Part 17: Burgos

After two weeks of uninterrupted walking, I decided to “take a short break”, like the great José María García used to say before going to ads, and have a day’s rest in Burgos. The physiotherapist I saw yesterday told me that I would feel a bit of discomfort after the jolting she was going to inflict on me and that if possible, she would recommend I take a day’s rest. She wasn’t lying. As contradictory as it may sound, I feel better after the massage, less stiff, but at the same time as if I’ve just been beaten up. Walking so many kilometres non-stop is like a game of pinball, or rather ‘painball’. Your body is the machine and the pain you suffer is indicated by the ball which hits a different part of your body every day, even those parts you weren’t aware existed. Today your feet hurt, tomorrow your back, after that your calf and just when you thought you were used to it all, the ball lands on the bonus and your whole body quivers as if you have just been kicked in the balls.

In the morning I took my time over breakfast in the hostel I’m staying in in the old town of Burgos and after I went up to my room to write for a bit after saying goodbye to Kevin and his mother who decided to continue walking. They are doing the Camino in sections and have to go back to Dublin mid-afternoon on Saturday so they prefer to get as many kilometres under their belt as possible to be closer to Santiago and then try to finish the job off next year. At midday, when there was a let up in the rain that had been falling since first thing this morning, I went for a walk around the town and visited the Cathedral and the more symbolic historical buildings of the old Castilian capital.

It’s freezing cold in Burgos. A few years ago as I was on my way back to Zaragoza with my parents and brother and sisters from Salamanca, where my cousin Iñaki got married, we stopped here for a few hours to visit the Cathedral and its surroundings. I don’t remember ever being so cold in my entire life. It must be the air from the mountains making its way through the plateau, but the chilly wind goes right through you and can leave you feeling out of sorts without you even realising.

There’s an Irish pub opposite the hostel called St. Patrick. I find it really hard to pass by an Irish pub without going in. And if the pub is called St. Patrick, it’s not just that it’s difficult, it’s that I wouldn’t dream of passing by without calling in. It was early evening when I went in, just as the Europa League final between Chelsea and Benfica was starting and I ordered a straight whiskey at the bar. That’s how Gavin, my dear Scottish boss in BBVA in London, told me it should be drunk. And that’s how I always drink it. It works wonders. I started to feel the cold less immediately and continued with a beer. I saw bits of the match but I spent most of the time writing on my notepad, replying to emails and asking Teresa, the nice barmaid, the titles of some of the songs that were playing in the background. In the end the English team won the Cup with a goal during injury time. Hard luck for Benfica.

I’ve quite disliked Chelsea ever since the year we won the Cup Winner’s Cup and played them in the semi-finals. Five thousand supporters came to Zaragoza, many of them without tickets, destroying everything in their path, starting with the beer supply. I know that you can’t lump all the supporters of one team together because of the behaviour of a select few, but I was there and what I described before was quite widespread. The Wild West.

I remember that after Real Zaragoza scored their third goal, which practically meant Chelsea were out, the hooligans of the English team started to lift chairs and throw them at the police. The violence was such that the police had to back off and protect themselves in the gates in the South stand. Those who have seen the Spanish police in action know that you don’t often see them taking a step back. I was in the North stand where some of the Ligallo fanatics started to climb the fencing around us in an attempt to make their way to the English fans. I always thought that it was just for show, firstly due to the distance between us and them as they still had to cross all the stands to get to anyone who spoke a different language to ours, and secondly because there were a lot of Chelsea fans looking for  trouble. More than any Aragonese fans anyway. Just as I was starting to consider that if they didn’t then it would be those savages who would start to jump over the fencing to get to us, the national police made a comeback as if they were the Seventh Cavalry themselves and started dishing out the beatings left, right and centre, egged on by a stadium that was shouting the well-known chant: "písalo, písalo (crush him, crush him)!" against the English.

While watching the news the next day after lunch, we saw that the British media were condemning the despicable behaviour of the Chelsea supporters and, at the same time, applauding the attitude of those of Real Zaragoza as an example of good sportsmanship, as they understood that instead of demanding that the police crush the heads of the English fans, the Romareda was horrified by all the violence and in a collective hippie outburst was shouting: “peace and love, peace and love!". 

After lunch I headed for the University library to make out that I was going to study for a while. At that time I was a young fresher. While on my way, I had to wait at some traffic lights as a bus had stopped in the middle of the zebra crossing due to traffic. I felt a strange presence looking at me from one of the windows so I looked around and caught the eye of a fat, forty-something English guy, covered in tattoos and with a double chin like "Jabba the Hutt" in Star Wars, staring back at me. I held his stare for exactly the amount of time needed for the beer and fish & chips blob to slowly move his sausage-like index finger from one side of his neck to the other. I must have gone a bit pale because the fatty started laughing just as the bus started to move again, to my relief, and disappeared down Avenida de Goya. I don’t like Chelsea and I don’t even want them to win their friendlies. And when they do lose I remember that nasty ball of blubber and then I’m the one laughing like "Jabba the Hutt"...

After the match I ordered one last beer. I discovered that they served Ámbar la Zaragozana and I couldn’t leave without having one for the road. It seems like only yesterday that I left from Canfranc station in the Aragonese Pyrenees and now I’m in Burgos, practically half-way through my pilgrimage. Some of my closest friends put together a sweepstake on how far I would get and the most optimistic of them said I’d only get as far as Logroño, and to tell you the truth even I wasn’t so sure that I would get much further either. Sport, other than raising my glass, hasn’t exactly been a big part of my life over recent years.  From the outside you think it’s only walking, but walking an average of 25 kilometres every day whether you feel like it or not, with your feet done in from the day before, come rain, snow, hail or blazing sun and all with quite a lot of weight on your back. It’s a physical challenge yes, but from my point of view it’s more of a mental one and my experience until now tells me that those who do not have a strong motivation to be here leave. And they leave because sooner or later the inevitable question comes up: what the hell am I doing here and why am I doing this? Why do I have to go through a rough time of it or put up with discomfort when I don’t need to? If you know what brought you here and why you’re doing it you’ll keep walking and hold on tight to the Camino without letting go, despite that neck cramp and even if your feet are one big blister that is threatening to consume you like an alien. And you do it safe in the knowledge that if you fall, you get back up and continue fighting. With the certainty that the Camino is your life and it’s all you’ve got…