Disappointed as we were three hours early on Monday and missed out
We’re at the final destination for the first week – Orleans. In that time we’ve covered the route from Paris, deviating from the guidebook walk as it meandered the fuck all over the place. We instead chose a more direct walk figuring we’d still have our fill of forests and churches along the way.
I took more pictures on my D-Lux 4 than the OM10 mostly because it was easier to pull out the Leica than drag out the Olympus and set it up on a tripod. We’ve been walking during the early morning, and besides it’s been cloudy, so it hasn’t been ideal photography weather for the OM10 without the tripod. The Leica is pretty easy to take pics but I like to be able to adjust my settings by dial rather than menu dive for each shot. Most photos are full of green. I grew up in an arid part of the world so you’ll have to forgive the shots of green stuff.
One of the bridges at Saclas, where my arse done and sat down in a nettle bush
It’s a pretty repetitive routine every day so I won’t break each down separately. There is nothing more tedious than trotting out updates for each day, which L laughs at because that’s what she’s doing on her blog. Who cares? “Day 3 – 23.4km! We walked by a forest. Day 4 – 22.1km! I saw a bird!” Maybe I haven’t been sufficiently lost in the magic of it all, labouring as I have been for breath. I prefer to present it as very long stretches of the same with the opportunity to have some nice things along the way, especially ones that can be conveyed through pictures and not numbers of kilometres.
I mean I’ve been trying to sex it up a bit on Instagram by including glamour shots with wheat but there’s only so much you can do with grains, or in this case castles:
Sexy castle action in Étampes
So to provide a simple summary of how the day goes, it’s more or less like this:
- Wake up. Gently move to see if anything is properly hurting. Attempt to warm up muscles. Try not to scream.
- Get dressed, put everything in pack, yawn.
- Heave pack to shoulders, emitting a keen of loss.
- Walk
- Break
- Walk
- Break at town for coffee.
- Repeat steps 4-7 until at final destination for day.
- Find accommodation, drop bags, shower, nap, hobble around town.
- Eat and sleep.
In the 17th century, it was customary not to smile when getting your likeness carved. Étampes
And everything else can be broken down into different categories:
Walking – It’s not so bad now. First few days were hellish. Feet hurt at the end of the day. Scenery is nice if you’re into wheat fields. Google maps has been a great help there, except when they led us into an open field telling us it was a straight road through. We took it anyway, tramping over cut wheat, but then had to stop when the next hurdle was a crop of corn a metre tall. I swore to myself that it was the last time a mere crop got the better of me, and we went around.
The detour brought a pleasant surprise – a clear, cold running stream in the next little collection of houses. Dunking our feet in the cold water was a lovely stop, but then a bit further upstream we encountered these long thing beds for water to run over. It looked kind of like the beds that recycled toilet water runs over, so we assumed we’d just washed our feet in effluent.
Later, we were at a bar having a drink with another pilgrim, and some local heard we were Australian and offered to take us for a drive around to see the sights. Nice, we thought, Australians aren’t usually offered much more than an escorted trip out of the bar. The first stop on the tour was a visit to the local cresserie, which is the place where watercress is grown, and more importantly had waterbeds very much like the one we were worried carried effluent. I thought about telling the story to our guide but with my French it would have come out as ‘you water your plants with piss’ so I held my tongue.
We climbed that bitch. Backstage passes to the Australians, Méréville
Food – We started on Saturday and had our meal that night provided by our accommodation. No problems there. Sunday and Monday proved terrible for finding anything open. Seriously, all that money lost in provincial towns because they couldn’t cater to the wandering foreigner crowd. The only choices we had were from the takeout joints with the big plastic kebab meat thing spinning out the front.
On that: L gave me a book to read written by an old guy from Canberra who had completed a similar walk in Spain. He had to give up the fancy meats and gorging along the way as they caused havoc with his guts. He recommended for travellers to have smaller, more healthy options along the way, as it was far better for their stomachs and for the walking.
In the spirit of experimentation, and out of desperation, we had kebabs and hamburgers Sunday, and on Monday I had a spicy vindaloo, to see whether such gastric blows to my body would combine with the stress of walking and cause any problems. This wasn’t a calculated risk by any measure, as the few toilets along the route were found in the occasional tabac and they were designed with few comforts in mind. All the rest were bare fields with foot-high wheat and the occasional treacherous corn.
Happily, I discovered that my digestive system is better than the one found in an elderly guy from Canberra. So take my advice. Get the cheese for dessert. Dig in to the fancy hams.
But since everything’s bloody shut anyway, you’ll be content with a baguette for the day. Possibly a kebab if you’re lucky.
Towns – in Australia, every small town has at least 30km between it and the next one, and it has three pubs and a couple of shops. Here, there’s 5km to travel, but you’re lucky to get both a tabac and a boulangerie in the same town. The other thing about rural towns in Aus is that there’s always an op shop or an antique place. This is one of my great loves in life. I don’t have to buy anything. I just like to browse, maybe even ask for a price and do that whistle between the teeth like ‘good luck chief’. But there’s nothing in these towns. Just a collection of houses, a mairie, a bank and pharmacy. Probably a church too.
So how am I meant to do a bloody camino without accumulating a collection of vinyl, cheap cameras, and 70’s sportswear when there are no op shops? The main motivation for doing this trip was not the spiritual whatever or the fitness or Christ knows why else people do it, I thought I was getting a go at the finest types of op shops one can find in the world – the small country places with flexible pricing, a shed out back full of stock to paw through, run by old ladies who can be charmed into discounting everything. I’ve seen ONE antique store so far and that asshole was shut, possibly long deceased.
This is how I want to travel. Let me browse through musty racks of dead men’s suits. Let me search through Kamahl and ABBA records to look for the good stuff. Let me try on dusty sunglasses and search for a pair without an eye-watering prescription lens. This is my pilgrimage, and so far the gods of second-hand wares have been unjust.
In the meantime there’s not much else to do when we’re not walking. The towns are pretty dead. So for want of other entertainment, I’ve been drinking. Seriously, if all that’s open in town is a brasserie, what else am I gonna do? The pint count has been growing at an alarming rate.
Everything is cheap though – I put change on the counter for two coffees, five bucks would cover it, I thought, and the lady came out with most of it back. 1.20-1.40 for an espresso. I mean at Postale in the 18th where we lived in Paris, for a while I was paying 1.80 for my coffees until I realised I’d misheard him and they were actually 2.20 or something (I usually just left money on the bar). The other place, down by Metro Jules Joffrin, charges 2.80 or something silly. Here, when it’s time to pay here we ask how much it is, and when they tell us, we remind them that it was for two coffees and a lemonade, just to be sure they didn’t leave two of them off. And they’re practically giving away the beer.
People – all of the people have been very friendly and helpful, even if we do get some stares from some of the more provincial types. And L and I have mastered French conversing – I will try to say something, which L then corrects, so my French has little training wheels, but I confess that sometimes I mess things up so splendidly that we have to switch back in English. But nobody has been proper offended or thrown a drink at me yet, as there’s some kindness shown to somebody making a go, however badly they cock it up. It’s shameful to get by on the foreigner speaking crazy card, but get by on it I must for now.
Although as an aside I just saw a guy walked past who looked exactly like a young French Ivan Reitman so it’s not all bad.
I’ve seen some lovely spots though, some beautiful scenes for photography. Of course we always wish for more than a point and shoot and a cheap film camera with a dirty lens, but a) we should never use our tools as a hindrance to our visions and b) it’s not like there are any goddamn places around here to score an SLR on the cheap. Nonetheless, some of the panoramic shots have been beautiful and I hope they came out well, but it’s been frustrating. One sees a lovely photo opportunity of the way the dawn light gilds the fields of wheat, and so you stop and drop your pack and rig up the tripod and go through all of that, and then you pack it all away and continue and you realise that just ahead, not thirty metres after the patch of shadow there’s the shot again but even better but you can’t be screwed going through all that again. Some have been easier, with the bridges and running water and things like that, although I did sit in a patch of thistles, for which the tiny, tiny shorts I wear did nothing to protect me.
Anyway, it hasn’t been so bad. The first week would always be the toughest one. Everything after here gets more interesting. Wine country, hopefully. Photos of wheat will slowly turn into photos of grapes. Small towns will have twelve vintners each with a cut-price bargain bin in the front yard. Small children will run from their homes to offer me glasses of wine on my thirsty walk. And for the love of god somebody, somewhere, will have a crate of old records for me to look through.
PS – I wrote most of this before I got into Orleans. Figured once I got there things would get better. You know what I found? Three photo shops all saying it’ll take a week for developing film. A week. Besides that, there’s not an op shop in sight. So I’ll have to make do with shots on the D-Lux and I don’t know, pawing through rubbish piles to get my fix until I come across a developed country again, as clearly it’s not the case between Paris and Orl-bloody-eans.