Walk with me for awhile
Three hikers share their stories of hiking the Camino de Santiago
Note from Brandy: Welcome to Story 1 of Issue 1! I wanted to kick things off with this story, since it encapsulates a lot of what we value at Good Trip — travel that brings connection with yourself, with others, and with the real world around us. Hope you enjoy x
The Camino de Santiago is one of those trips that you either feel like everyone is doing, or you’ve never heard of it.
There are several routes of this famous hiking trail, the most popular stretch being the 500-mile long Camino Francés, which runs from the French border through Northern Spain. This pilgrimage trail has been in use since the Middle Ages, and while traditionally a religious pilgrimage for Catholics, is now popular with travelers from any background seeking to reconnect with nature, see the world by foot, and unplug.
If you hike the entire Camino Francés, it usually takes around 30-35 days, but a lot of travelers split the trail up and do certain sections to fit different trip lengths. The trail meanders through nature and small villages along the way, ending in Santiago de Compostela.
We talked to three different trail hikers, spanning years, number of days hiking, and travel buddies:
Sam Daly: Hiked in 2006 with friends when they were 19-20 years old
Marissa Klein: Hiked for 5 days with family during Christmas and New Year’s 2019, the last 5 days/100km from Sarria
Erin Yarnall: Hiked, solo for 12 days in July 2022
On going long:
Sam: We started in the French Pyrenees in Saint John Pied de Port, and finished up in the most western edge of Spain, Finisterre, a few days beyond Santiago. We had roughly enough money to last six weeks but we somehow managed to stretch it out to eight. We weren’t being very strict with the miles each day, and when we got to a town we really liked, like Burgos or Leon, we would sometimes stay a couple days. We did between 800 and 900 kilometers.
We went into it with no hiking experience, and it was the first time we were outside the country alone as adults. It was even one of my friends’ first time flying. We would have been around 19 or 20 at the time too. We had a starting point and a fairly basic map, and the rest was just following the route. There are a few routes you can take depending on where you start — some are coastal but we did the main route through the Basque country, Castile, Leon and Galicia. The time of year is important too as it was starting to get hot in the middle; if we left it later in the year it would have been much harder.
Who the Camino is best for:
Marissa: Anyone can do it. It’s a lot of walking, but there are ways to modify it: only doing a few days, and doing it with a provider who will bus your luggage for you and make your lodging reservations. This is what we did. It makes it much less hard-core and it certainly makes it more expensive, but for my family (ranging in age at that time from 19-73), this was the best version.
Erin: Of course, I would recommend it to anyone who is Catholic. I'm not Catholic, I just like hiking, so it's great for people who enjoy hiking, but I think if you're Catholic you can get a lot out of the trip and all of the religious meaning along the way that kind of went over my head. I would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a unique way to see parts of Spain/France/Portugal (depending on which route you take) that you would never see otherwise. If I was booking a normal trip to Portugal, I would never stop at these towns that I walked through because they're so small, but there's so much to see and they're all gorgeous, so it's a shame that a lot of travelers aren't able to see them.
Doing the trail pre-smartphone:
Sam: We went into it with not a lot of planning. I walked with two friends of mine, but as we went you would naturally fall into walking with and making friends with strangers, either because you walk at a certain speed, or we decided to stop in a town that day and got talking to other walkers in the hostel.
Having a smart phone with maps and the internet would of course be helpful, but I enjoyed just following the sign posts, and we would plan our stops for the day depending on how much we walked the day before, or the distance between towns (or how hungover we were!). I do remember looking for internet cafes as we went, and some hostels would have a computer, but I wasn’t posting photos or documenting. I did have a digital camera with me at the time but it was shite and I lost all the photos.
On hiking with family:
Marissa: My semi-extended family has done a few trips together. We all value being active, and we also needed something we could do around Christmastime. We chose to do five days worth of the Camino, and visit a couple of other places in Spain as well. It was similar to other family trips, but we appreciated that it gave us lots of time to be relaxed without having a packed agenda. We also had the ability to walk solo or while talking to different combinations of family members, so lots of quality time.
Going it alone:
Erin: I did the hiking trip completely on my own, and I really enjoyed it. I did the Camino Portugues, so I left from Porto and walked nearly 225 km to get to Santiago de Compostela. It took me 12 days altogether, including my one rest day.
On making connections along the way:
Marissa: Because we went during the off-season, we didn’t see very many other travelers and we interacted with almost no one. I don’t remember seeing much in the way of other families.
Erin: I interacted with a lot of people on the Camino. The first two days I walked with someone that I met on the trail, and we would stay in the same hostels as each other, but she had pre-booked where she was staying, so we had a different destination one night and were able to meet back up a few days later after I took a rest day. I walked with other people as well, but I mostly enjoyed walking on my own.
Where I would talk to the most people was at the hostels each night, or at cafes and stops along the route. I would stop at a cafe every couple of hours to use the bathroom and grab a snack and a drink, and I would talk to whoever was around at those. I had a walking playlist that was hundreds of songs long, so I liked listening to that when I was actually walking.
Sam: The people we met were a range: older religious types, corporate hippies, young alternatives, gangs of English teachers, solo walkers recovered from cancer, fitness enthusiasts. We met some professional walkers — as in, they lived on the Camino and would walk back and forth living in the hostels.
At that time the pilgrim hostels were mostly free and you were only expected to leave a donation of how much you could afford. I reckon that is harder to come by now as I hear its way more popular than when we went. You could make friends with someone, walk together for a few days and then they might decide to walk a few extra miles or stop short and then you would never see them again. If you didn't like someone you might walk a few extra miles to get ahead of them too.
You could make friends with someone, walk together for a few days and then they might decide to walk a few extra miles or stop short and then you would never see them again.
There was a good sense of camaraderie with most people you met, and we would like to have a few beers in the towns and hostels at the end of each day and it was easy to talk to other pilgrims (that being said, I remember being given out to by some angry French man for talking too loud one night).
I can remember one guy in his early 20s who started walking from Hamburg in Germany for non religious reasons, and had already been walking for weeks if not months by the time we were a few weeks in. There was an American woman in her mid 20s who had gotten divorced and wanted to get away. A middle aged air hostess who was engaged but was out for some final freedom. An English guy named Dean from Hull (the most depressing town in the UK apparently); we walked with him for a good bit. Dean was an interesting guy in his early 40s. He had recovered from cancer, and it was a dream of his to do the Camino. He had a love of movies and music that got us talking to him. He seemed to have lived an interesting life — lived in Amsterdam in a squat during the early 90s when the famous skinhead riots broke out. We didn’t finish the walk with him but one of my friends kept in contact with him for a few years after.
by:
Editing: Ash Pattison-Scott and Natalie Filkoski
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