Travels with my Donkey

pedometer to pieces. Petronella launched into an enthusiastic celebration of Shinto's fearsome endowment. I ate everyone's chips. Poor Kathy had been handed the short straw down the end next to Baroness von Munchausen, and passing by en route to the loo I heard her small voice enquire politely, 'So, um, how did you disarm the hijacker?'
    I was by now accustomed to being woken at an hour that could not be described in numerals alone — quarter to sodding five, half bloody four — but that night was disturbed from an unusually early stage. At twenty past twelve there was a great convulsion of stomps and snorts, and I eased out an earplug to hear a German male hissing a multilingual list of furious grievances. The English portion was issued as he swished the last of his belongings into his rucksack: 'She reads viss the torch, and he makes some sounds like a dog who dies, und everybody smell und I vill NEVER stay in zis places again!' And out he went, into the night, taking two pairs of somebody else's socks and leaving behind a compass.
    No one slept much after that, or no one else. By the time I woke again, night still held the upper hand; yet in the gloaming, shapes moved to and from the bathroom and stooped over rustling backpacks. I still couldn't understand it. Evelyn had already left a penknife and a pair of sandals under various dark bunks, and that day paid the heftiest dawn tax yet. Walking by torchlight out of Calzadilla, she mistook a roadside reflector for a yellow arrow and headed in the wrong direction for two hours. As she retraced her steps there was a twanging snap so loud she heard it above Edith Piaf's Walkmanned warblings. Her left leg buckled — a ruptured tendon. I'd have given up, ended it all, stuck my head in Shinto's mouth and yelled 'Cheese!', but Evelyn carefully strapped herself together and hobbled on. So laboured was her consequent progress that a couple of clicks outside Calzadilla I caught her up, yet still she refused to let us — him — shoulder even a tiny part of her burden. I don't know what made that woman tick, but if you listen hard enough you can probably hear it.
    We walked together into the next village, where the baker sold us fairy cakes and a hot baguette before slipping off his white coat and opening up the shop next door to weigh out our tomatoes. Just beyond, Evelyn waved us on. 'Never thought I'd say this,' she said, coaxing her wince into a smile, 'but that burro has me beat.' It was an awkward situation, but by this stage traditional chivalries had long since been abandoned.
    Freed from a diet of hallucinogenic poison, Shinto was indeed burning up the road: what a difference a day makes. He always went better on asphalt, and this was newly laid and clean swept. Crucially, it was also bordered by an unbroken guard rail high enough to keep any edible vergeside distractions at bay. Without access to loop tapes of stampeding carthorses and the means of their amplified broadcast I couldn't have designed this stretch better myself.
    And that morning we had the N120 all to ourselves. Three cars in the first hour and two in the second: someone told us the traffic had been sucked away by a new autovía, but when those broad sweeps of shiny tarmac swung round towards us they were silent. This was as close to a no man's land as we'd been through: it was no surprise to read that in the sixteenth century the belligerent Moors of Andalucia were forcibly resettled on the Castilian flatlands. Nowhere to hide, no one to kill.
    We clopped past the marker posts at 4 clicks an hour, for the first time since day one. Lunch banished all memory of that endured beneath the previous day's fly-blown bivouac: a tap, a shaded bench by a church, a yard full of alfalfa. As I sat there, watching the snowy seed-fluff from the big white poplars pile up in drifts by the porch, the usual steady flow of pilgrims passed with a wave or a word. Evelyn, walking much more easily, Baroness von Munchausen, gabbling cobblers at some whey-faced unfortunate, and a shrunken clockwork Dutchwoman in her seventies who without stopping called out that she'd walked from Eindhoven averaging 45 kilometres a day.
    We had almost been done for by 19 the day before, but with 25 on the meter and the little hand shy of 4.00 we entered the not overly appealing outskirts of Sahagún. Just beyond the station stood the flaking concrete ellipse that housed the Plaza de Toros. 'Fancy a night in the bullring?' I chirped at