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People ask me – often in solicitous tones – why I keep coming back to the Camino de Santiago, or more precisely, to the Camino Franc\u00e9s, the great pilgrim trunk-road that runs from the Spanish Pyrenees west across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela. “You’re in a rut,” the questioners seem to imply. “It’s a big world, there are other experiences to be had, other roads to walk. Why \u2026. again?”<\/p>\n
I tell them they\u2019re absolutely right, and swear I\u2019ll someday walk to Rome, and make the Buddhist pilgrimage to the Japanese island of Shikoku, and check out the Portuguese route to Santiago \u2026. But in the meantime, I\u2019m still far from wearing out the novelty of the good old Camino Franc\u00e9s.
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\n\u201cEvery time,\u201d (I explain) \u201cI walk it in a different season, sleep in different places, find new ways to get somewhere familiar \u2013 and new ways to get lost. I turn left where before I turned right, look up where last time I looked down. But most of all, I meet a whole new cast of pilgrims, all with their own stories, their own novel ways of looking at our shared experience. I do the Camino again because every time it \u2019s different.\u201d<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s still not the whole answer. For while half the appeal of the Camino is the surprises, the eternal newness of the familiar, the other half is what does not change: the deep, persistent rhythms of the road.<\/p>\n
I suppose the obvious one is the rhythm of the pilgrim’s day, the waking and walking and eating and sleeping and waking and walking and…. though for me, I never established much in the way of a daily rhythm. Some days I walked fifteen kilometers, others forty. There were nights I slept the sleep of the just. Others when I lay awake till dawn.<\/p>\n
I usually set out in the morning with an idea of where I wanted to end up that night, but if it transpired that the Camino had other ideas for me, I didn\u2019t put up a fight. I\u2019ve learned not to argue with the Camino. This is not to say that other pilgrims didn\u2019t find or create order in the Camino\u2019s rush and flux. But the only fixed star in my pilgrim sky was a morning coffee.<\/p>\n
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\nWhat, then, were the rhythms I felt? Well, first and last, the rhythm we pound with the steps of our journey, the rhythm of walking. What rhythm, save our heartbeat, our breathing, is more basic to life? It was the steady metronome of footsteps that took our kind out of Africa a million years ago and carried us to the farthest ends of the Earth \u2013 for better or for worse. Walking defines us. We are the creature who goes on four legs in the morning and two in the afternoon.<\/p>\n
But walking is a rhythm that\u2019s hard to find in the life most of us live today. A city is a choppy sea for walkers, with its crowded sidewalks and stop-and-go traffic lights, its traffic and distractions. The leveled surfaces meant to facilitate our progress are rock-hard, we pay for convenience with sore feet. And city journeys are Ulyssean, returning us at the end of the day to the place we left in the morning. To follow the ribbon of the Camino ever westward across Spain is to rediscover another way of walking \u2013 strong, calm, purposeful.
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\nAnd as we walk through this particular landscape, we become aware of another rhythm: the rhythm of the rural and the urban. At least until we reach Galicia, with its loose scattering of farms and byres, there is little continuous human settlement on the Camino. What we find instead are long stretches of emptiness punctuated at regular intervals by a compact village or town.<\/p>\n
This pattern was laid down in Spain\u2019s olden days of chronic warfare, when people went out to farm the fields by day, then huddled in their villages at night. It was shaped by the pilgrimage, too \u2013 big towns pop up at roughly the distance of a day\u2019s walk from each other. What counts for us today, however, is that this alternation between habitation and emptiness creates another rhythm: the rhythm of solitude and community.<\/p>\n
I have used the word “emptiness” to describe the spaces between the Camino\u2019s towns, and perhaps that is how we would experience them \u2013 if we were driving. But when we walk, they are anything but. They are full, full beyond measure, of space and sky, clouds and silence, wind and earth and wheat. They are places where the mind can expand and soar \u2013 or conversely, feel its smallness upon the vast face of our planet. They are places to be alone, with eyes set on the horizon, footsteps marking off the beat, while the spirit walks its own Camino.
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\nAnd then, with a roll of drums, our lonely, peaceful road enters a human settlement, a little urbs spun tight around its civic square, its well, and its bar (or two, or three\u2026). We join the pilgrims lazing around the fountain (drying their laundry, sharing fruit, comparing blisters), or duck out of the rain to share a coffee or a glass of wine, or come to the refuge where we will spend the night and scan the register for familiar names. And we are reminded, if we needed reminding, that the Camino is and always has been not a solitary endeavour but a collaboration.<\/p>\n
My perfect Camino days, the ones I walk again in my thoughts and dreams, are the ones when all the rhythms run together, when fellowship and solitude, the sense of a lonely journey and the knowledge that the journey is shared, play off of and balance each other, as surely as a step with the left foot balances a step with the right.<\/p>\n
Follow Up Facts<\/span>Robert Ward\u2019s inspiring, entertaining book, All the Good Pilgrims<\/a> [Thomas Allen Publishers, 2007], will certainly help readers make a decision of whether to follow in his \u201cdirected wandering\u201d footsteps. It is also a great read for armchair travelers.<\/span> Watercolor artist Jennifer Lawson paints her away along the Camino de Santiago<\/a>, capturing Spain\u2019s landscapes, food, animals and people encountered on her challenging daily adventures. <\/p>\n Learn about nine routes to Spain\u2019s Santiago de Compostela<\/a> pilgrimage site, and different terrains you will encounter on each route. <\/p>\n Two senior women<\/a> walk Spain\u2019s Camino de Santiago for 751 kilometers from the French border to Santiago de Compostela, staying in pilgrim hostels and meeting every challenge. <\/p>\n Perennial traveler and book author, Robert Ward, speaks about his many journeys on the Camino: its \u201ceternal newness\u201d and its \u201cdeep, persistent rhythms of the road<\/a>\u201d. <\/p>\n In a small-group tour, walk part of northern Spain\u2019s Camino de Santiago<\/a> in the footsteps of millions of pilgrims over more than 1,000 years and experience the fascination of this route. <\/p>\n Learn about the significance of the Camino passport and the scallop shell<\/a> that is the pilgrim\u2019s symbol for the famous walk to Santiago de Compostela. <\/p>\n
\nTo enjoy more richly-illustrated articles about the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route across northern Spain, click on each of the image buttons below. Walking Spain\u2019s Camino de Santiago<\/a> offers the most comprehensive Follow Up Facts<\/strong> box at the end of that article.<\/span>
\nThe coast of Spain is always high on the list when it comes to choosing where to spend summer and with holidays in Costa Blanca<\/a> you can’t fail!<\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n![\"All](\"https:\/\/www.travelwithachallenge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Book-Cover300.jpg\")
Robert Ward<\/strong> is a travel lover who tired of aimless wandering and turned to pilgrimages \u2013 directed wandering. In All the Good Pilgrims<\/strong> he tells many colorful tales that he gathered over the course of five Camino walks between 1999 and 2004, totalling some 3,000 kilometers.
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\nRobert holds an MA in English Literature and a BA in English and Religious Studies. He taught English for several years in Japan, and can converse in Japanese, as well as (on a good day) Spanish, French and Italian. His travel articles have been featured in the Globe and Mail, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. He has recently completed a play, set (as one might predict) on the Camino de Santiago. Robert lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife, Michiko. www.robertward.ca<\/a>.
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\n<\/span><\/p>\nMore Articles on Walking the Camino<\/h3>\n