Last night I was too tired and thought only on the hardships, but today it was so beautiful (cool and breeze) that I feel I have to repeat yesterday, through a more positive lens. The Pyrenees are beautiful mountains, that from Caro looked like an endless succession of green canyons crowned by stern rocky cupolas. The canyon I ended walking through was covered on a dense forest of broad-leaf trees (oaks, chestnuts, beeches), and the darn mass of blackberries that in no time had my legs scratched like by a mad cat). There are some small farms way up in the mountain, growing mostly corn. Once you reach the tree line, the ground cover is composed of green grass and clusters of sheep. Of course it was too hot, so I had to bump the sheep aside to get a bit of the shade.
Once you reach the top of the canyon, and slug farther toward La Vierge of Ourisson, you are on top of the world! From there one can see the long valleys gracefully descending toward the plain of Bayonne. From the Spanish side fog blows through the passes, so for a moment you feel suspended at the end of the world, which is a very good reason to pray to our Lady of Ourisson.
The hard part starts here, because the grass becomes scarce, the sheep disappear, and you are alone facing your waning forces and worst fears. That is when I sighted the last big tall mountain, and in my heart prayed to our Lady of Ourisson for a miracle, which she graciously granted by moving the trail from straight up the mountain to skirting it on the south, closely following the border between France and Spain. Then you come into a different country, with steep hillslopes that seem to go on forever, while you cling to this edge path, which goes from the head of one drainage to the other, and wonder if this is going to go on until you reach the Mediterranean. This is the "wet" side of the Pyrenees, constantly shrouded in fog, which in turn results in a dense forest cover and very luscious meadows of grass. You would expect to find sheep here, right? Alas, what you find are numerous herds of very fat horses, carrying cow bells. They are fine looking animals that would look great pulling a plow, but there is no agriculture anywhere around here. Now, I don't want to start any rumors, but I suspect these are meat animals who, like Hansel, are just gaining weight until the time comes.
Eventually this border trail enters Spain and the Province of Navarra, but keeps parallel to the border until you are ready to drop off of exhaustion. It is then that it turns and, in a lull between the clouds of fog, you see for the first time the beautiful crags of the Kingdom of Navarra. All of a sudden you are transported to the hundreds of conflicts between Spain and France, and the times when Spain was flooding the French with inexpensive illegal merchandise, and the French were trying to enforce customs through this impossibly steep and convoluted border. Contraband was one thing our dear Basques understood very well, so this was a never-ending story. Even English Captain Jack Aubrey (sown into the costume of a dancing bear) and his friend Dr. Steven Maturin traversed the Pyrenees to smuggle Jack out of France! (See Patrick O'Brien's fabulous novels for further reference.)
The way down was, as I have already told you, a Calvary, but I forgot to tell you about the dense forest that clings to the steep slopes. Perfect cover for smugglers and the occasional forays of the French border patrol, or for a desperate medieval battle.
Roncesvalles, besides being my saving port, is not much of anything. I believe it lives from the Camino de Santiago tourism, so they maintain three or four pilgrim hostels. Note to self: Forget about pre-booking accommodation. You will be paying a steep overprice. I stayed at a guesthouse that cost me 72 euros, whereas the hostel would have cost me 15 euros (same is true for the next step of El Camino, where I am paying 30 euros for a bunk bed without a towel, whereas I could have gotten the same for 15 euros a lot closer to the Puente de Rabia, and with a towel).
Oh, yes, back to
Roncesvalles. So it is little more than a cluster of hostels without a village
to support it. Why then does it stick to mind? Well, in 778, Charlemagne took
his Frank army over the Pyrenees and destroyed the City of Pamplona. All smug
he turned back home, but the Basques, mad as hornets at the destruction of
their main city, fell on the Frank army at Roncesvalles (they were probably
slugging up the same steep slopes I stumbled down), isolated the rearguard of
the Frankish lords, and wiped them out! Among the ones killed was Roland, a
Frank commander dear to Charlemagne, who elevated him posthumously to the rank
of Paladin.
OK, so now we come to Thursday, when I woke full of aches at Roncesvalles, took a double-strength Iboprufen, and started the 20 km walk to Zubiri. It was a glorious day, cooler and breezier, and walking down the much gentler slopes of the watershed of the Arga River I had a much easier time enjoying the beauty of Navarra. I love walking paths that take you under the canopy of the trees, where you have to stop often to enjoy the rustling of the trees, and it was on one of these instances when I was overtaken by a group of young people, who were laughing and joking as young people do. I took a moment to let them go by when, right behind came this young Italian woman, slender like a fay, carrying an enormous backpack. We said a quick hello as she powered past me, but after a few meters she stopped cold, to hear the rustling of the leaves. Then she approached one of the trees and gave it a long friendly hug before resuming her march. I caught up to her a couple of times, because she had stopped to smell the flowers, or put her feet in a stream. Here is a person who really enjoyed the wonderful nature that surrounds us.
I was a bit more pragmatic, and between short spells of contemplation of the landscape, I dutifully stopped at every town crossed by El Camino, to have a glass of red wine (Navarra has some very fine wines), a tapa, and some light conversation with my fellow travelers. I love traveling through Spain!
I should mention that the Pyrenees are a collision mountain chain, formed when Spain got pushed against France, pretty much as Italy pushed unto France to form the Alps, toward the end of the Cretaceous. The rocks I saw are probably of Mesozoic age (I couldn't find any fossils), and form sequences of black shales and sandstones toward the bottom and limestones toward the top. The folded limestones form many of the craggy peaks of the High Pyrenees, but in the paths of El Camino we see lots of shales and sandstones. Interestingly, the paths follow the strike of the shale beds, and over centuries the peregrinos have carved deep ruts in these shales, bound by steep ridges of sandstone. Now and then the path has to cut across the strike, which makes for a very nasty rocky crossing, hard on the ankles and a real nightmare for biking peregrinos.
I made it to Zubiri in good spirits and good time, and crossed the river using the double-arched medieval Puente de la Rabia. Legend has it that to keep the cattle from getting rabies, small stock holders used to walk them around the central peer of the bridge, and hence the name. Navarra is a land of dense forest, so all sorts of legends exist about the aquelarres that evil witches would hold in the depths of the forest. The legends were local and of little importance, because these were remote places that nobody knew about. With the opening of El Camino, however, the legends started to travel, and in the XVI and XVII centuries the inquisition "cleansed" the land of many a witch and warlock. I think I will limit my further activities to the daylight hours.
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