Follow the Yellow Arrow

The Camino is really a patchwork of paths crossing Spain. Sometimes we´re on dirt paths winding through vineyards, other times we´re on sidewalks in crowded cities, and sometimes it´s led us up onto the asphalt of very busy roads. You figure out where to go by following the waymarkers, which vary from ancient stone stele with a carving of a scallop shell in rural areas, to brass shells embedded in the sidewalk in the nicest parts of the big cities, to government-produced blue and yellow traffic signs showing the silouhette of a hiker and a scallop shell. By far, the most common marker are arrows that have been spray painted on whatever surface is available, pointing you in the right direction. We´ve seen them on old stone walls, trees, curbs - everywhere you can think of! For the first couple of days, we would point them out to each other, excited each time we saw one. Now that we´re old pros, we almost don´t need the markers. You can begin to intuit which way the Camino will curve, and the arrows are nice to see but basically a non-event. The one thing you can be sure of - if you´re going through a city, no matter what size, the Camino will take you past the Catholic church. It doesn´t aim to minimize the kilometers you need to walk - you´re feet are expendable and it will go out of its way to take you to a very small town if there´s a church to be seen!
Now, for those of you who are data driven, here are a few statistics. On this trip, we´ll pass through over 150 cities, ranging in population from two to 180,000. But the median population is a little south of 200. That´s an awful lot of very small towns. Before arriving, I was most excited to see the most famous sites in the towns like Pamplona and Leon. But I´ve gotten to the point where I dread big cities. When you´re used to rural areas, it´s pretty oppressive to walk into a city. It seems outrageously noisy, the cars pollute the air and the sidewalks are so hard on your feet. And it takes hours to walk through the industrial sprawl to get to the sites in the city center that you´ve seen in the books. So you really begin to cherish the days where you´re on dirt paths walking through the countryside and you´re very grateful that the Camino still takes you through those very small towns.
When we hit our first couple of hamlets in Navarra I was amazed at the shape that they were in. Most of them were founded in the 10th or 11th century. They generally have one main street lined with really old stone townhouses in various states of repair (disrepair?). There´s always a church and a bar or two, and more abandoned buildings than occupied ones. If there´s an albergue in town, there will be somewhere for the pilgrims to get a meal and often a little store. I kept telling Mark that Spain is ripe for flipping property as there seems to be a lot of inventory for sale, but he rightly pointed out that you could definately renovate here, but selling them may be a different story!
The one thing you notice as you walk through these villages is how friendly the people are. They always say hello and often wish you a ¨Buen Camino¨ as you walk by. If you are lost at a crossroad in the early morning dark, they will stop to point you in the right direction. The shop owners let you come in and use the facillities with a smile, even if you aren´t buying anything. I can´t tell you how wonderful they have been. And over time, we´ve come to really enjoy these seemingly dead towns. We happily walk a couple of extra miles to escape the towns of two or three thousand in order stay to an albergue in a small town.
The other night, we had dinner with a couple from Majorca. They were doing the Camino a week at a time over a couple of years and were talking about how much these small towns seemed to be growing! They also said that the albergues and small pensions that now dot the Camino remind them of how Majorca was when they were growing up. They told us that Majorca is now dominated by large hotels and upscale B&B´s, their implication being that if the Camino keeps attracting more people, this is the way the Camino will go. This was a pretty hard concept to wrap our minds around given what we´d seen which didn´t seem to be a lot of growth given that the Camino has been around for 1,200 years! But there may be something to their argument. While we´ve been walking, we´ve met Pilgrims on bikes and motorcycles. We´ve seen Pilgrims who pay to get their backpacks transported between towns, and now that we´re nearing Santiago, we´re seeing busloads of Pilgrims who walk a few choice miles each day but mostly ride. We´ve met Pilgrims who don´t stay in albergues, opting for private rooms in pensions.
We bought the 2007 edition of a guidebook and have been surprised by how many more albergues and pensions have been in some of the small towns than were listed by our guide, most of them opening up in the last six months. And that makes sense. The towns may be small but they have over 100,000 people walking through their backyard. There is definately money to be made. And it´s wonderful to enter a small town after a hot dusty section and see the red tables, chairs and umbrellas outside of a cafe signaling that this is a nice place for a cold drink, a little something to eat and a little rest for your feet.
But from our perspective, we really hope that the Camino preserves its ancient roots, focusing on the countryside and small towns, and doesn´t become a really long tourist trap. We´ll see.
One more quick note, Grant Dodson, if you´re out there, you are one of the few people who can tolerate my rambling stories. I´ve got one that´s way too long to blog - it involves a Spanish vegetarian (rare thing), a pot-smoking mountain hermit and some Woo Woo salve that they gave us for Mark´s shin splint. If you and Sui come back to Boulder, we´ll pop open a bottle of La Rioja and spend the evening telling you the story!