FOREWORD: I completed the El Camino de Santiago – an 800km spiritual pilgrimage across Spain in late Summer of 2009. I journalled and photographed my trip, and as a final completion I agreed to publish my journal and pictures a year to the day of my journey.

STATS: Walked 25kms (15.5 miles)

9:25pm It is as if time is speeding up and the Camino is coming to an end. I have something like 96,5km to go and it is like the sand in an hour glass, the last few grains of sand go so quickly. I am in the bed in the B and B and it is wonderful. I got another bout of Bed Bug bites last night and today was real agony. I basically could not rest my arms to my sides for the skin would become agitated by the bag. It is and was insanely itchy. When I got in to town I was like F*ck it give me every single goddamn spray and lotion and potion on the market, I don’t care what it costs and how heavy it is to carry. I got bug spray for the bed, and anti-itch cream and souped myself up to the nines. I am prepared.

It was the most beautiful beautiful walk today. Mum and I started out did the first 10km’s. It was a light stroll for me which was fine, a little irky going so slow knowing that she would leave me at noon and I would then have so much more to go in the afternoon. But it was Ok just to be with her. Her knee was pretty bad so she did get a cab and I walked for the rest of the afternoon. The morning was really misty and ethereal. I fed a beautiful horse which made my day. I met a dog with one ear, when we gate crashed a gorgeous picturesque hotel to make a pee.

We have entered the state of Galicia, and I believe that it is the poorest state in Spain. It is ironic because the landscape is the most beautiful but the towns are really run down. They have a very distinctive smell and I a so sensitive to smell that it is hard for me to walk through them without retching. They tell me the spray is rotting hay, but it is smells like something dead and dying. It is so distinctive and unidentifiable and like nothing my nasal passages has ever experienced. Yuck.

The afternoon was so so magical as I walked alone in a state of peacefulness and contentment. Not much else is going through my mind. The sweat on the itch was with me but I could not let it take away from savouring this blissful achievement of my state of mind. It only took 37 days…

I really am feeling great. I have also been allowing myself to just be in my body, and to just love it the way that it is. I had this amazing dream yesterday afternoon that I was in love with a woman and I was anxious about that and then in the dream I got this realisation that to have someone to love it doesn’t really matter if they were a man or a woman and I gave myself permission just to love her. And this woman was skinny like Calista Flockhart, and as I hugged her I realised how thin and boney she was, and how that was me. A version of me. And just giving myself permission to love all parts of myself. I am changed.

This town Portomarin is unusual and a little eerie. Some tome many years ago the powers that be decided that they wanted to run a river through the town, so they basically relocated the town up on the hill and flooded the old town. So as you walk into the town you have to cross a vast bridge over the river, and in the river are all of these old shapes sticking above the water line marking the old town. It is eerie. Walking across the bridge I had near death experience number, what is it? number 6… It was crazy windy and a huge truck belted past me, I just had time to hang on the side of the bridge to save myself from blowing being blown away.

After this massive walk of the day the last test was the huge set of steep stairs into the town, all I could think of was that one day in about a year I am going to write and publish this story and I am going to say ” after a massive walk today, to top it all off was this monstrous set of stairs, just to really test you.” As I lie here it seems rather silly now, but it kept running through my head as I trudged up those stairs. Knowing I would write about it one day was all that I could use to keep me going. How vain!

I found my way to mum in the hotel, I scrubbed up, went straight to the Chemist, then to the pub for dinner with our Aussie friends, and now we are in bed. Itchin’

previous day: day 36 fonfria-sarria
next day: day 38 portomarin-to-palas de rei

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