through the undergrowth and headed back to the hotel she'd booked us into, 5 kilometres up the road, and then walked back to meet us. It was perhaps a little ludicrous, and would be superseded in subsequent days by a marginally more practical but distressingly more expensive taxi-based scheme, but that afternoon I couldn't have cared less.
    When the path eased slightly away from the road, seven-year-old Lilja took charge of Shinto's rope; four-year-old Valdis was gently bobbing about up