Me, Myself, and the Voices in my Head

23 June, Madrid to Oviedo. This day was all logistics: getting a credencial from the Pilgrim's Office in Madrid, buying hiking poles at Decathlon, taking a bus to Oviedo and securing a bunk and my first sello at the municipal albergue there.

24 June, Oviedo to San Juan de Villapañada. It was a little tricky getting out of Oviedo itself due to some minor construction causing route detours, but hunting for the shells set in the pavement was already becoming a bit of a game to me. Once I was out of the city, the knee pain that I'd been worrying about for three months before departure resolved rapidly; it turns out that maybe my body doesn't love concrete, which is not a great revelation to receive given that I live in Tokyo. For a few kilometers I walked past fields of cattle and horses with a Portuguese peregrino; we parted ways at a cafe on the road.

When I finally trudged up that last hill to the albergue in San Juan de Villapañada, I discovered that the hospitalero was off running errands and "would be back later." I settled in with the other peregrinos to do laundry at the outdoor sink and hang it on the line, as not even the native Spanish-speaker in the group could figure out how the washing machine in the kitchen worked. This is where I met the lifeguard (German), the biologist (Spanish), and the priest-and-friend (Italian). I helped the lifeguard peacefully relocate a lizard from the laundry sink, realizing in the process that I had not at any point researched whether Spanish wildlife was poisonous. The priest held Mass at a picnic table outside for anyone interested. The hospitalero showed up and taught us how to drink Asturian cidre, which requires you to pour from bottle to glass one mouthful at a time at a distance of at least one meter to properly calibrate the size and volume of the bubbles. Northern Spain is significantly farther north than I'm used to, with sunlight stretching past 22:00 at night

25 June, San Juan de Villapañada to Bodenaya. It was misty and the clothes I'd left on the line were not exactly as dry as I would have liked, but back in my pack they had to go. The biologist and I kept pace for part of the morning, and he taught me about the horreos, the wooden granaries built on little stilts on top of the houses we were passing. Lots more walking past grazing fields and carefully stepping around the piles of horse dung on the path.

Spotty rain throughout the day, and as people passed we'd pause to help each other get in and out of rain ponchos or put rainshields on our packs.

The 10-bed albergue at Bodenaya was my favorite of the whole Camino. The whole place is covered in flags and postcards and souvenirs from past pilgrims; I chose the bed under the pride flag. The hospitalera is from the same part of California I spent my childhood in, and she and her husband run the albergue out of their actual house as a donativo.

This is where I met what would become the rest of my loose adventuring party: the repeat peregrino (an Irishman) who walks almost every year, the mechanic, a German freeter between jobs, and a Mexican backpacker.

We all pitched in to help prepare dinner, talked about why we were out here, and then the hospitalera handed her guitar to the lifeguard. This is how I found out that I am apparently the only person in the world who doesn't know how to sing "Take Me Home, Country Roads."

26 June, Bodenaya to Colinas de Arriba. This day holds two memories that will stay with me for the rest of my life: the shocking and perfect coldness of the water in the Fuente de San Juan public fountain just outside Tineo, and the Bee Tunnel.

The path went from Tineo through a lovely shady patch of woods, and then carried me uphill into an absolutely stunning meadow of wildflowers.

300 meters into this meadow, I realized that it was home to definitely more than a Wicker Man worth of bees.

I've known people who kept bees. I have a pretty good sense of what 200 bees looks like. So my most conservative, trying-to-keep-from-shitting-myself estimate was that I was in the vicinity of 700 bees minimum. I could not hear anything but the buzzing. The bees were swooping me like magpies to investigate my hat and my sunblock, and landing on the path ahead of me, demanding extreme caution about where I put my feet and my sticks.

But there was no alternate path! My challenge was just to somehow pass through the surprise Bee Tunnel unscathed. And I did it, so I guess I'm the new Jupiter Ascending and I'm waiting for my space werewolf boyfriend to roller-skate into my life any day now.

People say the Camino gives you perspective about life. This is the perspective: now, when I am having a bad time, I ask myself, "would I rather do this, or be in the Bee Tunnel again?"

Arguing about how much cleavage a fictional character is permitted to display (a task that takes up approximately 25% of my work hours) is not worse than the Bee Tunnel. And, conversely, I would rather spend the rest of my life in the Bee Tunnel than ever visit my mom and her husband again.

Everyone I'd been with at Bodenaya except the biologist very sensibly stopped at Borres for the day. I knew the next day would be the Hospitales crossing, which is why I pushed on to Colinas de Arriba (getting a little lost on the way and adding on an extra 3km to my walk). Everyone said Hospitales was hard, so I wanted to make sure that it was the only hard thing I did that day and not add extra distance. The biologist teased me for caving and paying someone at the albergue in Colinas to do my laundry, but I felt it was appropriate to Treat Myself after my bee ordeal.

27 June, Colinas de Arriba to La Mesa (crossing Hospitales). There's a lot that's rough about Hospitales: the elevation gain, the completely unrestrained herds of cattle (including intact and very grumpy bulls), the sparse and scrubby trees offering no shade, the wind, the part where there's no food or potable water along that stretch of path so have fun with your resource management game.

When I struggled to the top of the first peak I found a grave/memorial, which felt like foreshadowing given the way everyone talks about how hard the Hospitales crossing is. The Italian padre and his friend were drinking Aquarius next to it. "That better not be the last guy who tried this," I said.

The biologist and the lifeguard and I kept passing each other throughout the day and stopped on a mountaintop together to eat snacks and gaze out over the blue valley yawning open beneath us.

The worst part was the descent. I've come to understand that any asshole can get themselves up a mountain. The hard part is getting back down in one piece. (Climbing Mt. Fuji two weeks ago has only solidified this conviction.)

The descent is several kilometers of loose, rocky, steeply graded terrain. I am deeply grateful to the two Spanish peregrinos who deliberately slowed their pace to keep us all in shouting distance of each other in case I hurt myself.

Most of the party briefly caught each other for a snack break just outside Lago, at a church with a beautiful old yew tree, and we finally made a WhatsApp group.

At La Mesa I was reunited with the rest of the peregrinos I'd spent the night at Bodenaya with. We sat around drinking tinto de verano and telling stories like we were in the goddamn Canterbury Tales. We also met a British teacher and her husband, who taught us the cork pass-thru. Several of our party became obsessed with this trick and for the rest of the walk, if there were two wine bottles open at the table someone was always practicing.

28 June, La Mesa to Grandas de Salime. This was probably my favorite day of the walk. After following the path through some farmers' grazing fields (there are several stretches of the Camino that are technically on private property), I stood on the rim of a valley filled with churning clouds, and then descended a winding path into that gloriously cool fog. When I'd passed through the cloudline I was rewarded with a spectacular view down onto the Grandas river and dam.

This was the first point at which I realized my sense of time had basically fallen to bits. I was conscious of the fact that I'd been on the way less than a week, and at the same time it felt like I'd been walking forever.

The adventuring party reunited in Grandas de Salime, where we made about three pounds of pasta together in the albergue kitchen and strategized the road ahead. The alternating periods of walking alone, walking together, and then reuniting to eat and debrief and plan gave a really pleasant rhythm to the experience.

29 June, Grandas de Salime to A Fonsagrada. I realized about two hours into the day that I'd managed to swap poles with an Australian lady who had the same model. (I had rubber tips and she did not.)

This was the day of the border crossing from Asturias into Galicia, leaving behind the cool and misty forests for sunny chaparral. There's a bar just past the Galician border that had the best bocadillo of the whole route, jamón con queso mantecoso. I am still thinking longingly of that cheese. I will miss that cheese for the rest of my life.

As I got further into Galicia the amount of roadside walking increased dramatically. Spanish drivers are tremendously courteous to peregrinos, though. They are very kind about making sure that you know they saw you and waving.

Of course there's a sense of community among peregrinos themselves, so that the default mode of engagement is, "I have too much X, would you like some?" Despite how light we're all packing, there seems to be very little scarcity mindset.

But the locals are also incredibly supportive! It was honestly very disorienting to have total strangers wish me a Buen Camino, offer me water, tell me unprompted where to go to find food or how far the next town was. It sometimes lent kind of a video-game surreality to the experience, because I cannot emphasize enough: people are just not this helpful to me in real life.

In A Fonsagrada, the party splurged on a slightly fancier pilgrim menu, where every course was as big as a full-sized meal. I had pulpo a feira, which was very exciting because I usually eat octopus raw.

30 June, A Fonsagrada to O Cádavo. Took a short day 1) because my ankles were beginning to complain and 2) I'd loosely figured out that I was a bit ahead of the Australians. The leapfrogging way that everyone passed and greeted each other creates a sort of information grapevine between peregrinos, and I'd been hearing since lunchtime the day before that the Australian lady was looking for me to trade poles back. There is a bottleneck through O Cádavo, only one road through town and it's slightly before where most people stop for the day. This created the perfect place for me to lie in wait so that we could swap.

Also in O Cádavo: clotheslines perfectly placed in the sun (doing laundry by hand got a lot easier once I was in dry, sunny Galicia) and the best roast pork I've ever had.

1 July, O Cádavo to Lugo. The low part of the trip: I managed to roll both ankles a few times on a gravelly bit of downhill and due to how this affected my pace needed to have my only Bush Wee of the Camino. (The terrain is not suited to this because the ground often slopes down away from the path and the bushes are not large enough for concealment. Thank you, kind tree that sheltered me.) This experience justified purchasing and carrying a kula cloth the whole way. I would have been very distressed without it.

In Lugo I bought an ankle brace and began reevaluating my plans. In the previous days I had thought that I would reach SdC with sufficient time remaining before my flight home to walk onward to Finisterre. The double ankle injury meant that I was going to have to slow down, throwing the whole thing off.

The adventuring party had another truly excellent meal here of oven-baked rabbit at a local restaurant.

2 July, Lugo to Ferreira. Having to work around my ankles (because dammit, I was getting to SdC, the terrain was finally getting really easy so as long as I took it slower there was no reason to quit) split me up from the group. At this point the Camino was becoming more crowded, and I heard more conversation in English as I passed. I stopped alone at a less-traveled albergue slightly off the path, where the hospitalera and I mainly communicated via Google Translate between Japanese and Spanish. She had a good laugh at my delight at multiple flavors of Aquarius. (In Japan we only have original/lemon flavor. Spain has orange and peach ones as well!)

3 July, Ferreira to Melide. Once I got back on the path, there were very few stretches where I was truly alone (no other people in sight). There were almost always other peregrinos within sight range and shouting distance. This is also where the Camino becomes a little less friendly, as well. People who have been on the road for some time are now settled in their various adventuring parties. While the helpfulness culture is still the dominant mode, but conversations outside people's own parties seem to be shorter and shallower, focused on resource and information sharing and less personal connections. It's easier to talk to individual people than to groups.

Melide is very industrial, and looks like the kind of city that American filmmakers put a yellow filter over. However, the road takes you past a bunch of very good dessert shops. I was very pleased with the churros.

According to the journal I kept, this is the point at which I realized that I hadn't had a headache the entire Camino. Staring at a screen for nine hours a day to keep a roof over my head is really doing my health in, I guess.

4 July, Melide to As Quintás. The road was now crowded enough that I could not go ten minutes without encountering another person. I found myself wishing I'd paced the first week differently to make the solitude and the more exciting terrain last longer. From Melide onward, the walk is fairly flat through thinly forested areas or over pavement.

A lot of my friends back in Japan had disapproved of the Camino idea because they feel foreign countries are dangerous and I'm obviously going to be mugged or murdered. I never felt myself to be in any danger while on the Camino, but just outside the albergue in As Quintás, I did have a moment of doubt about my choice to stay there. The outside wall of the albergue, along the road, was lined with signs about "secrets in the Bible" explaining that 1) the Forbidden Fruit in Genesis was not necessarily an apple, 2) in fact Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden for ceasing to follow a vegetarian diet, 3) the reason humanity repeats its mistakes is our dependence on drugs that cause us to ignore long-term consequences, 4) the Forbidden Fruit is a metaphor for drugs.

As someone who has one and a half parents that are flat earthers, I felt some real anxiety about this! I did not think I was in physical danger but I was apprehensive that I might need to extricate myself from an indoctrination attempt. (I did take photos of the posters and of myself outside the albergue's sign and sent that to several friends so that they'd know where to start looking if they didn't hear from me the next day. You cannot be too careful about interacting with conspiracy theorists.)

Thankfully the hospitalera had much better manners than my family and did not use dinner as a platform from which to lecture about her beliefs. Also, her quinoa was absolutely amazing.

5 July, As Quintás to Lavacolla. The deeper you get into Galicia, the more the native trees are replaced by vast forests of eucalyptus. This stretch of the Way was distinguished by its great profusion of cyclists. I spent most of the walk jumping off the path to keep from getting run over.

This is where I also began to see a lot more influencers filming along the way, and had to work to keep myself from being background footage!

6 July, Lavacolla to Santiago de Compostela. I started early and got into the city before the crowds. The process of getting my compostela took less than fifteen minutes. Afterwards, I circled back to the Plaza del Obradoiro and met up with most of my adventuring party, who were arriving from different cities around the same time. (The lifeguard and the repeat peregrino had already been and gone, walking at a faster pace than the rest of us and continuing on to Finisterre and Muxía.) We had brunch together, sort of struggling to navigate the city now that we were no longer following shells and arrows. I hadn't realized until it was over how much structure and comfort I had derived from having Quest Markers to point my way.

Over brunch the biologist told us of Juan do Camino, a man he'd met a few days ago on the path. Juan do Camino, real name unknown, has supposedly been walking the Camino continuously for several years. (A month ago, I would have thought that was bonkers. Now I get it, and I'm maybe a little jealous.)

That afternoon, I got a waymarker scallop tattoo on my ankle to commemorate the experience. (Someday, I will go back to finish the SdC → Finisterre walk, and then I'll get another on the other ankle.)

I kept running the numbers, but there was no way I could reach Finisterre on foot at my injured pace and be sure I could make my flight home. I was deeply bummed by this, and by saying farewell to my adventuring party as they shouldered their packs and moved on to the next town.

I spent a couple days recovering in SdC (donating my sticks and knife at Pilgrim House, hanging around the cafes journaling) and trying to integrate the experience, then returned to Madrid for some sightseeing before coming home to Japan. It took a bit over a month for my ankles to recover from the mild supination trauma.

So I suppose the question is, in what way am I changed.

I'm struggling with the gap between how good my body felt walking average 25km/day through the forests and brush (for the first time, I was really and truly friends and teammates with my body! it wasn't just an adversary whose presence I tolerated!) and how bad it feels to hunch over my laptop and strain my eyes on my spreadsheets in a paved-over city that is baking itself alive.

Look, I'd always known that there were better ways to live out there! That we could be, collectively, treating each other better! But now I've lived it. I feel like I sloughed off a lot of calluses and now I'm getting all bruised and scraped just by trying to make a living under modern capitalism. I am complicit in a great deal of wanton waste and pointless destruction in the pursuit of profits.

At the same time, I am cognizant of the fact that people treat each other well in this setting because "pilgrim" is a privileged temporary status. I am not about to be like, I'm uprooting my life and moving to Spain. That is not a magic fix that will deliver the kinder world I desire.

I am constantly on the receiving end of a lot of casual racism and sexism in my professional and social circles as a queer mixed-race AFAB person in Japan. I kind of just deal with it as the price of a functional healthcare infrastructure and reasonable confidence that I won't be gunned down in a shopping mall. But after being in a subculture where I was not automatically treated as Existing Incorrectly, it's just really rough coming home to that.

I am not Christian or Catholic. I practice Shinto and am very happy there. A thing that surprised me was that walking the Camino reinforced my relationship to my own beliefs. It was very affirming to recognize the beauty in someone else's rites without being tempted by them.

I have a lot more confidence that I can do hard things and work out solutions on the fly. Walking through a foreign country where I barely speak the language and have no idea where I'm going to sleep that night, and yet always managing to work it out, is a really good feeling!

And if something does go wrong: well, at least I'm not in the Bee Tunnel.

I don't know exactly when, but I'm planning to walk the Kumano Kodo and get my Dual Pilgrim badge. (And my adventuring party has a standing invitation that if anyone makes it to Japan, I'll take time off work to go walk whatever bit of the Kumano Kodo with them!)

What prospective peregrinos should know:

Everyone talks about the Primitivo as the most secluded and hikerly of the paths, with the least highway walking, which was my motivation in choosing it. I will say that the altitude gain/descent is not as severe as some hiking I've done around Tokyo, and a lot of the steep trails were not so steep as some of what I encounter in an urban setting at home.

Post-pandemic, a lot of price guides are outdated. The €15/day Camino is a thing of the past. Before Lugo, I was able to get by on an average €30/day budget. After Lugo, just a simple bunk (no meal included) cost €20-25. In the last couple days of walking my spending had inflated to over €50/day.

You are going to eat a lot of tortilla and bocadillos. I am lucky enough not to have food restrictions or aversions beyond midlevel lactose intolerance, but I met vegetarian and vegan peregrinos along the way who were really struggling with the pork-dominant culinary culture. I think it'd be very difficult to keep kosher or halal in this setting as well. (I actually went down a whole Wikipedia rabbit hole about the Spanish Inquisition one night because I was curious about how much antisemitism influenced the popularity of pork in Spain.)

In general the lingua franca amongst peregrinos is English but basic Spanish is necessary for interacting with any locals. I took 2 years in high school (but that was focused on Baja/Mexican Spanish), and before I left I replayed Pokémon Scarlet in continental Spanish. This made me really good at shopping and obtaining food, but not much else. My listening comprehension is good enough to keep up with most stories and warnings from other peregrinos but I can't speak well enough to really contribute to the conversation.

As you get closer to SdC and things get more crowded, it's no longer practical to just turn up somewhere and count on the availability of beds unless you want to race everyone else on the road. From Melide onward, I'd start walking by 7:00 in the morning, evaluate how much farther I thought I could walk for the day around 12:00, grab a bed in that town via WhatsApp or Booking.com, and finish the day's walk around 14:00.

You are going to meet so many people, and they are going to be so kind despite your differences. One of the things I loved about the Camino is that it proved wrong everything my family always says about the world. My relatives believe everyone else is always out to hurt/use/manipulate you and that only blood family can be trusted, and I've been the lone voice of dissent against that since I was like twelve, and I've generally been right.

Unless a lot of shit goes down and fundamentally restructures society, this is the closest experience most of us can ever get to a traditional fantasy narrative experience of "wake up, walk, shelter at an unfamiliar inn for the night, keep walking." It's the most satisfying thing I've ever done.