Travels with my Donkey

aloft, stained and gaping mouths to the sky. A gang of teenagers roared and honked past in an elderly Peugeot with its roof sawn off and the rest painted like a Friesian. And after all the checkpoints and separatist graffiti, all the bilingual road-signs and furious defacement of public buildings, it was frankly a relief to see red-and-yellow banners and ensigns draped in merry profusion along the old balconies. After nine days of Zubiris and Utergas, here was a town that didn't sound like a Bulgarian moped; a town that was Spanish and happy to be so.
    But we all know what can happen when you leave a donkey alone in a town full of partying Spaniards. I tightened my grasp round the rope: lose Shinto here and the next time I saw him he'd be cowering under a hail of tomatoes with the fattest trainee priest in Santo Domingo sitting backwards across his withers. It was almost a relief when the slightly harassed hospitalero explained that because the magnificent old refugio 's usual stabling area was currently alive with banqueting revellers, Shinto would have to be locked up in a quiet yard round the back.
    I did his feet, then my laundry, and after a particularly important post-camping shower went out to hit the streets. There was a dense throng in the square outside the refugio, gradually organising itself behind half a dozen boys carrying a huge crucifix decorated with crêpe-paper cockerels. A proper religious procession: under the list drawn up by British pilgrim William Wey in 1456, participation was worth forty days off purgatory,- two hundred if I could find a mitred bishop somewhere in the ranks.
    Well, I haven't had such fun on a Wednesday afternoon since Margaret Thatcher resigned. In a dilatory conga the parade led me past cartwheel-girthed vats full of garlicky mushrooms simmering outside a bookshop, past fairy-lit silhouettes of Santo Domingo and those two chickens, past a church whose tower was conspicuously home to half a dozen flapping storks. More colour-coded kids in their hilariously illegal gangmobiles: loudness in all its forms. Rainbow dungarees aside, the keynote fashion items — an integral part of some earlier procession and sadly now only on view in photographers' windows — was the daftest millinery it has ever been my pleasure to hoot at in deranged appreciation: lacy, flowered cylinders the size of Michael Schumacher's rear wheels, somehow balanced atop the veiled heads of the young flower of Santo Domingan womanhood. Here, at last, were the people who invented the upside-down exclamation mark.
    I sidled off the end of the parade along a street between whose pavements a funfair was in the latter process of erection, and sat outside a bar with the first of three coffees, watching the mad, mad world go by. Boys in berets and their grannies' shawls begged for change: mindful that they were doubtless collecting for unstable pyrotechnics, I gave generously. One talked a little English, and in so many words, and then so many more, explained that each gang represented a suburb of Santo Domingo, often focused round a bar. He jogged over to rejoin his blue-capped companions, and watching them chant away between the bingo booths and airgun galleries, I felt warmly infused with a sense of continuity and community, by this free-spirited display of tribal anarchy. And then, draining my cup for the last time, I thought how sad it was that we'd lost all this, and that any attempt at recreating the spectacle before me in small-town Britain would be sourly compromised by an undercurrent of beery aggression.
    The plaza outside the refugio was still alive, pilgrims and locals jiggling about to the brass band's now rather fibrillated rhythm. 'Special night tonight!' shrieked a Frenchman, one whose hysterical girlish giggle had enlivened many a bunk-house on previous evenings. 'They keep open ze door to ten surty!' He handed me a plastic beaker of marinaded mushrooms and a brimming wine spout, both of which I tackled with the reckless chutzpah of a man wearing black clothes. 'Viva España' segued messily into 'Brown Girl in the Ring'; a trio of Brazilians mamboed lithely about while along with my fellow North Europeans I jerked to the whim of some inept puppeteer. It was good to be with pilgrims but not talk about clicks and bunks and blisters, not even to have thought or cared whether my laundry would have dried in the lingering misted humidity. But when the curfew drew near, and my fellow travellers trailed