Travels with my Donkey

hill's lower reaches were flanked by barley, meaning Shinto hardly noticed the unappealing conditions: he'd honed his on-the-hoof grazing technique so perfectly that whenever I looked round there was a sort of thick green Fu Manchu moustache dangling from either side of his lazily masticating jaw. The very few who followed me over later that day reported a path bestrewn with his half-chewed rejects.
    But as the path steepened, the paddied grain fields gave way to buffeted heather and gorse, which Shinto never even sniffed. And who could blame him? Maddening as his relentless gluttony, his persistent vegetative state, surely was, I had to respect Shinto's tastes. If we liked to eat it (barley, wheat, love carrots) so did he. And if we didn't — viz. his absolute favourite, a roadside clovery shrub subsequently identified as wild alfalfa — at least it looked like we might, if only in a multi-leaf herb salad or tea-bagged infusion. I was especially delighted at Shinto's dogged refusal to kowtow to farmyard stereotype by eating thistles. In a land so Catholically fertile that asparagus and honeysuckle grow wild by the road, what right-thinking beast would glumly survey the verdant cornucopia around and sigh, 'You know, I could just murder a pincushion'?
    With his food supply cut off, my donkey slowed to a mud-hoofed trudge. I turned to exhort him and he gave me a look, which if it said anything said, You think I evolved in Africa for this? On we ploughed — those crest-topping turbines were almost scarily huge, but they didn't seem to be getting any nearer. The French lot had pulled away, and I began to feel just a little uneasy. It was gone 5.00; in the windswept, granite gloom the yellow gorse-buds almost glowed. Shinto lost his footing a couple of times, which was a couple fewer than me. And then, almost bent double by the astonishing rearward blast, I was at the summit, battling with my poncho at the foot of one of the droning rotary giants that poled out endlessly along the hill's spine in either direction. How wittily apposite it could so easily have been: here I was, in Spain, with an equine companion, tilting at wind farms.
    There was some sort of contemporary pilgrim monument up here, prematurely weathered wrought-iron figures that quivered and sang in the wind, but even though it featured what looked like a donkey the elements forestalled any photographic dalliance. To think that this monstrously storm-torn brow had for over 500 years been home to a monastery and pilgrim refuge, of which unsurprisingly nothing remains.
    It didn't get any less blowy on the scrabbly-pebbled descent, which seemed both unfair and topographically illogical. The wind combed the barley into Van Gogh waves and sent the black plastic asparagus tunnels madly flapping; distantly beyond, the Navarrese landscape settled into a rolling plain, villages huddled in its folds.
    Shinto did his best to resist the encouragements of wind and gradient, but in the end we built up a ragged momentum that saw us actually overtake a pilgrim, though as he was on his knees before a pathside statue of the Virgin I thought better of a quick chat. The drizzle got serious, and machine-gunned in the back by horizontal drops we finally broached the underwhelming, unhopeful one-donk town that could only be Uterga.
    I'd been concentrating so hard on not thinking about those beds — both of them — that I hadn't troubled to memorise the refugio 's location from my Confraternity guide, and if I got that out now there'd be pages all over Iberia. So I did what I later learnt you always do, and continued along the muddy main street looking for signs of pilgrim occupation: filthy boots on a window sill, wet hiking socks on a line. In the climactic conditions this was of course oafishly wrong-headed, so I was almost as happy as I should have been when the head of a young woman appeared through a gingerly opened front door and issued a beckoning jerk.
    Soon I'd become accustomed to the warm-hearted weirdness encountered in many camino villages. But you don't forget your first time. The house was old, and had not been made new. Its cavernous, unlit hall was floored with a crazily undulating mosaic of age-burnished pebbles; I was shown into a side room and belatedly grasped that its stall-like wattle-and-daub enclosure was not for dipping sheep but bathing pilgrims. Behind the first door on the upstairs landing was an atmospherically illuminated gilt shrine — more of