Chemin de St. Jacques: Day 1-2

By Conor | September 13th, 2004 | 1 Comment »

I knew that I wanted to do some walking in France after the chateau renovation thing ended - I had bought the Lonely Planet’s “Walking in France”, for christ’s sake - it just turned out to be quite a bit different from what I had expected. For starters, it was a pilgrimage. That is to say, I walked along the Chemin de St. Jacques (Path of St. James), the 1500 km long pilgrimage trail extending through France and ending in Santiago, Spain. So I was a pilgrim for about a week, at least according to everybody I met, but not the kind with the hat and the religion and the horn of plenty at Thanksgiving. I was the kind with the walking and the blisters and the band-aids.

I had never heard of the Chemin de St. Jacques before going down to France, and I imagine I’m joined by a whole load of people on that. Nevertheless, it is a world famous ancient pilgrimage route. “World famous” in this case means that people who know a lot of stuff know about it, not “world famous” like Britney Spears or the fact that mixing Coke and Pop Rocks makes your stomach explode. For people like me who don’t know tons of stuff, here’s the summary: the Chemin de St. Jacques was pioneered originally around the year 1000, and for about 500 years, Santiago, Spain, to where the route leads, rivaled Jerusalem and Rome as a destination for Christian pilgrims. Tens of thousands still walk it each year, usually for about 1-2 weeks at a time.

Thing is, I didn’t meet anybody doing it for religious reasons, nor was I doing it for those reasons. It’s just a fun thing to do, walking about 25 km per day through scenic countryside and resting in tiny villages at night, carrying all your stuff on your back and meeting loads of people in the evenings who are doing the same thing. In this respect, it could maybe be compared to the Appalachian Trail in the US, if you replaced the bears and pinecones with medieval churches and brie.

I only discovered it myself because it happened to pass through the small town of Espalion, which was where I was doing this chateau renovation work. I knew a guy who had walked along it before and recommended it, and I liked the idea of walking out the front door and going until the next town. So I shipped a buttload of stuff back to Brussels, where I live, to lighten my pack to the point where I could lift it and not cry, and I set out just before noon on Sept. 9, my sister’s birthday.

Turns out I don’t know crap about walking, and not even a Lonely Planet guidebook on the subject could help somebody like me. I guess the guide book assumed that you had the general mechanics of walking down pat, and this book just told you where to employ those tools, i.e., France. I kind of thought that if you’re in relatively decent shape, you just walk until you’re tired and that’s that. Not so much. I was in such a great mood that first day that I just took off and walked more in that first afternoon than most people walked during the whole day, about 30 km. And that night, in a village called Golinhac, I could hardly move from all the blisters on my feet. That was mistake number 1. Mistake number 2 was having no idea how to take care of that situation. I won’t tell you how I did, but I imagine it was probably much the same method that a retarded monkey might use. That is to say, it was poorly thought-out and somewhat gruesome. Mistake number 3 was then taking off the next morning and going another 25 km.

And yet, with all that, I was so happy. It was a great feeling to walk through such beautiful countryside alone, and I found that coming across a village by walking to it made me appreciate it much more than I otherwise would have. The evening of the first day I met loads of people, a trend that continued throughout. (A young American speaking French was a bit of an exotic species on the route; the middle-aged ladies thought I was adorable, like a talking puppy.) By the end of the second day, I had followed a steep path down into a valley and arrived at the tiny village of Conques, where I would find something that would change my life….forever.