Travels with my Donkey

snuffled the lot, then rounded the performance off by sneezing raisiny oat-phlegm all over the postman's back.
    The camino returned to the riverside, meandering towards the city centre past fields and allotments that persisted almost up to the town walls. En route Shinto had a bit of an across-the-fence set-to with a yappy little Shetland pony, which he won after a muesli-powered hoof-stamping snort-off. Then it was over the river, up on to the cobbles and, after a couple of tourist photocalls and a one-sided donk-lore discourse with a cig-wizened umbrella-toter, under a huge, mossy arch and into Old Pamplona.
    I'd been advised by Hanno to bypass cities, and actually ordered to by the Donkey Sanctuary. It wasn't hard to see why, but I had vowed to try at least one. And why not the first? Pamplona had the history: founded by the Roman general Pompaelo, it was ruled by the Moors for a century until 799, and thereafter repopulated with Jews and Frenchmen as an ethnic bulwark. Throughout the Middle Ages the city was a vital pilgrim pit stop — unusually, ailing travellers were permitted to stay more than a single night (many, in consequence, pegged out in Pamplona). And flicking through the Liber Sancti Jacobi in Miguel Indurain's bar I'd come across the pertinently bracing tale of a pilgrim whose wife, horse and chattels are variously slaughtered and stolen by an evil Pamplonese innkeeper. There! Actually, that isn't the end: the bereaved husband is stoically preparing to continue, the couple's two children on his shoulders, when Santiago himself appears with a donkey. 'Here you go, son,' he says, 'and leave that innkeeper to me.'
    I'm not sure if St Jim was smiling on me that day, but everyone else was. They stood in dirty old doorways to beam and point as the camino took the path of most resistance, winding up circuitous alleys barely wide enough for a fully laden donk, let alone the parping procession of delivery trucks we trailed behind us.
    Shinto's ears were swivelling about on red alert, eventually settling into a one-forward, one-back set-up for 360-degree surround-sound coverage. I held him on the shortest leash, my knuckles white around the rope, not daring to spare any eye time for the cathedrals, refugios or any of the other stately old lovelinesses that I was no doubt passing by. Once I was momentarily distracted by a parked Lamborghini, and before I knew it a bulging pannier had brushed a hefty men-at-work road-hole barrier and sent it crashing to the cobbles. Nothing substantial falls over in a Latin city centre without triggering at least a small domino effect; I was righting an adjacent moped when a volley of squeakily guttural abuse rained down from a mercifully lofty window.
    The alleys opened into boulevards, and Shinto's fan club swelled in noise and numbers. 'Burro!' they shrieked. Or: 'Burrico!' Or: 'Burriquino!' As we traversed the central business district, the appealing incongruity of our presence seemed complete. Waiting for a little green man amidst a pavement full of briefcase carriers I was treated to handshakes, back pats and a heartfelt 'buen viaje', as I stepped off the kerb I felt part of the most portentous convoy to set foot on a zebra crossing since Paul McCartney left his shoes in the Abbey Road gutter.
    Over a couple of technically demanding roundabouts, a slightly erratic passage over a narrow bridge and suddenly we were past the railway tracks and out into what was today a very green belt, Shinto chewing off roadside weeds with happy nonchalance. He'd done it. We'd done it. The two of us, together, as a team. I ruffled his crest, patted his poll, and set him off up the road with a blokeish slap on the dock. If this whole thing was the Steeplechase Triple Crown, we'd just completed the first leg.
    It was wet, but we were on a roll and I added to my already impressive catalogue of unseen historico-pilgrimy must-sees by tramping straight by the many Romanesque structures of Cizur Menor. And also past its enticing refugio, upon whose garlanded balcony lounged debonaire pilgrims, sipping tall drinks. The priority was getting out of sync with the bed-hogging army of enduro freaks, to which end I'd cunningly plotted to press on to the next refugio, over a hill in the tiny and so I hoped easily disregarded village of Uterga.
    Initial visual contact with this hill, as Shinto and I lunched amidst the weeds by the perimeter wall of an executive-belt villa, presented the first suggestion