Crossing another border

I am in my twenties.

By the time anyone reads that, it will most likely not be true anymore.  I think, according to the Popular Wisdom conveyed through our modern sages, like episodes of Friends, that I am supposed to be freaking out right now about getting older.  Old.

After all, I am about to turn 30, I have no job, nor any visible path to one, no home…shit, I don’t even have a cell phone.  And that is just the way I like it.  (Well, for the cell phone at least, I am well and truly primed to start working again…)

I am ready to wrap up this decade.  When I think back to who I was when I was 20, and the things that have happened since, I feel a tremendous amount of gratitude for all the people who were part of my life.  I am satisfied with my twenties, time to wrap them up and start a new project.

The last decade has been good to me, on the inside and the outside.  On the outside, it started with a sense that the politics in my country were accelerating down the drain, greased by greed, deception, and apathy.  I felt a heavy pull towards losing all respect for my countrymen, and it was not a good feeling.

Now, while still not convinced my countrymen are all smart enough to come in out of the rain, I have seen something happen that maybe only the dreamers thought possible back 10 years ago.  (Oh look, Hollywood has cast a black president, how cool would that be?  Maybe someday…)  And best of all, we don’t even notice he’s black anymore!  I am proud of that.  Albeit not planning on visiting Alabama any time soon.  I like my optimism, thank you very much.

Those ten years have been good to me on the inside too.  I have known good times, good friends, love, laughter, and sadness and pain to round out the form.  I spent the first half ensconced in Santa Cruz, barely leaving the zip code, and it was good living.  I spent the last third moving among thirty-something countries on three continents and that was good too.  And just as with the politics, at the outset that transition seemed unimaginable.

And best of all, my thirties are shaping up to be fanfuckingtastic too.

Halfway into my first day of my thirties my amazing girlfriend Katrien will be joining me in Madrid where we will somehow survive the heat and enjoy vegetarian food from our favorite little restaurant tucked away on that one street I am pretty sure I still know how to find.  And three days into my thirties we will get on a plane to Qatar, and four days in we will get on another plane to South Africa.  From there it is a month of presumable amazingness in Africa, with a special glow leant to it by all of those who so generously supported out fundraising efforts.  Thank you!!!

That glow of generosity is warming me as I move from my twenties to my thirties.

The first thing I will accomplish in my thirties will be painting orphanage walls in Pretoria, made possible by the contributions of various awesome people, from old friends I’ve had since I was 13 to new ones I haven’t even met yet.  Friends one and all!  And my twenties and thirties are richer because of you!

So I will try to cross this border of years with an appropriate mindset.  One of openness to the world, gratitude to my fellow humans, and optimism for our future.

Well shit, look at that, I’m in my thirties.  Cool.

Manjarin

The Knights Templar... I knew the name, but little beyond a vague sense of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Then I met some and they did more than attempt to assassinate charismatic archaeologists with chiseled jawlines. Tell me more, Indiana Google.

Among the most powerful military organizations during two centuries of the Middle Ages, the Templars were founded to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem after the First Crusade, and played a key part in many battles during those ill-advised conflicts.

Individual members were sworn to poverty and a life of servitude, but the order prospered, partly due to the creation of an early form of banking, whereby crusaders would give their money to the Order and receive a paper script, which could be redeemed in The Holy Land and/or their return home. This meant they didn't have to carry their money, leaving them less tempting to bandits on the long road to/from Jerusalem, but also that the ones who died, effectively gave their earthly fortunes to the Knights.

Being rich and sort-of-banks, the Templars eventually loaned a bunch of money to King Philip IV of France, who was an asshole.  Instead of paying them back, he eradicated his rivals in 1307 by having them all arrested (on Friday the 13th) and tortured into confessions of idolatry, homosexuality, and spitting on the cross.  History records that the last Grand Master of the Templars was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314 for having recanted his earlier confession.

There is a popular legend that as he died he cursed the Pope and the King to join him in death; both died within the year.

Almost seven hundred years later, somewhere in the 1980s, a snowstorm hit the mountains of western Castilla-Leon. The people of the already semi-abandoned village of Manjarin were forced to take refuge in the lower lands, and when they returned, they found that snow had caved in their roofs, and looters had taken most of their possessions.  Harsh, no?  The town had been struggling to survive for some time already, and that was the flake that broke the villagers' back, so they packed up what remained and left, leaving the town to fall into ruin, like several others in the area.

A few years later a generous and hard-working man named Tomas opened an encomienda in the abandoned schoolhouse.  It is separate from the albergue system of the Camino de Santiago, and is located just before the highest point on the French Way of the Camino in an area characterized by bad weather.

Tomas is a Templar Knight.

I reached Manjarin coming down through the mist after passing the Iron Cross, a pilgrim landmark and guide post with an unfortunate name (though the cross was there long before the Nazis hatched from their eggs). The town is largely reduced to piles of fallen stones, with the notable exception of the refugio, that welcomes you with a display of flags and woodsmoke from the chimney.

The building is basic, stone, and the fireplace in the corner provides all the heat, some of which is carried by a chimney up to the loft where a dozen lucky pilgrims can sleep on mats, nervous about the smoke that lingers in the room but grateful for the heat.

There is no running water in the abandoned town, so the toilet is a dry one, with a pile of sawdust to dump in after you use it. The generator is for emergencies, and illumination comes from candles, a propane tank providing the cooking, and a bellows is an everyday tool for keeping the fire going.

A few serious men have dedicated themselves to this ancient order, and live in that empty stone town, offering peregrinos a unique experience in a place without street lights, clean of the cacophonies of traffic and television, and wrapped in mist that holds the sound of the Gregorian Chant close and intimate.

Tomas was away the night I was there, but the two men who were there prepared a simple dinner for us, which we took together at a trestle table, discussing their belief that Jesus took a wife, had children, and that women can exist outside of the Virgin v Whore dynamic promoted by some other dogmas over the centuries.

They believe celibacy is a powerful tool for getting closer to God…if the brother chooses it.  Otherwise it does not work.  It is always nice to hear common sense.

That place is no softer now than it was in the 1980s, and the modern Knights alternate years staying during the winter. They get few pilgrims during the snowbound months, but they do get some. The thought of that isolated mountain shrine, wrapped in snow, Gregorian chant hanging in the stillness…that would be worth the cold climb.

Couchsurfing is the shit.

Humans are better than you are sometimes led to believe.

When I spent a week in a religious community in May, the sad thing was their super pessimistic view of modern society and humanity in general as being massively selfish   Self-interest may indeed be rampant in many individual’s lives, poor souls, but I spent my last three days in Santiago as a guest of a guy I met the day before, who brought me into his house, gave me a set of keys, cooked for me, and showed me around town, introducing me to his friends and making sure I enjoyed my time there.  The charge for this hosting was…nothing.

The website www.couchsurfing.org coordinates travelers and hosts, providing a framework for people to meet each other, help each other, and learn about each other.  It is an absolutely beautiful thing.  Now of course it has its tainted individuals, skeezy guys looking to get laid, or incomprehensible jerks who abuse the trust of the hosts, but as far as I can tell 100% of the time (with a slight margin of error) it provides for positive experiences.

I have only surfed twice, but both were fanfuckingtastic.  The first was in Vitoria, the capital of the Basque Country in northern Spain, where a photographer showed me around this under-valued town and a student brought me on the field trip for a Symbolism and Iconography class to a local monastery which culminated in a five hour long lunch and sobremesa, the Spanish tradition of hanging out at the table after the meal, singing, telling stories, and a whole lot of laughing.

The second time was the one from above, in Santiago, Galicia, in northwest Spain.  I was guided to the Galician heritage museum, a Thursday flea market of frying churros, hawkers selling pairs of socks for fifty cents, and flocks of bargain hunting Spanish women peering through piles of fashionable(?) footwear.  We spent one evening eating tiny sea snails out of their shells with toothpicks and listening in on a Ben Harper concert beside the massive and impressive Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela while sipping local Galician vino tinto.

On my first trip through Europe one of my regrets was that I met very few locals.  If I knew someone in a given country, chances were that I had met them while they were traveling somewhere else entirely.  Couchsurfing is the remedy to that.  I know have Spanish friends in Vitoria and Santiago, how cool is that!  Even if you are not looking to sleep on someone’s couch, the site has a level for people who volunteer to meet up with you for a cup of coffee, a tour around town, or advice on what to do/see.  It’s kind of like a facebook where the whole world is your friend.

There is only one aspect of my couchsurfing experience thus far that I don’t like: that I don’t have a way to return the favor.  This type of generosity is a growing thing, and I want to pass it on.

In a world where the evening news shows you almost mythic stories of exploitation, violence, and insanity over and over, couchsurfing.org is a reminder of the generosity of actual people.

More interesting than the bus.

Hey cool, I didn’t get ax-murdered.

Always trying to save money (seriously, someone hire me…please?) and have interesting experiences, I decided to skip the bus from Santiago to Madrid and hitch-hike.  Don’t tell my mom.  (Hi mom.)  I figured this was a great place to do it, with all these great pilgrim people around, Santiago must be used to alternative travel arrangements and trustworthy folk, right?

Besides, I had just come off an incredible three days couch surfing so was pretty high on the human spirit.  (If you don’t know couchsurfing.org and are cool, you should check it out and sign up.)  I headed over to the spot recommended by my host and stuck the thumb out.

It took longer than I expected, and I admit I was getting a little down on the Spanish character when I got a ride from a lady with a mini-van full of kids.  Unexpected.  Normally when I see kids in the car I lower the pulgada because I understand someone not wanting to put some wacko off the side of the road in the car with their progeny.  But this car was different.  I don’t know what the story was, some sort of kickass foster program, maybe?  The kids were from different countries, and the conversation ranged from drugs (where I duly reported that they are an awful idea, other than a little natural herbal goodness) though the kids knew more than I do I think (what the hell is “pollen?”) to what strange food we’ve eaten, where I thought my goat-head soup with brain, kidney, heart, liver and who knows what else would stack up well enough, but even the tiny dude has eaten the testicles of some sort of animal (I couldn’t hear him real well over the background noise of his adorableness).

The matron of the wagon was totally down to earth and realistic, and to be honest I had nothing but confidence in these kids as they climbed out at various points around town.

They recommended a place to get good cheap food, so I went over and ordered my chicken-breast sandwich.  It was good for the first half, which I ate fast enough o not notice that the chicken was basically raw.  Nothing like hitchhiking with the imminent possibility of projectile vomit, right?

I started walking again, trying not to be grumpy about the cook’s ineptitude (these things happen, right?) because no one wants to pick up a grumpy hitcher.  Apparently I hid it well enough because the very first car stopped and picked me up.  It was one of those mini van-truck things that are so uber-popular in Spain (called fulgonetas here).

The highway we were on went straight to Ourense, with no other towns of note and no other highways to choose from, but he consulted the map to make sure it was on his way.  That could have been a sign.

He was coming from a seminar of vocational training classes in Galicia and on the way back was looking at a house he was considering buying in Castilla, before returning home to Madrid.  Sure, why not, I’ll ride along.

We made our way to the town.  The village.  The hamlet.  The Podunk.  It was one of those towns that I passed through on the Camino de Santiago where all the young people have left and the streets are dry and unstained, four octogenarians sharing the occasional bench in silence.  Those were sad, this, without the passing pilgrims, was worse.

We found the house and I am proud to say I managed to wait until I was out of their sight before letting my jaw drop open in absolute astonishment.  The place was…a mess.  I can understand that not everywhere is going to have the USA realtor style of polishing everything and spraying New Cookie Smell aerosols everywhere, but shit man, at least sweep up some of the dead cockroaches, no?

It was one of those traditional countryside buildings, with roughhewn timber ceiling beams below plaster and adobe walls, uneven floors and a big pit for a cellar.  It was like a museum…that hasn’t had funding in 30 years…where the curator died 27 years ago without anyone noticing…and he left the doors and windows open.

There was stuff in the house from the previous owner, but of course it couldn’t be normal stuff, no, it had to be bizarre canes and tattered religious icons and dishes covered in dirt from the decaying ceiling and thingymajiggit whosawhatsits.  And I swear I got some seriously spooky vibes from that back bedroom, the one with the bed in the dark corner below the crucifix.  Somebody got themselves chopped up with a kitchen knife in that room.  Possibly by one of the dolls in the parlor that were watching me.

And there was a noticeable difference between the level of the roof outside and the level of the ceiling inside, with no access and no windows.  It was less than a full storey width, but more than just an attic.  I asked what was up there and the agent, without meeting my eyes, murmured something about other space and changed the subject.

My driver guy though didn’t seem to care about these details, and when I got back from exploring, fleeing, and protecting my soul from the vengeful poltergeist, he was ears-deep into a monologue about the corruption of the Spanish government and how the people in this town, all 1,000 of them, should form a new political party and overthrow the system.

The realtor’s mom, because what realtor doesn’t bring their mom along, was giving him one of the best askance looks I have ever seen.  I wanted to take a picture.  Instead I walked back to the car before the doll that was following me with a rusty (that is rust, right?) cleaver caught up with me.

We left behind the decaying adobe walls, straw and underlying bricks hanging out into the street, and got back on the road.  He seemed to be considering buying it.

From there it was onward to Madrid.  The trip should have taken maybe 5 hours.  It took us 11.  I don’t understand how, because he drove like a madman.  A blindfolded madman.  With a tendency to reach behind him for a soda as we approached sharp turns, roundabouts, or pedestrians.  I wasn’t sure Red Bull was such a good idea.

Americans can’t drive straight, we drift around our giant lanes like oversize pinballs.  Italians drift fully across and between lanes.  This guy did the same.  My favorite was when he would drift over until we were straddling the lane line, then signal and move back into the one we’d just left.  Once it got dark he would randomly flick on his high beams, without any sort of rhyme or reason that I could identify.

Early in the trip he told me he was tired of living in Spain, but every country I suggested he was afraid of.  I thought that was actually kind of cute, in a sad way.  Poor guy, scared of everything.

Then he offhandedly mentioned that all his friends and family think he is a monster.  I didn’t ask for an explanation and he didn’t offer one.

Then I learned how he had run afoul of Almeria.  The entire town.  He told me about how it was all mafia down there and after some unintelligible details concerning the sale of a motorcycle or three, some sort of medical process gone wrong, and a whole lot of legal denunciations on his part, he had fled the city.

Looking to change the subject I asked him about the classes he had taken.  They hadn’t ended well, with him leaving early after being threatened and abused by the programs sub-director.  And more denunciations.  Those were kind of a theme of his.  The classes he was taking were about programming automatons.

Then he was telling me about his dreams and detailed belief in extraterrestrials, and how he remembered his own birth and back to his own conception.

We got to one of the tollbooths for the highway, and as we pulled through I wasn’t sure if I wanted the Guardia Civil to approach us or not…  Dealing with the Guardia Civil is kind of like dealing with belligerent gorillas or being in prison, you kind of just don’t make eye contact and see if you can slip by.  But not my guy.  He pulled up to the two officers, who I swear looked to me like they were about to start goose-stepping, and asked “Can we help you with anything?”

I don’t know who was more surprised, the officers, me, or himself.  They responded with a curt and clipped “move along” and off we went.  I couldn’t help but wonder if it would have been better to jump out at that point, losing my backpack to save my hide.

But we kept on, eventually getting to the Community of Madrid, where I breathed a cautious sigh of relief at having made it.  Turns out the Community of Madrid is frickin massive, and we still had 47 kilometers to go.  By this time he was getting really tired, seemingly at an increasing rate.  Now when he drifted over to span two lanes he didn’t seem to notice or care.

He was running a fairly continuous commentary, and it increasingly made no sense.  “El coche zapatilla” and “el coche de Bilbao aqui era dejado” both sound like bad poetry, but when they are spilling from the glazed aspect of the person who is driving the truck you are in at 120 kilometers an hour?  Not so pretty.

We finally made it to the streets of Madrid proper, where at least we were going slower.  Now if only he hadn’t been honking at all the semi-naked ladies (seriously, I don’t mean to sound conservative but…never mind, that’s another post) and drifting into crosswalks.  Then he got in the taxi-only lane and when we caught up to the queue of taxis honked at them for blocking the way.

I don’t know how long it has been since he was here (he says he lives here) but he tried to turn onto a street that was now a pedestrian zone covered with people at 1:00 AM on a Spanish Friday night.  Twice.

But we made it to the neighborhood where I know of a few hostels, and I climbed out.  To be honest I am very thankful to him for taking me all this way, and really wish him the best of luck.  And I gave him my email address, which is linked to my face book, which has this blog address…maybe I shouldn’t post this…

Capitalism on the Camino de Santiago

Back in The Day when pilgrims were darn likely to die en route of disease, bandits, exhaustion, exposure, drowning, falling off the Pyrenees, or (my own closest hazard) sneezing until their brains liquefy and leak out the ears (I believe the Latin term is Mortis Supersneezus) their devotion and Calling to their faith was rewarded and assisted by a spirit of charity that ranged from locals giving water and food, to organizations like the Knights Templar which risked their own wellbeing to patrol the Camino.

Nowadays most locals don’t seem to notice pilgrims anymore, moving around them the way you unconsciously move around puddles after a month of rain, and the Guardia Civil (Spanish police) only interacts with you if you look Moroccan.  (I know, that’s inflammatory, but shit man, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a police force more given to racial profiling.  It‘s worse than Arizona.)

Anyway, what I was getting at is that the spirit of charity for pilgrims has generally dissolved.  This is entirely logical, given that instead of death, we only risk physical discomfort, and instead of a few devout/crazy individuals, today you find everything from students on a cheap holiday to retirees proving their mettle (far more of the latter, and still all varying degrees of crazy).  With ATMs and guidebooks we don’t have that same level of dependency on the goodwill of others.  Plus there’s 150,000 of us annually.

The problem I see is the speed with which a certain dearth of charity is evolving into outright exploitation.  

Up until a few years ago all the accommodation was based on donations by pilgrims.  Apparently their numbers outpaced their generosity, so a modest fee of a couple euro became standard.  Now it is pretty much just the religious shelters, “parroquial” albergues, that are donativo, and not surprisingly they conserve a very different feel and attitude than the private ones.

Guide books from even last year advise typical prices for lodging as 3 Euro, a bocadillo sandwich is 2, and a pilgrim menu 7.  I found few incidences of any of those three that were less than 2 euros higher than those prices, with a lot of the private albergues charging 12.  (Just in case, bocadillo is the Spanish sandwich whose predictability has kept me alive and utterly bored flavor-wise for the past month, and menu is in the European sense of a two course meal plus wine, bread, and usually dessert.  That sounds luxurious, and fairly is, but pilgrim menus are a standardized, almost fast-food version of a two course meal, served on the cheap, and you burn something like 5,000 calories a day walking.)

Some of these albergues, especially those that combine lodging with food service, are making an absolute killing off of pilgrims.  5 euro for every body in a bunk bed in a 100 bed room where you don’t even provide sheets, and 9 euro for every cheap dish of meat and French fries, and I am starting to look for a Knight Templar to protect me from the bandit, you know?

Now, I don’t want to bitch and moan about 2 euro…and I’m not.  I’m bitching and moaning about 2 euro for everything, every time, and around something that is supposed to be about high-falootin‘ stuff like personal transformation, spirituality, and the goodness of mankind.  And it is seemingly increasing dramatically in only a year or so; what is the future?

Capitalism is infiltrating the Camino de Santiago.

Now, I know it is all relative.  If you were to go for a personally transformative experience in a New Age center like Sedona, I don’t know but I expect you would be paying exponentially higher amounts.  But damnit, that’s their problem, they’re even farther off-track.  (We can talk about the psychology of humans and how they only value things they pay for another time.)

This being said, there is a flip side, but these columns, though narrow, look intimidatingly long so I will put that in a separate post…

Oh, and this is the town from the other post that is growing so quickly...Hontanas, hidden in the plains of the meseta a day past Burgos.  The albergue was in the ?th century pilgrim hospital.

Entrepreneurship on the Camino de Santiago

There is a massive amount of business opportunity being wasted on the Camino de Santiago.

Pilgrims generally start walking between 5:00 and 7:00 AM.  They are going to be walking all day, burning well over twice as many calories as in normal life, and are generally hungry.  Spanish bars, the standard (and often only) eating establishment in most of the towns, rarely open before 10:00 and when they do open, they pretty much only serve coffee.  And white white white bread.  (In the town in the picture there was no bar or cafe, and one little store, no sandwiches or prepared food, only that airy dry white bread.)

The Spanish siesta is still very much in force, especially in the small towns, and as pilgrims arrive at their day’s destination around 1:00 or 2:00 PM they often have to wait for things to open again at 5:00.

I was happy to see people sticking to their traditional ways, without regard for accommodating us interlopers, buuuut…

Particularly for that morning period, if you opened a little waffle, pancake, crepe, or whatever cart along the side of the camino and sold them for 50 cents each?  You would sell out every day.  You could take a giant vat of pancake batter down there and pilgrims would be licking it clean for you within two hours.  That’s actually kind of a gross and post-Apocalyptic image, sorry.

Sandwiches in the afternoon, especially if they actually have any flavor, and especially especially if you added a couple fans and shade to sit in, and it would be the same story.  Only without any licking.

I know I was just ranting about how business is tainting the Camino de Santiago (sometimes don’t you wish you could kick Big Business right in the taint?) and that may seem at odds with this, but it’s not, as long as the cart/stand is run with the right mentality.  Charge enough to cover costs and pay your rent, and provide for the pilgrims without exploiting them.  We are hungry, man!

All the way across Spain, 1,000 kilometers of walking and I saw one guy doing this, selling drinks and snacks out of the back of his tiny pickup truck at the ferociously windy peak of Alto de Perdon above Pamplona.

All this being said, I am going to rather contradict myself, as usual, and say that there is also something essential about pilgrims NOT having their needs met.  We SHOULD be hungry a lot of the time.  We SHOULD be thirsty and footsore and smelly.  It’s part of the experience.

This opportunity is glaring, and I know I am not the only one to notice it, and to be honest I am a little scared to see what will happen to the Camino de Santiago over the next few years.  I met an Italian guy, Graziano, who had been in one of the tiny towns the year before.  Last year there was one albergue, and one café.  This year there were two albergues, three restaurants, a tiny store, and at least three more buildings under construction.

So don’t open too many stands, but maybe one at the top of that one hill before Santo Domingo…

Serendipity baby

This Universe is just too flippin amazing sometimes.  Of course things don’t always go well, but when they just fall into place…it’s a trippy sense of the Divine, no?

Last night was the World Cup Final, and my recent case of Spanish Futbol Fever had me stoked (if I can reveal my continuing low-grade case of California surfer slang).  Watching a soccer game alone is okay, but oh-so-much-better with friends.  The problem was, in this entire city I knew two people, and since they are always together, effectively count as one person with regards to likelihood of random encounters.

I wandered around the city all afternoon people watching, reading, and making a ginormous sandwich in the park with sharp sheep-milk cheese, fresh tomato, and red bell pepper while sitting across the path from a bench loaded with four nuns in beige robes eating ice cream.  It was beautiful.

But I didn’t see my friends.  It was getting kind of chilly, and since the game wouldn’t end until 11:00ish, I headed back to the place I’m staying to get my long-sleeve shirt.  Since the world is a beautiful and amazing place, on the way I ran into, yup, the couple I know.  They had a table with an extra chair in view of the screen, their Spanish couch surfing host was on the way, and suffice to say, I never made it back for that shirt and am absolutely fine with that.

I may have shivered a bit, but I had good Galician beer to drink, octopus to eat, and great company to keep me happy.  An entire city and I happen to walk right past their table.  Serendipitous, no?

And it gets better.  They were couch surfing, their host came by, he is fantastic, I need a place from tomorrow on, they are leaving today…  So now I am meeting the host, Juan, in the park tomorrow afternoon at 3:00 to move my stuff to his place.

I am adding Serendipity to my list of names of the Divine.