Travels with my Donkey

imploration was her solitary reported utterance. The camino is many things: a religious duty, a voyage of personal discovery and shared experience, a test of spiritual and human endurance. Perhaps, in many ways, it is like a marriage. But a honeymoon it is not.
    Shinto seemed a little downcast after this encounter: his presence had, perhaps uniquely, failed to cheer a doleful stranger. Then the Otero Largo reached its gentle summit, and there it was. Sky of blue, sea of green — the true meseta alta, a sweeping continent of wheat that has been the bread basket of Iberia since Roman times. Three or four distant towns struggled up out of the haze, each crowned by a shimmering, wobbly church tower. And that was it. I took a picture, but when I look at it now it's hard to tell what it's of. That's no landscape: that's just a flag, a big, dull flag, top half blue, bottom half green.
    'The grain in Spain grows mainly on this plain,' I said, flatly, then turned round to Shinto.
    Donkeys always look slightly hungover, but this was the first time mine had looked drunk. His head was all over the place, straining back and erratically darting forward, then swaying left to right, then jerking up again. The eyes were in whites-up El Loco mode, lolling back into his big skull. And great God Almighty, that mouth: lips stretched tautly back like a shrivelled Pharaoh's, yellowed teeth gnashing at the heavens. It was like Mr Ed cursing in tongues.
    'Come on, Shints,' I said, in a voice very unlike a man's. I cut him some slack, and with the rope paid out to its limit turned to continue. In a second he'd bounded up, and I looked back just in time to see his teeth clamp around one of the straps of my daypack. 'Shinto!' I shrieked, jerking it out. But his eyes were now slits of restless hatred, the ears pinned back with sociopathic intent. He went for me again, gnashing at a bare elbow, and the chase was on.
    On and on we ran and scrambled and panted, trailing a column of bad words and dust across that epic panorama. Sometimes he'd slow down, then catch me off guard when I followed suit. Only after an hour, with the sanctuary of Boadilla del Camino approaching at unencountered speed, did I happen upon a strategic solution. Keep the rope taut, and maintain a steady jog keeping it at full length. And when it slackens, young pilgrim, run for your sorry life.
    The presence of other human life had a policing effect on Shinto, and he strolled through the scrub-dusted, tractor-jammed streets of Boadilla with his demeanour settling into an approximation of repentance. The uneasy truce was for once accompanied by mutual understanding: we both knew that he hadn't been himself, that he had in fact just been Berserko, the Mad Donkey.
    I could probably call Boadilla horrid, and was certainly in a mood to, but folded up in my back pocket was a little brochure that meant I wouldn't. I passed the official refugio and was uncharitably relieved to see it comfortably the most wretched yet: a sort of abandoned post office, with broken windows and fluorescent tubes emitting unwanted light and an insistent monotone. There were pilgrims glumly manipulating their laundry in its filthy yard, but I didn't know any of them. They were out of the loop on this one.
    It was Petronella who'd found the brochure, days back somewhere before Burgos, and on many an evening since we'd all gathered round to scrutinise it with hushed reverence. 'Oasis en el Camino' was the catchline presiding over images of a pilgrim Shangri-La, lawns like golf greens, parasol-sheltered tables, a wall of bougainvillea, sculptures, fountains. It was a twenty-first-century update of those orchard/dovecote monasteries that must regularly have reduced our medieval forebears to tears of grateful joy. One of the British Columbians had dubbed it Club Med, and the forty-eight-bed bunk-house aside it did indeed seem the sort of place you'd book for a real, normal holiday. So much so that I'd made a real, normal holiday booking, over the phone from Castrojeriz.
    The walls of the new pride of Boadilla were square up next to its old one, a magnificent Gothic rollo, a sort of giant and ornate limestone sceptre stood on end. I walked Shinto round it a couple of times, admiring its carved scallop shells, flowers and animals. 'The Rollo shows with dignity the judicial autonomy the village had in the times of Enrique IV,' read the brochure, which didn't quite tell the whole story. Erected by the Boadillans in