14 mar

Walked another 18 kilometres, from Miramont-Sensacq to Arzacq-Arraziguet. Making a total of 534 kilometres.
After waking up it is my job to start the heater (crank a knob, push a button) and get the water boiling (start a fire). When the water is boiling I’ll wake Julie and she does the rest while I’ll read in bed, basically trying to solve the Super Fiendish Sudoku of The Times I have just downloaded. I’ll also make sure it still rains in England. Good weather always becomes better when it is bad somewhere else, I have found out.
This morning Julie not only started to make the coffee. She also told me that the buckles of my backpack were melting. I had left them hanging against the heater.
My leg was hurting still, so I decided then and there to switch the walking program into a trying to find a new backpack program. The one I had had both buckles on the front side broken now. It was a little large for its purpose too. It was bought at a liquidation sale of a camping store at an impulse moment where I thought there was a great backpack hiker going to grow out of me. Which never happened.
Julie drove to the next larger town, Mont de Marsan, where we not only got a new backpack, but also got duplicate keys for Merlin. It was a frightening thought to think we would lose our only set of keys and then be stuck. So frightening that it took us exactly 7 months to act upon it. And then we spent a good hour and a half at lovely McDonald’s, having a coffee but basically enjoying their great wifi. Julie’s mother tried to skype – she must have seen we were online – but that proved impossible in the noisy surroundings of this busy busy place.
I tried to drive too, for a little bit. But my right foot was just not able to control the gas pedal. But walking around seemed to be okay, so Julie dropped me of at Miramont (ten kilometres down the path where we ended last night). Driving into town we saw a guy waving his arms. It was Jean Pierre who had just finished his day walking and was wiped out, he explained. Yesterday he had also walked from Nogaro to Aire sur l’Adour which had been too much for him too.

We had some soup together and then I walked on. The amazing thing was that my leg seemed to recover, while walking. Well maybe not recover, the pain just numbed down to a level where it didn’t hurt while walking. Only when I touched it, I could still feel something wasn’t right. But when it hurts when you touch it, don’t touch it, as my mother would say.
When I arrived in Arzacq, Julie told me she had met another Pelerin. Some how it is Julie who meets the walkers, not me. This was a dutch girl, Claire, from Utrecht who was also staying in this town. We saw her later with another walker, Kitty from Japan, and decided to have pizza together.

It was so nice to share stories together. Claire had started in Moissac because she didn’t think it was a good idea to start with the most difficult part, the Pyrennees. Kitty turned out to be the veteran. She has almost finished the whole Camino now, having walked it in different stretches. This last stretch will bring her from Aire sur l’Adour to Saint Jean Pied du Port. In exactly three years time she will have done the whole journey when she finishes later this week.
Kitty urged us to stay at hostels sometimes, because it was so much fun to meet people there. She has a whole group of Camino-friend, which includes somehow the composer of the Ultreia song my saints in Prayssac sang for me, and which Kitty now also sang in the restaurant. ‘You will hear it more and more, especially when there are frenchmen around’, she said.
Kitty lives in Singapore, which makes her walking the Camino in stretches even more amazing. I asked her about the temple-walk on the Japanese island Shikoku that Gideon Lewis-Kraus was writing about. Kitty had looked into that she said, but it was all too formal she thought, that trip. You had to buy special clothes, a special bag, you even had to buy your stamps she grumbled, the hostels were expensive and then the walk was mostly over asphalt. And then, most people did it by bus. Nothing like the camaraderie of the Camino.
Earlier in the day, we saw Claire find the melted backpack I had thrown away in a container on the market square where we are parked. She had just been throwing away a piece of paper and then found this perfectly reasonable backpack. As I watched, Claire and Kitty first looked through all the backpack pockets, a process I followed with anxiety as I have a tendency to forget things. And then they started to look at the backpack, holding it up. They were clearly giving it all kinds of compliments, which is nice for an item that has been so heartlessly gotten rid of just a few minutes before.
Later in the restaurant we started talking about it. ‘Was that your bag’, Claire exclaimed. ‘We were wondering who would throw away such a fine bag.’ I told her about the buckles. She would see if she could replace them. Claire uses a bag from her backpacking days, she said. ‘It is larger than myself!’ She said that she had read that you just should carry a bag that is 10% of your weight. Her current bag weighs 16,5 kilo’s, which would indicate that she almost has to triple in weight herself to justify that load.
Well, it was fun to share these travel stories. I will fill up my own back pack again and will have to be creative to get it to 3 kilo’s, which would mean I have to lose about two thirds in weight to get to the appropriate backpack weight/bodyweight division.
Anyway, 904 kilometres to go.