It was super exciting to arrive in Saint Jean Pied de Port (SJPDP). The train from Bayonne was small. A single carriage but so many other pilgrims! Well maybe a dozen. It’s not hard to spot a modern day pilgrim. None of them look like the AI generated version of me as a pilgrim that my friend Dwaine posted on my office door one morning on my last week of work.
An hour later and we were in SJPDP, so long now a town that has lived in our imagination. Its cobblestoned street is the setting for the start of the film ‘The Way’ with Martin Sheen and another more recent Australian book and movie about the Camino called ‘The way, my way’. The latter of these I had watched on a plane coming home from a conference in Columbia in 2024.
‘We should just do that’ I suggested to Emma. The conference I had just finished had been stressful and the idea of going for a really long walk appealed greatly. I liked the idea of waking up each day and just, walking. The fact that the walk started up over the Pyrenees before making its way through the Spanish country side of forests, cities, fields and towns was an added bonus.
SJPDP was idyllic. A medieval walled town on a hillside at the base of the mountains. It was so beautiful I was excited just to be there. Almost as excited as I was to get underway. What would happen over the next five to six weeks? What will we see? Who will we meet? Despite having planned this for so long I really had done very little research on even the route that we would follow. Not enough brain space while working perhaps, although I think a part of me didn’t want to know what was to come. Just to let it unfold.
We found a place for dinner outside the walls of the old town. It was on a river with a view back over the gate and bridge we would cross the next morning. The start of the walk. We talked about why we were doing this. For Emma it was the adventure. For me… a chance to checkout of the day to day. I am tired. My brain is tired. Mostly work, which has this tendency to become an all consuming mix of people and politics and pressure to deliver. For Paul and Khia I will leave for them to describe to those whom they choose.
The next morning started slow. We only set out to walk 9 kilometres for our first day. The way of Saint James is steep from the outset and Emma had gone to great lengths to book us a place at the Borda Auberge. A booking that many other pilgrims were jealous of. It is highly sought after but with only a few beds it’s a bit like booking concert tickets. Staying at Borda breaks up an otherwise long first day climbing more than a thousand metres up and over the mountains into Spain. We stocked up on lunch and some snacks and headed for the gate at the start of the walk.
I asked a passing pilgrim to take a photo of us on the bridge. His name was Martin. He was from the USA and he had just retired from his career as an engineer. He obliged before asking if he could walk with us out of town so he didn’t get lost. We’d not taken more than five steps and had met our first friend.
A short walk through SJPDP and we started heading up, walking on a country road through a picturesque agricultural scene. Birds were chirping and Paul started to ID them with an app on his phone called Merlin.
The higher we went the bigger the birds got and soon we were enjoying flocks of Eurasian Griffons, with wing spans approaching three metres, spiralling in the thermals over the mountains. As we neared the height of our first days walk we were higher than even the Griffons. Seemingly within arms reach, they sped past us, one after the other along the side of the mountain.
We walked through Orrison, the first option for a stop on the Camino Frances. In my mind it was at least a village. In reality, a stone building with a lovely balcony overlooking the valley below. We bought coffees and hot chocolates and continued on as the fog rolled in.
By the time we reached Borda 15 minutes later (around 2pm) we could barely see 20 metres. Borda is run by Lorenzo. A pilgrim himself who had purchased this place as an old sheep farm in 2019. In his own words he then swapped the sheep for pilgrims. He now hosts a dozen pilgrims a day in his charming auberge on the side of the mountain.
Lorenzo prepared a delicious, home cooked meal in his cozy little common room. Before dinner he told us all his story before inviting everyone to say why they were walking the Camino. We met Robyn from NZ. An organisational change consultant who the year before had walked the 600 km Le Puy through France, which finished at SJPDP. She was walking the Camino because she wanted to finish the journey all the way through to Santiago de Compostella. She said the Le Puy had made her more settled and she wanted more of that in her life. She was 70 years old, but bright as a button and moving like a human many years younger. She took a shine to Emma and her organisational talents. We also met Tracey, from the US, with her deep gravelly voice. Tracey had walked the Camino four times before and couldn’t stay away. Lorenzo told us we would all be back for the same reason. Mike was also from the US, but when it came his turn he teared up and couldn’t speak. We walked with him the next day where he told us his wife had recently passed away. ‘I’m an A to B kind of guy’ he said. ‘My wife, she was the one who always encouraged me to stop and smell the roses’. She had walked the Camino before she died and Mike was out to follow in her foot steps. Louise was another walking on her own. There was a sadness with Louise. She introduced herself as a mother and an ex-wife who had no idea who she was herself any longer. She was walking to rediscover herself. There were others too.
Already this walk was taking on a tone. A sense of community from day one with people we’d met just an hour beforehand.
The fog was even thicker the next morning. This would have bothered me in years gone by. I would have been infuriated at the thought of the views I couldn’t see on what was likely the one time in my life I would walk this way. A conversation with my friend Hugh a week before we left Australia had however planted the notion that I would walk this Camino with equanimity. It was foggy and so I would enjoy the fog.
And enjoy it I did. Immensely. It was mystical high up on the mountain and my eye was drawn to the detail of everything that I could see with nary a thought to what I couldn’t. Wildflowers and figures emerging and disappearing in and out of the mist. I fell into a photo frenzy and could scarcely have been happier – taking in beautiful things.
We were all in high spirits. We laughed a lot though I cannot recall now what we were laughing about. I think Paul and I were behaving like teenage boys. Riffing off my mishearing a conversation on the train where I thought Khia and Emma were talking about lingerie pines (it was really Monterey pines).
Mike caught up to us and we laughed with him too. We asked him to take a photo of us in the mist. I gave him explicit instructions and then gave him a hard time when he didn’t follow them. The other passing pilgrims must surely have felt we were all mad.
The higher we went, the brighter it got and then a most unexpected thing happened. The skies cleared and we emerged above the clouds. Crystal clear and stunning, the green mountain pastures stood out against the white backdrop. Extraordinary.
We crossed from France into Spain at an innocuous looking cattle grid bridge finding the high point of the crossing at 1420 metres a little later. We all lay in the sun or sat and ate lunch airing our toes in their toe socks on the mountain pass.
We walked five more kilometres dropping 600 metres in height before arriving at a converted monastery, now the Roncesvalles Albergue, and into a scene of chaos. There is nearly only one place to stay in Roncesvalles. It sleeps around 280 pilgrims and it seemed like they were all trying to check in at once.
That night we ate at the pilgrim dinner where we met Bill, Bryan and Victoria from the UK. Bill in particular was larger than life. He too had walked the Camino four times and was back for more.
There is a sign on the outskirts of Ronscevalles that says 790 kilometres to Santiago (by road). We stopped there briefly the next morning for a photo before joining pilgrim rush hour on the way out of town. The fog had descended once again overnight as we walked along a gentle path through beech forest along the edge of a moss covered stone wall.
Two villages later and we came across a cafe for breakfast, filled with pilgrims, including some we knew. Tracey was there, as was Bill, Bryan and Victoria. Here we are on the other side of the world stopping in at a cafe we will likely never see again and bumping into people as if we were in the cafe downstairs at work.
Recaffeinated and fed, we headed off again, over a wooden bridge, onto country roads which wended their way through a patchwork of fields and forest. The road became single track, and the single track moved always in and out of tunnels of vegetation. The fog cleared and the beech trees overhead were vibrant shades of green set off nicely by their black branches.
We stopped for lunch on a random bench in another random little village where I almost broke Khia. She was on one end and I the other with the legs somewhere in between. When I stood up she fell down landing on the arm she has only so recently had put back together with surgery. Eek.
No harm done, Khia bounced back. And we walked on ending our day in Zubiri where the Albergue Emma had booked turned out to be adjoined to a medieval bridge over a waterway flowing through town. Emma and Paul took a swim while Khia and I watched on.
We resumed the next day with an encore of walking. Past a magnesium mine, and then on down a valley towards Pamplona. Paul declared he needed a wee somewhere along the way and I got the silly’s again. I broke out into song. ‘Ah weeeeee, Ah weee, Ah weee ah wimba way’, to the tune of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’. Turns out I can be quite immature when I’m not being serious.
No mountain views today but the flowers were nice. A walking cottage garden composed of everything I spend my weekends pulling out of our garden back home.
We finished day four 22.5 kilometres after we started. Footsore and tired but with an apartment to recover in the middle of old town Pamplona. But that’s for another time.
8 itchy feet 