Travels with my Donkey

dolefully incorporating a bronzed cast of his walking boots, stands by the 26-kilometre marker. Or in fact like the thousands of medieval pilgrims pushing up the alfalfa in crypts and churchyards right up to Santiago, some even within sight of its cathedral. Every time the cartilage in my right knee gave me some gyp, which it had done to embarrassingly vocal effect in many a crowded nocturnal dormitory, or I felt a twinge in an ankle, or Shinto stumbled over a rock, I'd think, No, please, not now. Just as I thought seven hours later, in fact, when our recovery from the brandy club's initiation of its newest member was rudely foreshortened by a town-quaking asinine cacophony.
     
    Shinto maintained his alarm in snooze mode, six brays every fifteen minutes. More emphatic, these: in place of the little-donk-lost bleats of yore here was a bugled, galvanising call-to-legs. At 7.00 we succumbed, and leaving Evelyn and Petronella to a more benign convalescence hit the funereal streets of Palas de Rei. For us a bakery breakfast of pizza — not sure how that happened — a bowl of chaff by a lamp-post for Shints, and off under a low and heavy sky.
    The meteorology wasn't representative and nor were our surroundings. Just as I settled into a drawling, cocksure commentary on corn cribs and cabbage trees, we found ourselves deep in a Vick-scented grove of flagpole-trunked eucalyptuses. And as the digits clicked down on the marker posts, so the increasingly well-developed pilgrim infrastructure began to suggest an almost processed experience that seemed a debasing affront to those weeks of lonely, biblical toil. Every time the camino crossed a road, it did so between red-triangle warning signs alerting drivers to the presence of blob-headed gourd-toters. There were taxi phone numbers daubed on walls to tempt any hellhound idlers,- we passed a refugio and noted condoms festooned horridly in the adjacent undergrowth. 'It hasn't always been like this,' I insisted stoutly as we clopped over a Roman bridge towards the pilgrim crowd gathered round a humble church. Inside a priest was signing photographs of himself.
    Most pilgrims were overnighting in Melide, and because we weren't it quietened down after lunch. Indeed, the weirdly eucalyptine forests notwithstanding, it was very much business as usual. A mouthy little donk in a neglected paddock spotted Shinto and charged over to bray and bellow and hoof his fence in frustration; Shinto skulked away, then shat himself foully round the corner. In a shaded dell we came up to a wooden bridge, and watching my dear, daft donkey settle into that familiar melancholy stupor before it I felt an odd surge of pride. 'Aren't we even going to try to...' mumbled Simon, and leading Shinto gently about I smiled in happy resignation.
    The detour meant, as ever, the road, and that at least meant a turn of speed. For an hour we mixed it with the truckers and sales reps; then one of those pilgrim-crossing signs appeared out of the clearing murk and eight legs padded back on to the dust. Simon's brought up the rear: it was good to have someone to share the droving with, and it had long been apparent that Shinto prospered in a triangular relationship.
    The night before I had delivered a keynote tutorial on donkey propulsion, heckled throughout by table mates who had witnessed nothing but farce and mutiny. 'Eeeeeuuuwwww!' we'd all ended up grunting at each other, like constipated weightlifters: I've rarely known a bill to arrive so promptly. And yet when Simon first essayed this discredited ululation under camino conditions, ostensibly in jest, something in his tone and meter imbued it with such gruff potency that Shinto leapt into a luggage-bouncing, click-devouring trotlet. What did he and Hanno have that I so patently didn't? Imposing physical stature and a generally more resolute bearing were answers I'd rather not have found myself contemplating, preferable as they were to the prognosis suggested a few months later when medical analysis discovered an accumulation of environmental oestrogen in my body.
    Thus it was that with the sun finally bullying its way through the cloud, we marched up, down and through a fitful parade of fly-blown hamlets before descending the breakneck valley into Ribadiso with almost triumphant panache. The medieval pilgrims had nicknamed this site Puente Paradiso, and it wasn't hard to understand why both they and my friend Nicky had found the refugio here so delightful: a