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.

I found while walking the Camino I became very sensitive to sound.

My hearing became finely tuned.

During my months of training, and in all the years I've been walking, I've always listened to audiobooks on an iPod.

I chose not to on the Camino.

I wanted to use the time to think, without interruption. Without distraction. I took my iPod, loaded to the 16GB max with books and music, but that 100gms of weight never came out of the pack. Not once. Not even on the plane home.

An unintended consequence of this is that I noticed my hearing improved. Or at least, it became more sensitive to sounds.

I heard birds. I heard streams and rivulets I couldn't see. I heard the wind.

I heard.

But I also heard things I didn't want to hear.

Cars coming up behind me sounded disproportionally loud. They would whoosh past me and they were violent. That's the word that kept coming to me as a car screamed past. Cars are violent.

My issue with the influx of pilgrims from Astorga on wasn't that they were short-cutting the Camino, or that there were so many of them, it was that they were loud.

Their laughter to me seemed like shrieking, and their footsteps sounded like soldiers with boots on the march.

That's what upset me the most, the noise they were making.

My hearing had become so sensitive, and attuned to the natural sounds of the Camino, that extraneous sounds were almost painful. And at times they were disturbing.

I'd become to regard the sounds of The Way as sacred. Church-like. You don't shriek in a church. You don't talk loudly. You don't clomp your feet. You respect where you are.

As a filmmaker, I understand sound. Not many people realise that when you're making a movie, you spend more time collating and editing sound than you do image. It's way more complex.

There is no such thing as silence. It exists in space, and in hermetically sealed environments, but nowhere else.

The Camino was never silent. There was always a cacophony of sound, if you cared to listen, even on the Meseta.

Especially on the Meseta.

I listened.

Now, many of my most wonderful memories are of things I heard. The cuckoo birds. The rush of water by the track outside of Samos. The wind on the high plains. The distant sound of cowbells in misty Galicia.

My camera enabled me to see, but in not using my iPod I was able to hear.

I forgot to mention the biggest little change of all –

Nothing scares me now.

Nothing.

I've already mentioned a big change since walking the Camino – I no longer need glasses.

But I've also noticed little changes.

Since coming back, I now keep my mobile phone on silent. I can't handle hearing it ring. And if I miss a call because I haven't heard it, I don't care. I used to obsessively respond to my phone. Not anymore.

I don't do Facebook anymore, either. Not like before.

Before the Camino, I'd have posted at least four to six times a day. Since returning, I've posted perhaps maybe six times in five weeks. It seems folly now. And ego driven.

Also, I used to always put the alarm on at night. The house is securely locked, but still I would always arm the security alarm. Not anymore.

Personal grooming – I used to use moisturiser each day. Didn't on the camino. Haven't since. And I still haven't put a battery in my razor.

Little changes. They actually mean big things…