Travels with my Donkey

half-smile, imparted an air of mystical inscrutability. 'I have been following your tracks,' he said, lazily, taking a red-eyed drag on a tiny roll-up. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, yet remained curiously unbedraggled. 'Oh,' I countered wittily, just as a violent mechanical whirring cranked up in the middle distance. Whether produced by the magnesite men or the Mario Brothers I'm not sure, but it was one of that family of sounds — the machine-gun flap of a lorry awning in the wind, a jarring metallic rasp, anything you might describe as a thrum — which flicked the big red switch in Shinto's head, a switch that could only be flicked off after a long and ragged pursuit.
    By the end of this particular one I found myself at a large village, and because I was now feeling bad in most of the traditional ways I lashed Shinto to a sheltered lamp-post and stumbled under the church's portico. Here I ingested the lumpy gel that had only hours ago been fresh bread, changed my socks, and nodded dully at the pilgrims trudging muddily on up the camino or shuffling into the gloomy refugio opposite. It was only after an hour that I realised I'd yet to see the German Dalai Lama pass by. He still hadn't appeared as I resaddled Shinto and set off. In fact I never saw him again, but considering events now I accept that isn't the issue. The issue is whether I saw him at all.
    That afternoon Shinto began to experiment with on-the-move grazing, another manifestation of my failure to establish dominance over him. I didn't have the authority to stop it, but then I didn't have the heart either: here he was, loose in a walk-thru all-you-can-eat salad bar, halfway up a hillside lushly carpeted with rain-freshened mint, oregano and thyme — a lot of it even looked good to me. But the corn was the worst. I quickly learnt the importance of bracing myself whenever the camino passed alongside a cultivated field of greeneared shoots; sadly, though, I was soon too damp and knackered actually to do so. The rope tautened, and before I could react Shinto was towing me helplessly through the wet crops, like an unseated jockey with his watch-strap snagged round a stirrup. By the time I'd got to my feet and yelled and bullied him back out on to the path he'd have half an EU grain quota hanging out of his mouth.
    Pamplona was leaching out towards me, half-finished suburbs covering the opposite side of a valley, many-laned ring roads forcing the camino into piss-puddled underpasses. Up a hill, around a humming substation, and then — after a slight 'Whither?' moment at a yellow arrow eroded to an indecipherable blob — it was over another Romanesque bridge and into the welcoming porch of Trinidad de Arre, a bijou monastery that has been sheltering pilgrims since the thirteenth century and hardly seemed to have been altered in the interim. Staying here was a smart ruse of mine, or rather of the Confraternity of St James, whose little red book had recommended it as a canny alternative to Pamplona, which lay 5 urban kilometres up the road and where you'd never get a bed. I squeezed Shinto into the porch alongside me and rapped on the big door.
    Between us we dripped off a reasonable puddle before it was answered, by a small old man with the fuddled, friendly face of Pinocchio's creator. Defying all environmental and physical indicators, this man almost immediately revealed himself as a horrible wanker. 'Completo, completo ,' he tutted and huffed, thrusting at me a flyer from a presumably proximate commercial alternative named the Hostal Obelix, before applying his minimal weight to the great slab of cleated oak. Suddenly, his was a punchable face. A wet pilgrim with a four-footed Jesusmobile at his side, being brusquely refused shelter at a monastery. A sodding monastery! Maybe I should have shaved again and shoved a pillow up my poncho. He didn't stop shaking his head as he finally eased the door closed: not a scrap of floor for my mattress, not a cloistered corner for my ass. No room at the inn.
    It was 5.30: I could press on into the Pamplona rush hour in quest for a bed I'd never find, or cut out the middleman and sink to my haunches crying like a girl right here. I was a bent knee away from plan B when the door creaked painfully open again. The cheery fuddled look had gone, replaced by one of truculent resignation and aimed at the leaking heavens. He set off up the road — I now noticed he had slippers on — and with a surge of expectation we