•Another small bag: a red Victorinox pocket knife with the words “INTO THE MILD” engraved on it (a gift from friends), a cotton reel with six clean needles (if I have to deal with blisters), a small head torch, two carabiners to hang things on, four extra AAA batteries, a nail clipper and a blue spork (spoon-fork-knife combination).
•One last Ziploc bag: a small bottle of washing-up liquid, a small box of Omo washing powder, a plug (for washing clothes in a basin), eight clothes pegs.
•A coffee mug.
•A 100 g packet of raw almonds, 150 g of biltong, two packets of energy jellies.
•A one-litre Laken water bottle.
•50 Go business cards.
•My Credencial del Peregrino, or Pilgrim Record, which I ordered in advance from the Confraternity of Saint James of South Africa.
The rucksack weighed 11,4 kg at Cape Town airport. That might not sound like much, but throw in about two litres of water and we’re nearing 14 kg.
A strange prospect: for over 800 km and forty days, I’ll be carrying the equivalent of a small child on my back.
* * *
I first heard about the Camino in 2004. One Sunday afternoon, I was sitting fairly anxiously (anxious because I was putting off the mountain of work I had to do) in the offices of the online journal LitNet above the Spur in Stellenbosch. Instead of working, I was aimlessly browsing the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho’s website.
I stumbled upon his publisher’s contact details and wrote an impulsive email asking whether I could send Paulo a few questions. His novel Eleven Minutes had just been published and an Afrikaans translation of his international bestseller The Alchemist was also on South African shelves.
When you send emails like these – just another request for an interview from an obscure corner of the world – you don’t usually hear back. But the very next morning, his publisher replied: “Paulo Coelho is currently on holiday on the French Riviera and would prefer to grant a telephone interview. He is available on Tuesday afternoon from 14:00 to 14:20. Here is his number …”
I nearly started hyperventilating. I spent a sleepless Monday night trying to come up with questions. I borrowed a speaker phone from a friend’s parents so I could record the interview. Paulo was relaxed, friendly and extremely generous with his time – we ended up talking for over half an hour.
My last question was how he would like to be remembered, to which he replied: “As someone who died while he was alive. I’m going to be cremated and my ashes will be spread on the Santiago pilgrim’s road. But if I had an epitaph or something written on a tombstone, it would be: ‘He died while he was alive.’ Because I see so many people who die before death arrives. They consider doing everything, they breathe, they eat, they make love … but they’ve lost their enthusiasm towards life. So I would like to be remembered as someone who died while he was alive.”
* * *
The Santiago pilgrim’s road … Paulo Coelho’s last answer led to my discovering the Camino, the “pilgrim’s way” that has led, since the ninth century, to the cathedral in the little town of Santiago de Compostela where it is believed the apostle St James lies buried.
It’s believed that James, called a “brother of Christ” in the Bible (although they were not family), came to Galicia in Spain to do missionary work some years after the crucifixion (and ascension to heaven, depending on your faith).
John Brierley notes in his guidebook that there is no historical evidence of this, only anecdotal accounts.
But assuming that James did indeed come to Spain, he would have been one of the first of the apostles to carry out Jesus’ injunction in Matthew 28:19: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.”
At that time (about forty years after the birth of Christ), northwestern Spain was a hub of paganism – with Finisterre on the coast a kind of headquarters with stone altars, rituals and initiation ceremonies. The kind of place where Getafix the Druid from the Asterix comics would have felt entirely at home.
Finisterre (the Latin finis terra means literally the “end of the Earth”) was likely one of the places where James tried his damnedest to convert the pagans to accept the message of the Man from Nazareth. But according to tradition – and its almost seamless fusion of fact, fiction and Catholic mysticism – James was no match for the pagans in Finisterre, so he headed for the little fishing village of Muxía, about thirty kilometres to the east. At Muxía he went to sit on a rock to lick his wounds, when out of the blue the Virgin Mary appeared before him in a small sailboat. She comforted him and encouraged him to return to Jerusalem without delay. Immediately after her appearance the sail of the little boat turned to rock, which is still there to this day.
James took Mary’s advice and went straight back to Jerusalem, where he was promptly beheaded by King Herod in 44 AD. So, James became the first martyr in the name of Christ. Did Herod ever do anything but murder babies and chop people’s heads off?
Despite his failed attempts to persuade the pagans of the error of their ways, James loved Spain, so a few of his followers brought his mortal remains back to the country by boat so that he could be buried at Finisterre. But the pagans didn’t approve; James’ followers fled to the interior and buried him somewhere there.
Almost eight centuries later, in the year 813 or 814, a shepherd named Pelayo or Pelagius had a vision of a bright star, which led him to the place where James had apparently been buried. This is the spot where the cathedral was later built and the little town of Santiago de Compostela established. The name of the town tells the story: Santo Iago (Saint James), Compos (field), Stella (stars). James is also the patron saint of Spain.
The first written record of a pilgrim walking the Camino dates from the year 940. In the subsequent centuries tens of thousands of people walked from every corner of Europe each year to pay homage at James’ grave, and in the process be granted forgiveness for their sins. The Camino starts at your front door, the moment you put a foot over the threshold.
There were apparently also forced pilgrimages: instead of serving jail time, some of those convicted were made to walk the Camino. You could even “delegate” someone else to walk your Camino and to receive forgiveness on your behalf at Santiago de Compostela.
The Camino became so huge that it began to overshadow the other two famous and ancient Christian pilgrimages – those to Jerusalem and to Rome – in popularity.
Brierley mentions that this early growth must be seen against the background of the Catholic Church’s attempts to consolidate its presence in Spain in the early Middle Ages, especially once the Moors had been expelled during the Crusades.
Here too the apostle James played a mythical – and controversial – role: He is known in Spain as Santiago Matamoros (Saint James the Moor-slayer). According to the legend, the apostle appeared on a white horse during the Battle of Clavijo and crushed a numerically vastly superior army of Moors with his sword.
From the Milky Way to the Moors … it remains a magical story that stirs the imagination of millions to this day.
* * *
9 March 1816: 5 rebels hanged … only Stephanus Cornelis Bothma’s rope did not snap … prosecutor Jacob Glen Cuyler … . “It will perhaps be a satisfaction to His Excellency to hear the prisoners one and all died fully resigned to their fate …”
10 October 1815 … “ruffian” … Frederik Cornelis (Freek) Bezuidenhout (55) from