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Vilanova de Arousa, Spain

“When one lives for a long time in great solitude, the silence or the darkness becomes visibly, audibly, and tangibly alive, and the unknown in oneself steps up in an unknown guise”

(C.G. Jung)

Perhaps the most profound part of this journey has been the solitude. Spending 30 days and nights alone. Well, in the company of my own thougths, dreams, fears, anxieties, jokes, anger, depression, joy. I have mostly been able to let these companions come and go. Every now and then, one of them would refuse to go, and would literally hang around the entire day. Mostly it was joy, but there were days that anger and sadness and fear also hung about. Joy is a soulful companion, makes the step light, breathing easy and uphill beareable. Fears – *******s. They climb into your backpack, spasm your muscles, burn your milt and mush your brain. And all you can do is to walk – with it, through it, but never away from it. It clings like the sweat to your skin. Wiping it away just makes it more sticky.

For most of the walking, there was no beginning or end. The perfect state of being – no worry about tomorrow or regrets about yesterday. Maybe the stiffness of the climb of yesterday somehow lingered the next day, but it soon disappeared as the muscles warmed up again. As the end of this journey comes nearer, so does the reality of having to go back., Of taking responsibility again, being the “boss”, making decisions and taking charge. Slowly it creeps into the silence of your footsteps, the crunch of the soil and the green of the moss. Before you know it, your minds has wondered off days ahead – the office, the clients.

It was a truly dreary weekend – wet to start with, the miserable youth hostel in Meis with all the boar hunters, then last night in this soulless place. I tried to find food, ended up with two pies – one tuna, one meat. Thank God for wine! Back at the hostel, I decided to have another beer. It was still early, and I needed to kill time before heading off to bed. The very friendly lady in the restaurant underneath the hostel who offered me the beautiful mussels and fritatta when I arrived, came with another little morsel: three prematurely born tiny little fish and a slice of bread. The fish looked as if they just jumped out of their mother’s womb (three months premature) onto my plate. I would assume that they had been deep fried (or killed in some other cruel way), but tonight I drew the line. Octopus – did it. Tripe – did it. The ear of a cow and tiny little fish with heads and tails – no way!

As a child, I remember vividly spending an easter weekend with very good friends of ours, oom Flip and tannie Hankies, and their son Louwrens, whom I grew up with. Oom Flip was a man of the sea, and my mother managed the Heidelberg Hotel for them for a while. We stayed in a little flat in the back yard of the hotel. The flat backed onto the Off Sales where oom Piet was the barman. There was another barman in the main bar, oom Jan, who lived in a room somewhere in the hotel backyard with Ben McCall (the head waiter, who came from Malawi, a wonderful gentle kind man) and some of the other hotel staff. Oom Jan used to grind his teeth so loudly at night that I could hear it in my bedroom. I recall many a Saturday evening that my mother (being the nurse/docter/psychiatrist/ambulance driver in town) had to stop fights between Ben and Ella (who worked in the kitchen), when after too much to drink things got ruff. I also recall her having to put stitches in a wound that was caused by Ella’s high heeled shoe in Ben’s head.

Just a bit of background – the easter weekend was spent in St. Sebastian Bay, where oom Flip and tannie Hankies had one of the little reed houses at the mouth of the Duivenhoks River. It was simple – I do not recall a bathroom. And the meals were all from the sea – allekrik, mussels, fish and harders. Harders are like sardines, just bigger. They were hauled from the sea by boat with a net, which Louwrens and I had to help operate. Back on land, they were put on the fire, and I was never sure if they were quite dead. They were not “cleaned” at all – braaied just like that. Well, it put me off eating fish for the next fourty years. Also – as a result of spending the entire weekend in the sun, I came home with sunstroke. For days I remember lying in bed in a sweaty fever, dreaming of being eaten alive by the mother of the harders while eating her children, crunching away at their intestines. I still cannot imagine eating a sardine – dead, alive, cooked or in a sauce. Ever.

As per the usual pattern, I wake up between 02h00 and 03h00. The good news is that when I got to the hostel last night, the owner of the restaurant gave me a little note to say that “the boat leaves at 13h30 today for the port of Vilanova”. I assume (and hope) that “today” is actually “tomorrow”. I could not walk 28kms today. My calves are in constant spasm, and my body is saying “NO!”. I realise that I have not taken a break since Porto. (Sitting in a cafe overlooking the harbour, I am amazed again at the television being on with top volume, and a show of acrobats entertaining the crowd. Between quizz shows, really old dubbed movies and this kind of thing I cannot believe the **** that is on television in this part of the world. And I have tried a few times to find anything to watch…).

So, today I find out the significance of the scallop shell, that seems something the average pilgrim cannot walk without. (I have resisted the urge to buy into this, not sure why really). Apparently James the apostle baptised pilgrims with water poured from a scallop shell. Good for them. If there is one thing that stands out more than anything else, it is perhaps the realisation of just how the Catholic church has idolised (in my humble opinion to the point of idolatory) Jesus, the saints and Mary. It would seem that the mysticism has been lost in the making concrete of everything that is sacred. It is now all contained in churches, chapels, art, crucifixes that people adore more than the miracle that it should represent. (In my first year at Stellenbosch university, Prof. Charles Fensham, lecturer in Hebrew history, came to hear of my rebellion and refusal to attend the prayer meetings. In my opinion, it was a circus of first year students trying to show off how well they can quote from the bible with their eyes closed. I made the comment that if I wanted to go to the circus, I would go to Boswell Wilkie and at least see something professional. Lead balloon if ever there was one. Prof. Fensham, wise old man, one morning before starting his lecture said to us “gentleman, don’t ever try to put God in a canned fruit bottle, He does not fit”). Thirty years later, it still seems that the only way that some people can get their heads around the universe and the miracle of it, is to make concrete what they think it should be or look like. Then they feel in control. Surely our brains have evolved beyond this?

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