WHEN WALKING

Home to Santiago – Day 46

Irun to San Sebastián: 26km

This morning the hostel wakes us with the sound of cockerels and Mozart. I feel suitably uplifted.

At breakfast I somehow end up with the same people as last night. I say goodbye to the lovely Marie Lourdes and enjoy one last opportunity to practise bad French before carrying on.

As I go to the toilets, I hear military music and think they must really want us gone now. But it turns out that today is a special day in Irun. It’s a day when everyone wears white, with red berets and red neckerchiefs, to celebrate kicking out the French.

We see the marching bands as we walk out of town and start up the first big hill and march in time. I practise egun on with a lady walking up the hill and learn Buen Camino in Basque: bide on. I expect I sound german.

After a long, long, steep haul up the hill, we then hear singing and arrive just in time to catch a mass commemorating kicking out the French. The congregation at the mountaintop chapel of Guadalupe all wearing the same red and white costume.

It also becomes a gathering point for pilgrims by the water tap. As the mass finishes and the locals stand chatting outside the church, a french pilgrim arrives. I tell her she’d better keep quiet.

Mickey and I decide to take the high path along the mountain ridge. The man at the hostel had told me he gets vertigo too, and he had no problem. As I pick my way up, I wonder if vertigo means something else in Spanish. As I always do in this situation, I talk to Krisz in my head and say his little mantra to keep focused. “Csak egy lépes”. Just one step.

Up on the beautiful breezy ridge, a group of us sit down for lunch: Kim from Korea, Paul and Norchka, a Dutch couple, and a forever to be nameless German man who speaks Dutch. Strangely, I find I can understand the dutch conversation, as long as I don’t focus too hard. It is a Magic Eye effect language.

Mickey’s really suffering on the way down. It is a steep and rocky descent. As I walk on ahead, I see a man walking on the path who immediately falls into step with me. And this is how I adopt, or am adopted by, Alberto for the rest of the day.

He laughs when he tells me his name: yes, it’s an old man’s name. “I’m Grandad Alberto.” He also laughs at his skin colour, paler than mine. “Something odd going on in the genes there”, he says. He studied and worked a while in Scotland and tells me that there he fitted in. He also tells me I speak Spanish with a German accent.

When we get down to the harbour, we wait for Mickey. A little group of us forms again and two American tourists come along, bemused by all these backpackers. We explain the concept of the Camino to them.

“I think I could do it. I’m 76, but I’m pretty fit,” the man says. “I was a sports instructor.”

I get the feeling, whether she likes it or not, that he and his wife are going to be doing the Camino next year.

“I organise everything,” he says.

I say to the wife, “Sometimes it’s harder to follow orders.”

And she agrees.

Alberto, Mickey and I stop for tapas. It’s getting later and later, but Mickey needs the break, and it is good to have someone with us who knows what is good. It is also good to have someone on hand to speak to my friend Julián when he calls. I write a follow up message to him, telling him I will remember my Spanish again before we meet on Sunday. It will be a struggle.

Finally, the three of us step onto a little ferry boat across the straits of this gorgeous twin harbour town, all of us slightly disappointed that, for €1.95, we only get five minutes of fun.

“I want to see your faces, when you see San Sebastian!” Alberto says. “I’m going to be looking at your faces!” he repeats.

When we do see it, it is lovely, but I don’t think our faces do it justice. I have just told Mickey that our hostel is two kilometres further than he thought, on the other side of town. I promise him beer. As it is, we sit down for ice creams before Alberto goes to join his friends and we continue to the Cats Hostel. There are no cats.

Th Cats hostel is, however, a normal tourist hostel. In the café-bar area, I chat with a bemused Californian woman.

“People with rucksacks turn up in my dorm every afternoon, and when I wake up in the morning, they’re gone!”

Mickey is considering a rest day in beautiful San Sebastián.

“It will be strange if I get home a few days early and my family ask me what I’ve done, and I tell them I didn’t swim in the sea at San Sebastián.”

When I say I will be carrying on, he’s quite surprised, but I explain: for me, the walking is what I come to do. Everything else is secondary. It’s a cruel old walk sometimes, but I take care of the laundry to make up.

And besides, bloody Brexit.

I need to be home on the 12th.