The Big Walk

Hold the Heights - Day 42

CHAPTER THREE

What if I live no more those kingly days?
Their night sleeps with me still.
I dream my feet upon the starry ways;
My heart rests in the hill.
I may not grudge the little left undone;
I hold the heights, I keep the dreams I won.
Geoffrey Winthrop Young

The pilgrim route is over. It feels amazing that the first stage of our journey has finished; the camino seems to have taken forever in itself. We’re excited to finally be heading away from busy roads and organised hostels; from now on, we’re on our own. After a few miles of forest tracks we reach the tiny hamlet of Fabrica de Orbaceita, where we join a new friend – the Gran Recorrido 11 or GR11. This is a recently created long distance footpath which leads through the Spanish Pyrenees from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, but is only occasionally marked with red and white paint splashes. Immediately from the hamlet it begins a tough, sweaty climb into the giant, rolling green hills which here make up the Pyrenees. It’s not just the gradient that is tougher than anything on the camino; the way is also badly overgrown and difficult to follow.

High in the hills we reach a tiny shepherds hut. As we approach, three huge barking dogs leap out, one of them running straight for us, snapping and snarling with bared teeth. We begin to walk quickly in reverse as we daren’t turn out backs on it, but luckily for us their shepherd master, living in the hut for the summer months, comes out to our rescue. After much yelling he has the dogs back inside. It’s hard to believe anyone could be living so primitively in western Europe; he has only a wooden shack with no facilities of any kind – a completely isolated existence. He has an enormous grey beard and doesn’t speak much; however he does point us on our way, contouring the slopes through the bracken. An hour later there’s no path at all and we’re stumbling desperately steeply downhill into the woods, again finding the route down the pastures in the valley bottom, which is our day’s destination. Out comes the tent in this lonely spot for our first wild camp.

There’s a beautiful river here, where we wash our clothes and then swim – it’s not even cold. I’d always assumed the border between France and Spain was along the highest ridges of the mountains, but here it’s the river itself, so we’re able to swim across into France and take our first steps in another country, before coming back. We bought gas for our stove in Logroňo ready for our trip into the mountains, and now we have our first brew of tea beside the tent, followed by our first camp-cooked meal as we watch the sun go down – idyllic.

The camino had been the ideal introduction to long-distance trekking with its plentiful shops, bars, hostel beds, and easy paths but it’s a real delight to be fending for ourselves at last, navigating our way across wild countryside. We saw no other walkers today.