Page 55 - LBV 2017

INTER-COMPANY TRAINING & VISITS
a pit stop at a cafe, where a café was available for the caffeine-addicts and a tortilla or two for the hungry. The bulk of the day’s miles were walked between 0900 and 1200, by which time temperatures had risen to the mid-30s and our legs would really be aching. Depending on how far we were walking that day – between 20 and 40km, usually around 30 – we would either push through to the albergue (hostel) or stop for lunch before walking another hour or three.
The Camino taught us some valuable lessons that can usefully be applied in green training, one of which is that admin comes first.
If you don’t wash your grimy socks
as soon as you get in, you won’t
catch enough sun to dry them on
the line in time for the next day’s
walking. If you don’t wake up from
your siesta to buy food, you will go
hungry (or have to rely on MLT JUO
Gibbons for a croissant). If you
ask JUO Fonseka to buy beef mince for a group spag bol, he will buy chicken mince. (Despite the colour, it was actually very good.)
There are several routes that fall under the Camino de Santiago (literally, the ‘Way of St James’). We walked the iconic French Way, whose origin is the just over the border in the idyllic French town of St-Jean-Pied-de-Port. What follows is 780km (485 miles) of gravel,
grass, dust and pavement that ends when the pilgrim reaches the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. There are all sorts of quirks that we came across on the journey. Pilgrims are required to carry a card passport that can be stamped
at every albergue, church and shop along the way, in order to prove that they have walked the whole thing when they reach Santiago and queue up for their official certificate. Pilgrims are also distinguishable by the scallop shell, a mythical symbol of St James, that they often tie to their rucksacks.
However, the real icon of the Camino is surely the yellow arrow that points the pilgrim towards Santiago, painted on stone posts dotted along the way, often accompanied by the distance left to walk in kilometres. We didn’t seem to make any kind of a dent in this number over the first few
days: 780 shrunk to 700 very slowly, and we learnt to measure our progress not by kilometres but by days. But, with a week or so to go, we got the scent of Santiago in our noses – the 100km post in Galicia was a huge morale boost.
One is supposed to meet people from all walks of life and all corners of the globe on the Camino. This is not quite true, as certain demographics (e.g. Koreans) are overrepresented. We were
2Lt Campbell enjoying a rest stop
There are all sorts of
quirks that we came across on the journey.
THE LIGHT BLUE VOLUNTEER 53