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Day 1
Two coffees in and the day has just begun. I’m on a plane to Portugal and everybody is basically dressed like me: the outdoor-wear. The man sitting next to me has the same pale, not-particularly-coloured shirt, palms on his knees, visibly excited and visibly unsure what to do with himself.
It’s him, me, and dozens of others on this flight from Brussels about to land in Porto and start walking towards Santiago de Compostela, a pilgrimage route thousands take every year for spiritual peace, heartbreak, curiosity, escape, confusion, or no particular reason at all.
The plane lifts off and I spend the next two hours above the clouds wondering what exactly my reason is. I don’t know where I’ll sleep that night because the proper pilgrim experience is apparently to book nothing and trust the albergues — pilgrim hostels that work first come, first served.
Maybe I should befriend this guy? Nuh-uh, a friend in Brussels had warned me not to accidentally get stuck in a Camino group.
I never saw or heard of that man again, and I completely abandoned my Camino diary.
Day 11
Ten days later, I’m on a train back from Santiago de Compostela to Porto, watching the landscape roll backwards like an analogue film. Did we really just walk all this way? I say we because my ambitious plan to walk alone for at least three days collapsed after roughly three hours.
I landed in Porto, abandoned my cinematic fantasy of walking straight from the airport after fifteen minutes of honking traffic, took a bus into town, ate what might genuinely have been the best pancakes of my life, stared at the ocean for two minutes and started north.
And I walked. I was passing the other pilgrims. Everyone looked professionally overprepared, and so did I after my own pre-Camino pilgrimage to Decathlon: proper hiking trousers, fighter-jet-looking trekking shoes, borrowed fleece, backpack too fresh, sage NYC cap. Needless to say, I looked fantastic. I also realised I would have to call myself a pilgrim.
By 6pm on that first day I arrived in Vila Chã, a tiny village 15km north of Porto, and found myself an albergue — or « Albuquerque », as I would later rename them. There, while registering my brand-new pilgrim passport and collecting my first stamp, I just like that, on my first night, met my Camino family. Or, more accurately, my band: the Camino Orphans.
There was a Portuguese-American with hair impressive enough to emotionally damage men flying to Turkey, a younger Brit who would become the guy in my rear-view mirror as I later always walked in front, pulling the group forward, otherwise we would keep getting distracted by literally everything and walk nowhere; there’s also an Italian girl turning twenty that very evening, and an older Brit we would later collectively call Mr Camino.
That evening they all sort of invited me to dinner and sort of handed me a beer. There was birthday pasta and a multilingual conversation between people who had been strangers two hours earlier. I liked them. But I didn’t want to walk with them. This was supposed to be a solo trip for at least a couple of days, and this was too soon. I disappear tomorrow.
The night itself was miserable. I was still sick-ish from Brussels, trying not to cough in a room full of strangers while the United Orchestra of Snorers performed, accompanied by somebody loudly blasting a podcast, presumably to fight snoring through psychological warfare.
In the morning the group gathered by the door. I stalled, pretending to be busy. Eventually they left. Then, naturally, half an hour later I caught up with all of them on a narrow wooden boardwalk where overtaking was socially impossible. Damn it.
Fffffffine. Breakfast coffee with them it was then.
Day whatever
El Camino de Santiago, or the Way of Saint James, is a network of pilgrimage routes leading to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, where the apostle Saint James — one of the twelve in the Jesus’s crowd — is traditionally believed to be buried. If it’s really him or just a random guy’s body, no science can tell. I guess that’s the faith.
To me, religion wasn’t the point to do this. I come from a country not particularly known for religious enthusiasm. As a Latvian, my faith is closer to a pagan appreciation of nature. I just really like walking. I had chosen the Camino Portugués route, starting on the coast before joining the inland trail.
Day two I mostly walked with Mr Camino and practically interviewed his life story out of him. He had retired early, moved somewhere between Porto and Lisbon and casually started his fifth Camino by walking out of his own front door. That must be the ultimate pilgrim way.
The rest happened fast. Day three we found the rest of the group and I never separated from them again. We walked 25 kilometres a day on average, learned that full albergues are every pilgrim’s nightmare, and somewhere between villages, forests and endless boardwalks, my solitary pilgrimage had become our project now.
We rediscovered Michael Jackson, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Fleetwood Mac, sang a lot and invented legends about people along the way, like Karen from Scotland or the Crazy Dutch Guy we actually never met. By day four it had become clear that we will all reach Santiago together. There was no reason to walk alone; it was just too much fun.
Life on the Camino was simple: get up, walk, coffee, walk, second coffee, walk, lunch, walk, figure out where to stop walking, and walk some more. Sometimes a cheeky 10am beer. That much walking can be a struggle, but the body adapts so quickly. First calves hurt, then feet and shoulders, then one knee begins expressing strong opinions. By day eight I had completed a full bodily pain rotation and felt to walk 500km more.
The landscape was beyond beautiful. Portugal began with fishing villages, boardwalks and rough Atlantic coastline before more rocky inland roads with farm animals in the distance came in the picture. The flora was a marvel too: wildflowers that my mother, aunt and grandmother struggled to keep alive in Latvian flower pots grew freely beside the path. Trumpet-shaped white callas stood among waves of orange nasturtiums. And so was, as expected in something called a pilgrimage, an insane amount of churches, big and tiny.
Sometimes I would just stare at the mountains in the distance. For a Latvian, seeing rainclouds hanging over the next valley while standing in sunshine myself is beyond comprehension.
Crossing from Portugal into Spain was also an adventure of its own. The border is a painted line in the middle of a bridge. Spain somehow does look different. The closer we got to Santiago, the greener everything became. The forests, lakes and hills had their own secret play going on.
But the real fun was the people. The Camino Orphans. Our band name developed from the fact that Mr Camino, who was an early bird, never walked with us but waited for our arrival somewhere around our next albergue. The Italian is actively developing a plan to become a musician (either a drummer or a singer – tbc), practising in hostel showers and collecting compliments afterwards. The American was figuring out what a possible life in Portugal might look like. I was about to move from Brussels to Rīga.
Even more impressively, he got the job. He specifically requested historical recognition in this memoir as the first man to walk the Camino in Nike Pandas while carrying a gaming laptop. I feel morally obliged to honour that request. I nod to that.
The Camino has unwritten rules: talk if you like, walk together, disappear if you feel like it. If morale collapses, stop for a quick espresso. Another café usually appears exactly when needed because, as the Camino Orphans liked to say, the Camino always provides. Except once, when it didn’t and we walked 10km without breakfast.
So what did the Camino provide me? Not much of divine enlightenment. What I got was more thirst for adventures and appreciation for the way the world works. I started walking because I thought I needed solitude, but between Porto and Santiago, I found people again.
Back at Porto Airport, I spotted my next book: Journey to Portugal by José Saramago. It’s a travelogue through his native country, first published in 1981.
Looks like I’m going to cross all those bridges again.
