Travels with my Donkey

an altar in proportion — dedicated to Nostra Señora. Behind the second was a truckle-bedded dormitory endowed very much more handsomely than the number in the Confraternity's brackets, and now dense with postcard-writing, blister-bursting pilgrims. At its conclusion was another door, which opened into a room dominated by an enormous old brass bed that had evidently hosted the biological beginnings of many an Utergan. This was my room, and my room alone. The price, the young woman gently informed me in broken English considerably more charming than my mallet-shattered Spanish, was 2 euros. Last come, best served.
    Shinto did all right for himself, too. I'd been uncomfortably aware that he was only a wet twenty-four hours from the official saturation point, when a donk gets too dank and has to be stabled. And stabled he was, ushered by a couple of young brothers through a pair of ancient, brick-thick wooden doors and into a shed with a big tractor and a mountain of seed potatoes. By way of thanks, Shinto knocked a can of oil over and made a rush for the spud pile. Laboriously restrained and lashed to the tractor, he promptly hosed out a great pool of foamy piss which we watched the densely earthen floor failing to absorb. And do you know what those two boys did? That's right — they ladled it into a wooden pail and tipped the lot down the back of my pants. No. They laughed.
    It was all so congenial that even the grubby rituals — the sock washing, the shirt wringing, the boot scraping — failed to dampen my mood. And once they were done, and I'd enjoyed an engagingly daft and rustic shower, it was off over the road to eat at the only option, a jarringly contemporary bar. It was pilgrims only, and eschewing a rather overwhelmingly Brazilian party of dedicated cigar smokers, I sat at the table with the ones I knew. Evelyn was here, and Petronella, and a quiet Danish lady who later described the poignant genesis of her own camino: she'd invited a hundred and twenty people to her fortieth birthday party, and sat sobbing in a big hall with the eleven who turned up. Also three young women from Berlin, who always seemed to be eating bars of Lindt whenever anyone met them, and who we consequently dubbed, rather brilliantly I thought, the German chocolate girls.
    It was a jolly evening, though not on the part of the serving staff, whose unswerving determination to counterpoint the definitively cheap and cheerful establishment opposite required them to deny anything other than sandwiches to pilgrims they didn't like the look of (in the case of our table, everyone but Evelyn), and to charge 300 per cent more per bottle of red than any of us had previously been asked to pay. But as this still amounted to three times fuck all, we all got rather drunk. It was our job: so reliably filthy was medieval water, many pilgrims drank only what the Liber Sancti Jacobi winningly dubs 'the precious liquor of Bacchus'.
    Four days on the road had seemed a month, and already we were a band of brothers, bound together by shared hardship. There was a long debrief on the lonely toil of Windmill Hill, and a pooling of garnered weather predictions. Somewhere around bottle three we moved on to more profound issues, the sort that separated what we were doing from youth hostelling. Evelyn had first heard of the camino whilst awaiting the results of a tumour biopsy; it turned out benign, but by then a close friend of hers was terminally ill, and all this and a certain now-or-never urgency had sparked off a sort of life-value stocktake. Doing the pilgrimage wasn't an end in itself, more an opportunity to find answers to big questions. And, she divulged with an almost apologetic shrug, somewhere back down the line she was a Catholic.
    So were the Berliners, in fact, but they weren't claiming any relevant inspiration: for them this was just a two-week holiday ramble, and pissed off at being pissed on they were already pondering a decamp to the Costa Blanca. Furthermore, they were policewomen — a startling and worrisome revelation. Was it an offence to swear at an animal? To permit grazing within 50 metres of an unlicensed bawdy-house? Almost certainly under obscure EU ordinances that only a German would enforce. And though I hadn't yet been drunk in charge of a road-going jackass, I would be in a minute: someone asked what my donkey was eating in his stable, and because the answer to this was nothing I bolted out into the wind, blushingly unhitched