I haven't yet described the actual Walking. I see the Walking
as being different from the Camino. The Camino I see as a process
of philosophical proportions while the Walking I see as the
physical and mental challenge of moving yourself every day until
you have made progress that could be marked on a little desktop
globe with a one centimeter line.
The Walking was hard. It was harder than I thought and harder
than I had prepared for. I had already walked a thousand
kilometers as practice for the Walk, and I had read several books
about the Walk and how to prepare. What made me so unprepared
was 1) I don't have mountains where I live 2) Almost all the
books are about the Camino Frances, not the Camino del Norte.
These two facts put together meant that I hit the ground with
wrong equipment and with wrong training. I also got sick and
it took maybe two weeks to clear completely.
The beginning of the Norte is uphill and downhill for about a
week. As I got to the first mountain, I thought that the path
is being renovated as it was only loose gravel tossed about.
It wasn't being worked on, that is how it was. Often it was worse:
Big round stones, empty streams, active streams, mud, a tunnel
through a thorny bush, a goat path a meter away of a cliff, a
path between a cliff and a wall that has come partially down
with landslides. And what the Walkers will tell you is that they
prefer this to the alternative: Walking on pavement, usually
next to a busy road. They say it's rough for their feet.
Well, for myself, after the 1000 km prep mostly on pavement,
the mountains were definitely the hard part.
As I had some flu symptoms, I had to take it easy. I was worried
that the strenuous climbs might give me something like an
inflammated heart. I don't know if that is a reasonable fear,
but that is how it sometimes felt. The crazy thing was, after I
huff and puff myself up some impossible trail, there's always
some old guy just having a stroll with their dog. And they all
have calves of steel. At the bar you see local ladies wearing
their dresses with hiking shoes.
There was another fact that made me even more unprepared than
the two I mentioned: I was quite rigid about my connectivity.
The way I saw this trip would not work if I didn't leave the
smartphone behind. So, what I had was a dumbphone, a pinephone,
a book reader and a camera. This is not a luddite existance by
no means, but it is limiting enough that I couldn't use some app
to plot my course.
I had made a map that I had on the book reader. This was my main
tool. I also downloaded some websites (as PDFs) on the reader to
have an overview of the accommodation options.
The dumbphone turned out to be less useful than I thought, since
it seems in Spain the operator doesn't send you a message if you
received an MMS that cannot be delivered to your phone. In my
homecountry I get a message. The way the lack of this message is
problematic is because it also seems that the smartphones are
defaulting to sending MMS instead of TXT these days, and there
is no way I can teach my mom into changing this setting each time
she sends a message. So the dumbphone was even dumber in Spain,
and I only used it to make phone calls.
The pinephone I brought with one essential function in mind:
I needed to have some device with me that can reserve a plane
ticket out of the country. I am paranoid enough to not do such
things without a VPN, so there was no dumber option for me.
It worked out well, though. It is so clumsy device as it is that
I really didn't have any issues of using it too much. Also, I
had some important mails I had to write so I was happy I had
the option to do so. The killer app on it was Marble, the map.
It is super handy for downloading areas beforehand and then
browsing offline. It also uses surprisingly little energy
compared to all the other graphical apps on pinephone. You can
also have 'layers' of information loaded when you need it. Stuff
like hostels, restaurants, etc. I got this info from a website
that I think is called Overpass Turbo, or something. It is an
API to openstreetmap and you can do quite interesting stuff
with it. Like for example, you could tell it to list all water
sources except when within city limits. This useful when you
don't want a crazy amount of points on your map as the cities
obviously have water everywhere and the only times you are
searching for water is outside city limits.
Anyway, this lack of connectivity by modern standards created
a situation where I often ended up without a place to stay
by the end of the day. I had started the trip thinking that
there will be enough albergues (this is a special hostel
for the Walkers) since this is what everything I read suggested.
These writers were almost scoffing at the idea of having a
sleeping bag. Well, turns out that all this information from
multiple sources was wrong, since I had not accounted for the
fact that out of the 300 000 or so Walkers 70% take the
Camino Frances, which I now hear (from other Walkers) is more
like a festival flowing slowly towards the west. So they have
all the services, including Menu Peregrino, the pilgrim's
menu, which was sorely missed on the Norte.
