Travels with my Donkey

arms. This he placed on the table, and eyeing me levelly began to fill with what lay upon it. If I'd been wearing more than pants he might have said something. And if there hadn't been an orange wedged in my gob I might have said something back.
     
    It was an almost Himalayan morning, all spindly trees on misted ridges, and we were out in it before the sun was born. Another scabby, vacant town, another inadequate bar breakfast, and thence off into the corn cribs and dung, the curled cinnamon strips of eucalyptus leaves and bark still jarringly weird under our feet. (We'd read the night before that the fast-growing and ruthlessly invasive trees had been brought in from Australia in the 1860s for construction purposes, and having proved utterly useless for these were now fitfully culled for garden furniture. I expect the whole thing was an Antipodean plot to pay Europe back for the rabbits. If not for the donkeys — introduced in the nineteenth century, the common ass found outback conditions so much to his liking that the Western Australian authorities felt obliged to shoot 1,000,000 wild donkeys in the 1980s alone. 'Hee-haw, hee-haw BANG!' laughed a spokesman I just made up.)
    With Simon at the rear we were really laying down some fat camino: everyone we knew had stayed in Melide and they hadn't passed us yet. We were overtaking as often as overtaken, and a man of apparent youth and vigour was visibly extended during a drawn-out pursuit from the rear. 'Vive Quebec!' he panted over his shoulder when at breathless length he breasted past me. At the top of the next hill something seemed to occur to him, and after a pause he turned about with his arms spread wide and an exultant bellow already half out of his throat: 'The queen is a beeetch!'
    But I did find a familiar face soon after, and it was looking out of the window of a Bedford camper parked up in the shade. John, St John, in his St John's Ambulance. Astonished handshakes, a résumé of the 620 kilometres that had elapsed since our previous encounter, coffee for the brothers and a biscuit for their donk. It struck me that here was a true keeper of the Santiagan flame, a spiritual descendant of those bridge builders and leper lovers who had made the medieval pilgrimage what it was. Men have been canonised for less. If it was down to me John would be a saint by now, but then again so would Eddy Merckx and the bloke who invented crisps.
    So how much sadder it was to discover that we now lived in an age when even a pilgrim cannot quite summon unquestioning trust in his fellow man. As I kept John up to speed with Shinto's faltering progress, every other passing walker spurned his charitable entreaties with a nervously polite shimmy of the hand.
    My new esteem for camper-van owner-drivers received a further boost a couple of villages down, when we found ourselves invited to dine in the mobile headquarters of a Swiss-Australian family. She walked, he drove and they met up via walkie-talkie every four hours to enable her to breastfeed the younger of their two young sons: a logistical undertaking far more imaginatively ludicrous than anything experienced in the multi-vehicular donk-o-kids phase of my pilgrimage. While their three-year-old rode Shinto round a solar-seared car park we filthied the van's climate-controlled interior with our dusted buttocks, feasting on chilled dairy products and tales of their pioneering determination. Nine months they'd been on the road; the baby's first words had been in Spanish. 'But I mean, you've had it really tough,' said the bearded father, tilting his head in the vicinity of my unseen donkey.
    Had I? The clicks were falling away with such bewildering haste — 28 to go, then 24.5, then 19 — that my camino now seemed to be coasting towards the line rather than grinding to an exhausted conclusion. An hour before we'd even managed to get Shinto through a ford with only a little light brutality.
    When I contemplated the friction scars on my palms these days, it was with something approaching scepticism.
    Heat was the only enemy, and it stealthily engaged us as we pressed on through the airless balsam of the eucalyptus groves. When he wasn't plunging it under fountains, Simon was swaddling his head in a turban of damp fabric. After eschewing a refugio blighted by its proximity to the uncomfortably popular N547, we dragged our gluey limbs back into the woods, then back out, and presently found ourselves gawping soporifically over a