Travels with my Donkey

you won't care to hold donkay shit in your fingers. By the finish you will be eating together from this.' He rapped a large knuckle against the washing-up bowl in my hands and jumped into the cab.
    'By the finish?' I quavered, my pale face angled up at him.
    'You will arrive in Santiago,' he said, but the pause before he said it was rather longer than I'd have preferred. And with that, and a many-pointed U-turn, this lovely big man was gone from my life.
     
    It was all so desperate that I hardly even noticed that the room was 50 euros, a sum that I'd been told would keep a Confraternity hard-noser fed and bedded for a week. And that didn't even bag me a telly, obliging me to make my own fun by impregnating the room with the stench of sweat and crap, a stench supplied for the moment by Shinto's saddle and the thick blanket that protected him from its more chafesome straps.
    I bundled both into a wardrobe, then laid all the maps and guidebooks out on the bed. Tomorrow — wince, swallow — was a non-negotiable 22 kilometres, a Grand Old Duke of York job that began with a 2,000-foot climb to the lonely pass of Ibañeta and ended with a swoop to Roncesvalles and its sprawling monastery complex. My test drove with Hanno had suggested I'd experience the starkest difficulties on the more challenging inclines and descents, and on this basis it was a shame that my first task was to get Shinto up the Pyrenees and the second to take him straight back down again. 'A tough stage of great beauty,' was one verdict. Tough indeed: every year at least a couple of pilgrims messed it up fatally, losing their way in the mountain mist and meeting a forsaken, hypothermic end, or over-winding their tickers by pushing too hard on the first day.
    The tanks of fatalism were on my lawn; I tried to will them away with mechanical positive thought. This was not a bad idea. Not at all. In fact, there was no way this was not a good idea. Not quite ready to start praying, instead I practised that knot. Interestingly, every time I wrapped the rope round the bedpost and started twisting and threading, the end result deteriorated. First I couldn't find the snake, and then he turned up with a mate. They had a fight up the tree; the tree fell down the well.
    After an hour I gave up, but getting to sleep was no easier. My, Spanish people are loud. There were kids still running about at 11.30, which by forthcoming standards qualified as the middle of the night. So relentlessly animated was their parents' corridor banter, and so prolonged, that I feared finding Shinto conversationally relieved of his hind legs. And then he wouldn't be able to walk, and this whole thing would be off, and obviously that would be just awful.
     

Five

     
    O f the 61,000 pilgrims who completed the camino in 2001, just over a third were non-Spaniards: Americans, Canadians, Germans, French, Brits, Brazilians. Most walked, a fifth did it on bikes; 170 arrived in Santiago astride or beside some sort of equine beast. Almost two-thirds of those who set off gave their faith as Roman Catholic, but fewer than half claimed 'religious motives'; the majority talked of 'cultural' inspiration, though this box could have been ticked by anyone from art historians to those emotionally on the run — jilted lovers, burnt-out executives, white-collar criminals. The tradition of medieval pilgrims sentenced to walk to Santiago in lieu of time behind bars lives on, in a scheme that offers Belgian delinquents the choice between pilgrimage and prison (in 1999, twenty-eight of them opted for the big walk over the big house). An extreme journey, appropriately inspired by extreme circumstances.
    Propped up in bed as my fellow guests exchanged decibels, I'd read of big Spaniards bursting into unexplained tears in their sleeping bags, of 'serial pilgrims' who did the camino again and again, of esoteric initiation and abrupt conversions to Catholicism. 'I realised that what I had unleashed within myself while walking could no longer be contained by what had been a stable relationship,' soliloquised an American pilgrim. 'To the shock of all who knew me, I ended my marriage.' All this was hardly helping, and not just because of a donkey-owner's phobic response to the phrase 'stable relationship'.
    'Don't come back all funny,' Birna had said, seeing me off at the airport. 'You know: saying grace at dinner and stuff.' I'd laughed then, but who knew what life-messing insights this mobile therapist's couch