​The thing I quickly realised on this trip, was that we'd never done anything like it before and on how well we got on together. As well I realised that we'll probably not do it again.

​
David Palmer
June 2024

Nearly four years ago my youngest son Ollee and I, at his instigation, walked about 250km of the Camino de Compostela through northern Spain.

There are several well-worn pilgrim routes across Spain and further afield, which bear the Compostela name. But they all terminate at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela near the north west corner of Spain.

We flew from Melbourne to Madrid in mid April and caught a very fast train to San Sebastian in the far north east of the country, on the coast and near the French border.

From there we started our walk on the route closest to the coast. Mostly country roads and well-worn tracks - pilgrims have been walking towards Santiago for at least 1000 years – we followed ceramic shells or drawings of one, to indicate the route. Fellow pilgrims often carried shells dangling from the backpacks to indicate their involvement in the walk too
​.
To me one of the biggest joys of the Compostela is that there are dedicated hostels scattered roughly a day’s walk apart along the route. And usually there are restaurants nearby, often designed to cater almost exclusively to walkers. So we usually had a very adequate simple three course meal, plus beer or wine, for 10 to 12 Euros each.

On only one occasion on the two week trip, were we not near a coffee shop, so we could have coffee and croissants in the morning. A walk of about 5km to a supermarket more or less solved that omission.

That meant because accommodation and food were provided en route, we did not have to carry much food, or any bedding, apart from sleeping bags.

Our walk was almost entirely through small farms on rolling hills. Many had just made silage so there was that smell in the air.

It was Basque country, the home to intriguingly enterprising people, who are not really Spaniards, although no-one can really tell where they came from. Their language is quite different and unexplainable as well.

One day while having lunch in a square, a dog wandered up to see if we had dropped any food. Ollee tried to engage it in Spanish but it just backed away looking somewhat wary. However he talked to it in the Basque language and it was suddenly quite friendly. Obviously a Basque dog.

Every village and town we went through had a large square with at least a restaurant, a bar and a few shops around it. And in the evenings whole families descended on these squares to eat and drink from from tables and chairs in the streets, and talk to and play with friends at other tables.
​
It is a wonderful feature of European life we have tried to emulate, but just haven’t matched, and there’s hardly a sign of it in this pandemic time.

That magic walk had a special anticipatory feel both to Ollee and to me, because his wife Lauren, was due to give birth to their first child and my first grandchild, in just a few weeks.
In due course Ernie was born without undue trouble and a couple of years later, Lauren gave birth to Wilf, now just one year old.

So if I’m still alive and reasonably fit in 2030, it would be wonderful to traverse the Camino de Compostela, again with Ollee, but with two grandsons as well, absorbing its wonders for the first time.


David Palmer
​February 2021

​A girl in one port was enough

​To say that for quite some time I felt like a fish out of water where sex was concerned is perhaps a bit confronting.

I was painfully shy well into my 20s, so was not good at even talking to girls, in the quiet corner of Western Victoria where I lived.

Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s my parents never talked to me about sex, even about birds and bees. I suppose they thought that growing up on a farm where there were horses (no stallions though) thousands of sheep, hundreds of cattle and tens of thousands of rabbits – before myxo at least – that I would be observant enough to realise their numbers were not getting bigger by themselves.

But not being that observant anyway, I was blissfully unaware.

My two years younger sister and I spent a lot of time riding horses and I remember once when I was 13 or 14, that we rode past a bull impregnating a cow and I asked her what was going on. I think my sister giggled and tried to explain. But I’m not sure I really got it. Naivety with a capital N.

By then I’d been at a boys’ only boarding school for four years and in reality I think we were all pretty naïve.

At one point when I was about 12, the headmaster spent some time telling us, that it was just not acceptable to walk around with an arm around another boy’s shoulders. I don’t think we knew why, but no doubt looking back, that directive was to ensure that none of us became gay. To this day I don’t know how many of us were, but I’ll ask at a school reunion I’m going to next month.

Much later, in fact in year 11, the headmaster was horrified to find that our year had not received any sex education although it was supposedly on the syllabus.

But I hadn’t advanced much in the sex awareness stakes on my own account either. I was excruciatingly shy which didn’t help and I didn’t start to get over that until I was well into my 20s.

Being a mid WWII kid, I had few contemporaries to socialise with in the quiet heart of the Western District I went home to after school. Then I jackerooed on a fairly remote Riverina sheep property and from there landed a job helping look after Hereford cattle being exported to Chile.

Aged 24, I was still a virgin when we landed in Chile. But the two other Aussie blokes I was with, although not verbalising that a bit of sex was high in their priorities after a month at sea, suggested we go to a brothel in Concepcion, the port where we landed.

One of the other blokes now lives in my street, but I don’t think we compared notes much then and we certainly haven’t since. Perhaps the time has come. To me it was a revelation but what I really remember is being advised to hide my money in my shoes. Good advice, because although the young woman demanded and probably deserved more than I gave her, she didn’t suspect I had more.

But the brothel visit was a oncer, because although the three of us lived together in a flat in Santiago for another three months – we were showing Aussie cattle at Santiago’s annual show – the subject of visiting brothels did not come up again.
​
However it was a turning point for me. No longer did I feel like a fish out of water, where sexual relations were concerned anyway.

​​'Backpacks and blisters matter'

I suppose it would have been naïve to believe that because his backpack weighed 20 percent more than mine, that my son Ollee’s walking pace along the Camino would be slowed to something akin to mine.

His usually weighed about six kilograms while mine was about five, a vital consideration, along with the dread of blistering our feet, which partly dominated our ambition to cover about 250km of the northern coastal Camino in Spain in 11 days.
​
The reality of the trip was that Ollee walked quite comfortably at the rate of about five kilometres an hour while I was pretty well stuck on four.  But then he is less than half my age and the 40 year difference, kept me pretty comfortable with the fact that I lagged behind most of the time.

The reality was that the only times we walked together was when he purposefully matched my speed although I was grateful that he frequently made that effort.  And I think because we were forewarned about the dangers of getting blisters on our feet and the impact that would have on our ability to walk at all, that we took reasonably elaborate precautions to protect our feet.

In both our cases it meant walking in our hiking boots for some distance several weeks before we started on the Camino and paying attention to the socks we wore. In my case I think I walked only 15km or so before we started and I didn’t even have a backpack on.

But my boots were fine. No pre walk signs of blisters.  As well, retailer Paddy Pallin advised using quite fluffy US made Wigwam socks, at $20 to $25 a pair. I bought two pairs and because I didn’t get blisters I reckon they worked brilliantly.
​
Towards the end of our walk, we met a young Lithuanian woman who had been stuck at an albuerque for three days, because she couldn’t proceed on her pilgrimage due to a number of well developed blisters on her feet.  Fortunately my sister had given me a Scholl product, which apparently is the bees knees for keeping the pain of blisters at bay, while enabling the user to continue walking.  Indeed our Lithuanian friend applied the blister fighters and in fact was able to accompany Ollee and I on most of the next day’s 20 plus kilometre walk.

The disparity between Ollee and my walking speeds, meant we became separated on several occasions and usually took different versions of the Camino or no version at all.

Marking of the Camino was usually pretty good, with yellow arrows and scallop symbols, delineating the way to go at fairly regular intervals. Sometimes they inexplicably ceased although if we were together, Ollee consulted Google Maps on his Spanish SIM card equipped phone and it usually pointed us in the right direction.

Apart from taking photographs, I barely used my phone because of the anticipated expense and because I was not turning off the camera after taking shots, I was running the battery down to nothing by about early afternoon most days.

That led me to acquire from Ollee, the phrase “Puerdo cargar mi telephono por favor?” This enabled me to have my phone charged up at bars and in one case a farmhouse, when we became separated and me lost.

One of those times was when the Camino went off into the hills to the south of Bilbao which was the mid-point of our trip. Ollee and I had walked flat suburban streets of Bilbao together for several kilometres that morning – I could more or less keep up with him on the flat - before the hills intervened. (The flat streets were such unchallenging walking, that Ollee was on his phone, investigating baby alarms on the Choice magazine website in Australia).

Anyway, we separated in the hills and although I met up with a couple of fellow pilgrims in the old part of the city, there was no sign of Ollee. I continued walking until I had gone quite a way from the city centre, a fact I noted from the large number of African refugees living in the area.
So I backtracked, tried to recharge my phone – it stubbornly refused to do so - and then wondered how I was going to find Ollee.

The problem was that we were not that night due to stay at one of the pilgrim albuerques, but at a smart hotel he’d booked in the middle of the city and I didn’t know the name of it.

​Eventually I found a visitor centre and much to my relief, one of the English speaking staff, undertook to ring the city’s hotels to find where Ollee had booked us in.  After ringing 10 she was successful and I made my way to the one that mattered. I booked in and saw that Ollee had already done so but was no longer there.

After a shower I walked to the nearby famous Guggenheim modern art museum and spent a couple of hours looking at the art on display inside.

Afterwards I spent maybe three quarters of an hour listening to variously talented pianists, who emerged from the crowd one after another, to play a grand piano stationed on the forecourt of the museum.

Suddenly Ollee appeared saying “I thought I might find you here.”
​
So in retrospect I hadn’t needed to plague the woman at the visitor’s centre. But it would have been a bit of a drag hauling my five kilogram backpack around for another three hours or so.

In all we walked about 250km from San Sebastian to Santander climbing and descending more than 4000m in 11 days. Santiago de Compostela, the ultimate pilgrimage destination, was still about 500km away close to the north western corner of Spain.
​
Another time maybe.