Travels with my Donkey

arrows led us up an unremarkable rise of cobbles, past a gang of street cleaners hosing away bits of Friday night, and smack into the back of Burgos cathedral.
    For a confounding moment everyone around was a dumbstruck peasant up from the sticks, gawping heavenward at the multi-spired profusion of lacy stonework, those two dozen filigree ladders to paradise. Following the substantial but rather stodgy Romanesque fare we'd been fed on so far this was like a sugar rush: a party-sized pavlova after two weeks of stale wholemeal. I dawdled up to the façade with wonder smeared across my face — the embellishment was almost pathological, as if the architect had been given the Lego Gothic DeLuxe super set and challenged to incorporate every last pinnacle and finial. And it was there that I took my most cherished picture of Shinto, a compliant, cock-eared gaze into the lens, a blandly contented tourist snapshot that said, Oh, and here I am outside the cathedral at Burgos.
    The refugio was out the other side of town, a pair of log-clad oversized trailers in the sprawling parkland behind a military hospital. It didn't open until 2.00, which meant an hour's wait behind the queue of early risers who'd left San Juan at 5 a.m. It was the first time I'd been in that position, and it would be the last: the dour lack of camaraderie in this pilgrim subgroup was palpable. When I tried to engage the golfing-capped Italian behind in conversation, he shot me a nettled glare and immediately pushed in front. A Spaniard sauntered up, and in whispering tones of doom punctuated with chiding tuts grimly let it be known that the picnicking family behind those trees were gitanos, and as such Shinto would be dog food by dawn. And then he pushed in front. It was ridiculous: there were no more than thirty of us queuing for ninety-six beds. When the round-bellied little hospitalero waddled up with the keys there was an immediate, elbowing free-for-all, as if the quarry wasn't a bottom bunk near the loos but the very last place on the very last chopper out of Saigon.
    I left Shinto browsing happily at the edge of a sun-feathered floral meadow, tied to a big chestnut tree just inside the refugio 's corralled perimeter. The plan, one with which I was quietly pleased, granted him a day off while I returned to inner Burgos for an afternoon of urbane, donkless peregrinations. This plan, however, was contingent on the use of Spanish municipal transport.
    I've only ever sat in a bus shelter for a whole hour once before, and this time it wasn't down to tequila-related semiconsciousness. An hour! Later I discovered that many Spanish routes are operated by this number of buses: one bus. A week or so later, I walked for eight hours within sight of a railway line, an intercity line, a line important enough to be marked on my Michelin map of Europe. I knew whenever a train was approaching, even when the track was right on the edge of the horizon, because before I'd heard or seen it Shinto would have bolted off across the road in blind, unbridled terror. In almost any other developed country this reaction would have occurred often enough to have proved our fatal undoing. But because this was Spain it happened once before lunch, and once afterwards.
    All that said, I can't blame anyone but myself for opting to allocate so many of the remaining daylight hours to a gormless dawdle round the sprawling food hall of some airportsized hypermarket. I emerged with a lobotomised consumerist glaze on my face and a huge sack of vinaigrette crisps in my hand, depleted of the cultural stamina that was apparently required to tackle the cathedral's interior. 'Allow at least six hours,' one of my guidebooks urged, 'and bring a flashlight and binoculars.'
    Knowing I would never do any of that had left me feeling aesthetically inadequate before I even went in, and though it was grandiosely immense, I couldn't catch a sniff of the sombre majesty that had very nearly had me on my knees in Los Arcos. There was too much stuff — fifteen chapels encircle the naves — and, on a late-spring Saturday, too many people. I spotted the carved image of a peeing angel on the choir-stalls and that did for me. A shame, really. I somehow completely missed the thirteenth-century life-sized Christ upholstered in buffalo skin, a figure that even sceptical medieval pilgrims saw move, and bleed, and have its nails and hair clipped. Stick that in your dummy, Tiny Tears. And I also appear to have stepped