Travels with my Donkey

like hotel for horse.'
    Navarrete wasn't a big place, but it took me an hour to find this establishment, hidden over a hill a click outside town. It was a ranch, I suppose, with a big paddock full of horses, and — hey, Shints! — the first rival donkeys we'd encountered. Shinto stopped in his tracks, nostrils flared, transfixed. This may have been because, of the three dark brown donks behind that fence, one was gamely shagging a huge mare.
    It was a refreshing inversion of the usual mule-spawning scenario, and after knocking on the owner's door we watched it unfold to a happy conclusion. A donkey doing a horse is a laudable way-to-go display of pluck, but a horse doing a donkey? That's just wrong. That's... mulophilia, or something.
    The proprietors were a lovely couple, who ruffled Shinto's mane, refused payment and insisted on photographing him for their archive. It falteringly transpired that Shinto wouldn't be let into the paddock on health-and-safety grounds; this was probably for the best, but we agreed a compromise wherein he was tied up in sight and earshot of his fellow long-ears.
    My long walk back was broken halfway by two matching beers, and rounded off with a brisk half-litre of rosé and an overly lubricated platter of fried meat slices outside the bar adjoining the refugio. (Note to the lowbrow chefs of Spain: please stop frying chorizo. It looks like scabs.) Evelyn was at the bar with a coterie of senior male admirers, and so too were a pair of elderly German ladies, broad faces capped with silvery pudding bowls. They were at least the fourth such couple I'd encountered, and scrutinising them with the enhanced understanding often associated with one's third glass I realised a common link: they were all lesbians. Evelyn later told me that in one refugio she'd been awakened in the small hours by some vigorous old-girl-on-old-girl action in the bunk below. I looked at the two ladies, smiling at each other over their tortillas. I don't know why the camino should attract so many of their ilk. And unless I ordered another carafe and downed it in one I could hardly ask.
     
    Six fifteen was the earliest I'd been up, but I was still the last out. At some point, I supposed, my body clock would adjust to this idiotic regime; probably when it did, I'd never be able to reset it, and end up booting my kids out of bed in the dark for years to come. Shinto was retrieved — that exchange of farewell brays softened the heart — and it was out into an already shimmering sun.
    Navarrete bid us a rather sombre goodbye, in the twin forms of another impromptu anti-ETA roadblock manned by twitchy, armed youths, and a monument to a Belgian pilgrim who'd been fatally knocked off her tandem in 1986. This was the second such memorial I'd seen, and soon they became commonplace. I suppose if you peg out on a pilgrimage, particularly because having done so you're automatically fast-tracked to paradise, bereaved relations feel an obligation to stick up a stone. But I can't say it did much for morale. One day I saw three: what was this, a big walk or The Long March?
    A debilitating stretch through the gutter detritus of our new tarmac neighbour, the N120, was leavened by the colossal mountain range taking shape to the left — I had no idea the horizons of Spain were so generously serrated. Most of the flinty peaks were topped with snow, dispatching a cool breeze to refresh us as the path left the road and ploughed a pleasant, gently rising furrow through more epic vineyards. Labourers were weeding and pruning, and it was good to see that they appeared to be locals rather than the slave-waged North Africans one tends to see out in the fields of southern Europe. But then again maybe they were slave-waged locals.
    At midday the advance guard from Logroño whistled up from behind, but unlike most of the speed ramblers these were an unusually communicative lot. Evidently too communicative, because after I'd been asked for perhaps the tenth time in an hour what his name was, and how I'd got him, and what he ate, I felt myself shuffling across the threshold of dangerous boredom. An endless throughput of people I would never see again had presented a persistent temptation for idle deceit, and rendered frivolous by a potent sun I finally succumbed to ennui-related fact management.
    Two little German men walked up, conversed, and proceeded towards the russet horizon taking with them the tragic tale of Faustus, found living off