Travels with my Donkey

had been in gradual decline since day four. This was unknown territory for him. I was pushing the donkey envelope, and I was obviously pushing it too hard. There was nothing else to say. Nothing I hadn't already said with flowers.
     
    Azofra took the whole crumbly, dusted shambles thing and ran with it. This time there was none of that nancy nice stuff at the middle, just two long streets of rude deprivation, the unsteady, dishevelled houses like old winos propping each other up. The roads converged near a scuffed-up church that also accommodated the refugio, described by my guide as 'in poor condition'. Just beyond were two bars, the walls of each hung with desiccated haunches of pig. Outside one sat Evelyn, encircled as was presently the norm by her adoring entourage. 'The whole town just ran out of water,' she called out. 'And the refuse-io is completely overrun with Belgian kids.' Well, she was wrong there! They were Dutch.
    A babbling senior señora invited Petronella to share the church's overspill porch with her teenage compatriots, a week into a school trip rather more roundly edifying than the dank Welsh festivals of tent-bound masturbation I wish I didn't recall. The church was surrounded by toothsome undergrowth, but also by steps. 'Burro no passa,' I mumbled, as the house-coated hospitalera gamely urged a bridling Shinto towards a small stone flight. She looked at me with withering condescension, then snapped the top off a dead sapling in those tiny, gnarled hands. 'No!' I yelped, jumping in front of her as she flexed it approvingly. 'No, that's... wrong. Gracias.'
    Half an hour later I was stamping tent-pegs into a rock-strewn, ant-happy triangle of semi-desert near a bus-stop just out of town. Before me, through a grove of fluttering beech trees, the sun was settling down to kiss the hard plain, as if in apology for what it had done that day. Twenty yards to my rear, two trilbied old farmers stood either side of a fountain in whose fitful, shandy-hued expectorate I'd later be cleaning my teeth. Every time I looked up they were staring with blink-less fervour, one at me, one at Shinto, up the top of the apex dentally pruning some big shrub. This was an agricultural settlement of desperate poverty, the first I'd been to where donkey theft might be the product of practical necessity rather than juvenile boredom. (As the perpetrator of many far less imaginative wrongs committed in the name of adolescent entertainment, I always held this as my dominant fear for Shinto's overnight safety.) Yet I needed food, and access to mankind's full gamut of bottled fluids, and when the tent was semi-erect that meant leaving the pair alone with Shinto. I approached with a manic smile and a lofted hand. And when that didn't seem to work, I stopped between them and crossed myself at each in turn.
     

Nine

     
    ' W e found a woman weeping bitterly,' I read aloud to my donkey as he stood saddled up by the fountain, hock deep in morning mist and nose down in a basin of barley. 'We followed her into a nearby field, where she had two asses stuck in a bog. We offered her assistance, whereupon she began laughing.' I scratched a mosquito-ravaged forearm, uncertain what I was trying to achieve beyond vaguely unsettling him, a job frankly better left to my mud-washed, camping-haired dishevelment. 'Not my words, Shinto,' I said, wedging the book into a pannier, 'but the words of seventeenth-century pilgrim Dominic Laffi as he walked out of Azofra.'
    I had camped, and so it had rained. The world beyond Azofra was a drizzled fuzz which occasionally offered up a medieval gallows, or a dead deer, or — sorry, madam! — a full pair of pilgrim buttocks caught in an ineffectively shrub-shielded comfort stop, before quickly engulfing them back behind us. Small groups of walkers plodded past every hour or so, and generally checked their pace for a little verbal byplay. All the English people I'd previously encountered, admittedly a modest sample, had been the sort who'd said things like 'the bods up at Confraternity HQ' and referred to their heads as 'the old noggin', so it was a frank relief to meet one, the loud and cheerful Sara, who didn't.
    An infuriating detour round a huge new golf course – surely a recipe for heavenly-wrath-induced lightning-related fairway fatalities — then slowly up and slowly down to the conclusion of another stage. In terms of clicks Shinto and I were 20-a-day men, but it was only 15 to Santo Domingo de la