This blog has just clicked over the 50,000 page views mark.

This since mid April.

I’m not sure about these things, but that to me seems like a lot. Particularly as this blog started out being just for family and friends – 25 people in total. And also given that I’ve done nothing to boost the numbers. No fancy tagging or search optimisation etc.

The blog has just spread through word of mouth.

While I was walking, this blog became an essential part of my Camino experience.

It continues to be so.

I am blessed to have met some wonderful people here, and some have become good friends. I’m also blessed to have gained a greater insight and understanding through the postings of others here.

So THANK YOU to all those who have visited the site, and especially to those who now regularly contribute.

You make this blog something very special.

Bill

I remember walking into Santiago and thinking: I’ve done it. I’m here. I’ll never walk the Camino again.

Less than a week later, I’d changed my mind.

I remember the moment when I changed my mind. I was in a train heading down to Porto. I looked out the window and I saw a pilgrim on the Portuguese route. The train was up high, so I was looking down on her. She was on a small country lane and she had her guidebook out. She was lost.

I could see, from my higher vantage point, a yellow arrow pointing the way, but from where she was, she couldn’t see it.

I got a sudden pang of… what was it… longing. I wanted to be down on that country lane, wearing my backpack again, looking at a guidebook, trying to find that yellow arrow. It was at that moment I knew that I’d would walk the Camino again, and I’d walk through Portugal.

What is it about the Camino that draws people back?

For me, I have no desire to walk the Coast to Coast walk in Britain, nor the Appalachian Trail nor the Pacific Crest in the US, nor some of the glorious walks we have here in Australia. Long distance walking as such doesn’t interest me.

It’s the Camino that’s become my obsession.

Why?

Today I asked that question of Steve – a bloke from Texas I’ve “met” through this blog. We’ve become good friends. He’s just finished his Camino. The camaraderie, he said. The people you meet.

Yes, I’d have to agree. The people who are attracted to the Camino, who are called to the Camino, are mostly wonderful extraordinary people.

But then I thought more on this, and thought that surely anyone walking the Appalachian Trail would be extraordinary too. That’s over 2,000 miles, and you have to carry more on your back than if you walk the Camino – a tent and all your food, for starters. There’s no sleeping in albergues and having cafe con leches whenever you want them.

So it has to be more than the people you meet. There must be something else.

And the conclusion I came to is that it’s a pilgrimage.

Whilst I couldn’t imagine walking the Appalachian Trail, or the Coast to Coast, I could imagine myself one day walking the Italian Camino through to Rome, or perhaps even the route to Jerusalem. (Knee allowing!) I certainly want to walk the Portuguese Camino back to Santiago again.

I should remind you all that I’m not Catholic, and I’m not religious as such. But like so many others, I’m inexplicably drawn to this notion of walking a pilgrimage route.

There are pilgrims I know of who’ve walked the Camino six and eight times. Some have walked more. They never tire of the journey, and they see something new each time. They experience something new each time.

I understand there’s a very real danger of living in a Camino Cocoon – that it’s much easier to live in the “Camino” world than the “real” world. That it’s a place of escape from all those difficulties we all face in everyday life. A nice little bubble where everything is simple, and people are nice and friendly. (Most of the time!)

That’s not the reason I’d like to walk the Camino again.

I can’t get out of my mind that image, from on high, of that lost pilgrim somewhere in northern Portugal.

I want to get lost again.

As some of you might know, I’ve been working on my eBook since returning from the Camino. I hope to have it completed and published by August.

Here is a sneak peak at a section – it describes my walking from Burgos to Hontanas, and worrying about getting a bed…

After several hours walking, I saw a figure up ahead. Perhaps because of the monotony, or perhaps out of sheer tiredness, I began to obsess that this person ahead of me would take the last remaining bed in Hontanas.

I’m not sure if my mind was playing tricks on me, because this started out as a joke to keep me amused, but it soon began to take hold. The person up ahead was a lone black figure – a silhouette against the white gravel track slicing through the green rolling hills.

He – I surmised it was a he because it walked like a “he” – took on a sinister form. Like a bandit. The person who was going to steal my bed from me. This dark marauder, always staying ahead of me no matter how fast I walked. This usurper of my coming night’s sleep.

I started to increase my speed. Bugger the pain. This thief wasn’t going to steal my bed! The last bed in town!

I was an ocean liner with throttles now pushed to the max. My engines were churning on overdrive. I was actually kicking up dust. I felt like Speedy Gonzales. This villain up ahead was getting closer. Kilometer after kilometer, I was slowly reeling him in.

Soon I’d be alongside him and I’d smile genially, and I’d say G’day mate, in my broadest Australian accent, if for no other reason than to disrupt his equilibrium. Put him off his pace. Then I’d discreetly surge ahead, so that by the time I got to Hontanas he’d be a mere stick figure in the distance behind me, choking on my plume of dust, and I’d have enough time to find the last remaining bed in town and claim it as my rightful own.

He stopped to get something out of his pack.

And I walked up to him.

What a nice guy!

His name was Wolfgang, as in Mozart he told me. I asked him who Mozart was and he looked at me blankly. Then I laughed. Australian sense of humor, I told him. He still looked at me blankly.

He was a Tax Inspector from Germany. In my mind, this put him on the same shelf as parking police and periodontists. To put this in perspective, on the next shelf down are people who kill baby seals. Even so, he was a delightful bloke and we had a good chat as we walked the last 8 kms into Hontanas.

This afternoon I was driving back to my home town north west of Sydney, and I happened to look out the car window.

I was passing a small pine forest, and on the other side was a lake. I got a sudden and vivid flashback to a similar grove of pine trees outside of Logrono. It too overlooked a lake.

But what I remembered most clearly was the beautiful young Japanese lass sitting under a tree, having a rest stop. She'd started at St. Jean same day as me, and we'd seen each other on the Camino several times since.

Whenever we met she was always happy and laughing and gorgeous. But I didn't even know her name. She spoke very little English. And yet there'd developed something of a sweet friendship between us.

She saw me walking, and yelled out to me to join her. Laughing, she waved me over.

I'd had a hard time that morning. I'd left Viana early, and had already walked about 12kms. I wanted to get to Ventosa, another 20kms further on.

Not only that, but I was in a lot of pain, and the long paved walking track leading out of Logrono had aggravated my injuries.

I didn't want to stop, but I walked over. She had some food laid out, and she invited me to join her.

I declined. I wanted to keep walking, and I knew that because of the language barrier, any time spent with her would be fraught with communication difficulties.

As I drove past that pine forest this afternoon, I got a sudden pang of regret.

I should have stopped.

I should have joined her and taken fifteen or twenty minutes out to sit and chat, no matter what the language difficulties.

We saw each other again several times over the next few weeks, and I bumped into her in Santiago at the end, and we hugged.

I never did find out her name.

And I regret that too.

Six weeks now after having finished my Camino, I still can’t walk properly.

I’m hobbling around like an old man.

(If you’ve read my past postings, I’ve previously defined as “old” anyone over the age of 60. I’m 59 yrs 10 mths and 2 wks, so technically I’m still a young buck…)

I have a deep seated reluctance to see doctors, believing the body heals itself, but yesterday I finally went to my GP.

My problems were two-fold: my knee is still very painful, and my left foot is numb, under the ball of the foot. And it’s not improving.

I walked 800+kms in 31days, and for 28 of those days I took 600mgs of Ibuprofen thrice daily. It reduced my pain and enabled me to complete the walk, but it also masked some warning signs.

So, what the doctor said…

With the knee, I have to get an MRI, and will probably need surgery. And with the foot, it seems I might have “nerve entrapment,” which happens when tissue around a nerve swells, or gets damaged, and it blocks nerve functions to the foot.

I had very bad tendonitis on that lower leg, and that’s what I think has caused it. I now have to go see a Neurologist and have tests, to see where this nerve entrapment resides.

So, the cost of walking the Camino….months of lingering pain and medical bills.

But, I have to get these injuries fixed up –

– so I can do it again!

I had my first big test last night.

Our son drove up from Sydney to stay with us for a couple of days. Lately he's been cooking, and he's developing into a bit of a Jamie Oliver/Gordon Ramsay, depending on his mood.

He cooked for my wife and me last night – pork chops in a beautiful onion and garlic based sauce, with crunched Italian styled potatoes with fennel. We sat down and had a great dinner together.

We then went into our tv room and watched Django Unchained, the Tarantino movie. (very disappointing, except for Samuel L Jackson who was brilliant.)

While watching the movie my son said he'd go and heat up the remaining chop, which he did. Then he came back and we kept watching the movie.

After about half an hour, my wife sniffed the air. Did you leave anything on the stove? she asked.

Our son raced out into the kitchen, as did my wife and I.

We could hardly see 2ft in front of our noses, there was so much smoke. He'd turned the hot plate up to maximum heat, and the pork chop in the Le Cruset pan was cinder-ized.

Fortunately the kitchen hadn't caught fire, but that was only minutes away.

I wasn't worried about the chop, I was worried about the pan, because they have enamel bases, and if they're left on high heat, they can crack, and they're useless.

I looked at the bottom of the pan and it was charred and black.

I was furious.

I bit down hard and we went back to watching the film, which now held even less interest for me.

My wife could see that I was fuming –

Our son started to apologise, but I was wasn't listening. I went online and looked up the replacement value of that particular pan. $363. Nooooooo.

The film now held absolutely no interest at all. As Django started shooting up bad guys and blood started spurting everywhere, Tarantino style, all I wanted to do was get that enamel pan and bang it over my son's head.

It brought back all the times in the past when he and I had clashed. He knew it, and I knew it.

My wife looked across at me, reading the warning signs. She hissed at me –

Bill, remember you're a PILGRIM!

I thought of the Camino. The Meseta in fact, early one morning, the air crisp and the sun just rising over a wide flat plain.

And I relaxed.

What was a pan? Our son had just driven four hours from Sydney to cook us a gorgeous meal. And now we were all sitting together enjoying just being in the same room.

So what if I had to trash the pan? It was more important that our son had made the effort to come and see us, and cook us a meal.

At that moment I felt an overwhelming sense of love for him.

Later, after the movie, my wife went into the kitchen, put on some industrial strength gloves and began scrubbing, trying to give the pan emergency roadside assistance.

My son and I sat and talked, dissecting the movie and talking about the relative merits of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and Jackie Brown.

Underneath it though, we were making amends. Both of us saying sorry, sub-texturally, both of us telling the other we loved them.

The pan eventually was revived, to live another day and cook another pork chop. My son and I agreed that the movie we'd just watched was not as good as Pulp Fiction –

And I suggested to him that one day, he walk the Camino.

The other night I had a vivid dream I was walking along an early section of the Camino – from Zubiri to Larrasoana.

In the dream I recalled detail I thought I'd forgotten – the little waterfalls in the creek beside the stream, the coffee stop and the breakfast I ordered. A stone farmhouse on a hill framed through blossoming trees.

These kind of recollections leap at me through the day, too.

For no apparent reason, I'll suddenly recall moments walking, or stretches of the track. The most vivid of these recollections are always about The Way, not about the pilgrims I met on The Way.

It's as though the power of the track itself, the Camino, won't let go of me. It's as though it has burnt itself into my psyche.

But what's strange is that, in my mind, I can remember what was over the next hill, what was around the next corner, what was beyond the bridge.

My memory's usually not that good!

But there are things I grasp to remember, too. And that's what makes me want to go back and walk it again.

The other night I had a vivid dream I was walking along an early section of the Camino – from Zubiri to Larrasoana.

In the dream I recalled detail I thought I'd forgotten – the little waterfalls in the creek beside the stream, the coffee stop and the breakfast I ordered. A stone farmhouse on a hill framed through blossoming trees.

These kind of recollections leap at me through the day, too.

For no apparent reason, I'll suddenly recall moments walking, or stretches of the track. The most vivid of these recollections are always about The Way, not about the pilgrims I met on The Way.

It's as though the power of the track itself, the Camino, won't let go of me. It's as though it has burnt itself into my psyche.

But what's strange is that, in my mind, I can remember what was over the next hill, what was around the next corner, what was beyond the bridge.

My memory's usually not that good!

But there are things I grasp to remember, too. And that's what makes me want to go back and walk it again.

In the past few days, thousands of Indian pilgrims have been killed in monsoon floods in northern India.

I was there, this time last year. I’d gone to Rishikesh, a sacred town on the Ganges, then down to Haridwar, a larger city that had attracted literally millions of pilgrims to celebrate the first rains of the monsoons.

This year, those rains have killed thousands. And destroyed towns and villages.

Here is a link to a story in today’s New York Times about the tragedy.

And following are some pictures I took at Haridwar this time last year.

Please spare a few moments to pray, in whatever form that might take for you, for these pilgrims who died on their way.

By the way, when I was struggling on the Camino with my bung knee, I thought of this pilgrim (below) in India. I remember he was moving on his crutches as fast as our car, to get to the sacred Ganges.

One of the things that terrified me about the Camino before I left home was bed bugs.

I read forum posts, I read blogs, I saw Google images of infected bites, I saw truly disgusting YouTube videos, and I have to say, the thought of bed bugs freaked me out.

The creepy little critters.

I read that the worst time for bed bugs on the Camino was late summer and fall, and perhaps that was one of the reasons why I suddenly decided to walk in the spring.

I did not want beg bugs crawling over me in the night, in my sleeping bag, feasting on my flesh. Disgusting. 

But, bed bugs have been known to feast in April/May too, and I knew as I set off from St. Jean Pied de Port that there was every chance I would have a bed bug encounter.

One of the things with bed bugs is that if you get bitten, you don’t want to carry them from albergue to albergue. So you have to go through an elaborate procedure to rid them from your clothing, your sleeping bag and your pack.

It takes hours of washing and drying, and the thought of hanging around, washing all my belongings and waiting for them to dry, bothered me more than getting bitten.

I’d considered bringing along an anti bed bug mat to put on my mattress, and I considered various sprays to douse my bedding – but in the end, I decided not to worry.

I’d decided from the outset that I would not walk the Camino in fear. Because I believe that you attract what you fear the most. 

If you fear bed bugs, then you’ll get bed bugs. That’s what I believe. If you fear rain, you’ll get rain. This might sound weird, but I do believe that you can carry your weather with you, in your thoughts. I say that metaphorically.

I consciously excluded bed bugs from my thinking, and I never had an issue with them.

But while I didn’t fear bed bugs, I feared my dodgy knee would act up.

And it did. Big time. It nearly derailed my Camino.

I feared the walk up to O Cebreiro and because of my anxiety, I couldn’t sleep the night before. Consequently, I did the climb exhausted from lack of sleep, and it was hard. But I’d made it hard for myself because of my fear.

You attract what you fear the most. 

I heard of some other pilgrims on my walk who got bitten by bed bugs. I didn’t. Maybe I was lucky, or maybe through my thinking I didn’t attract them. I don’t know.

But we don’t realise how powerful our thoughts can be.

Our thoughts are as powerful as our actions.