Camino de Santiago Day 38: The End of the World
I reach the end of the road, the end of the Camino, and the end of everything
I’m coming to the end of my Camino de Santiago odyssey (it’s not quite over yet). It’s ended up being not just a physical but a creative journey. Sign up to keep in touch with weekly stories, essays and blog posts about travel, the outdoors and all kinds of journeys.
The Mist
This is the last day I walk. The last day of the routine: wake, pack, have a croissant and a coffee for breakfast. It’s raining. We wait around for it to stop but it gets heavier. It hasn’t been like this the whole trip. Someone asks me how confident I am we’ll see a glorious sunset at the end of the world:
“Very”.
Even though we’ve been blessed with unseasonably dry weather for the whole trip – we’ve had about three or four days where it’s rained so far – I’m kind of annoyed at the thought of not getting the photo-finish sunset fitting for the climax of this epic journey.
We have to start walking.
A few kilometres in we stop to get fuel – it’s a long day’s walk and there’s no towns nor stops for the next 15km. We meet Patrick from Thurles, who I’d bumped into yesterday briefly. This is his ninth Camino. He called me a ‘badass’ for making it from St. Jean to here in the typical enough five weeks or so; he began his Camino in August, and seems to be taking a more happy-go-lucky approach than the average goal-oriented pilgrim. He’s a man closer to my father’s generation than mine and his attitude and How he Caminos reflects that. He doesn’t use a guidebook or maps or a smartphone and doesn’t mind getting lost – in fact, he seems to relish it, his character seeming to be the type who gets lost on purpose just to give himself something interesting to do.
He took the Camino out of Leon but when he asked someone where he was going they informed him he was on the wrong Camino (the Camino Santander connects Leon with Oviedo to the north, through which the Camino del Norte runs and the Camino Primitivo begins, heading towards Santiago along a different path to the Camino Frances, which we took). He had to go about 15km back to Leon before continuing on. Fully embracing the more traditional traveller’s mindset, he seemed to have one foot in the Camino and one in the real world, where there are no yellow arrows, and technically no wrong turns.
He travels light and once did the Camino with no backpack, only a money belt with an ATM card, a bottle of shampoo in his pocket. Having no change of clothes he washed his in the sink each night, drying them out on his back in the heat of the Spanish summer, a time when many pilgrims sleep outside because albergues are often booked out by the crowds travelling for tourist season, and because the climate allows it.
This is his second time coming to Fisterra on this trip – when he reached Santiago the first time he heard Porto was nice and took a train down before completing the Camino Portuguese back to Santiago; now he finds himself heading on to the End of the World again. Next year he hopes to do the Pacific Crest Trail, which spans the United States from the Mexican to the Canadian border, through California, Oregon and Washington states, beginning on his seventieth birthday, and completion of which would put him in an elite group of adventurers who’ve done it in his 70’s. Unlike the Camino, he reckons you’d really want to have your training done and your wits about you doing that one – there’s a few potential major problems: isolation, altitude, and bears. It’s also about 5 or 6 times the length of the Camino.
He's more enthusiastic than eccentric though, and although he has one foot in the Camino, the other one is in the real world, as he admits:
“If your dreams don’t scare you they’re not big enough, and this fucking terrifies me”.
If you’re enjoying reading my stories then why not share them?
The Veteran
Patrick’s Camino experience means he has local knowledge and informs us that the 15km stretch ahead is through a forest, and does indeed have nowhere to eat or get water. I’m kind of dreading it after the slog of yesterday, which was a never-ending winding route up and down country roads and hills past endless farms. In this weird half-Camino limbo where there were yellow arrows and marking but everything was closed and nobody was too interested in it, it felt like I was walking through a maze that everyone else was free to come and go from.
The rain got heavier and we were resigned to our jackets, covers and hoods. I walked with Patrick and we shared stories. I’d to keep my phone in my backpack to save it getting wet, which meant for once I could neither check the time nor the map to see how far I’d progressed. Rather than a slog the whole thing felt effortless, being unable to gratify dopamine cravings meant I’d to focus on the walk, all aches and pains were gone. Knowing that the destination was in sight seemed to make things easier.
After what I thought was about an hour we round a corner and there’s something peaking out from behind the evergreen trees:
Water.
The Sea
It actually took my by surprise, and the rain having eased off, it was safe to take my phone out for the obligatory picture. Even Patrick whipped out his gadget as he’d “told the folks back home I’d take a few videos”. As our feet splashed down the beginnings of a steep hill the picture peeled back further, just in time for the sky to begin slowly clearing into a sight that was surprisingly moving for me: first the sea itself, then the sea infrastructure: boats, piers, beaches all began to coalesce in the distance as the sky calmed.
I see the sea at Cee
The town in front of and below us had the appropriate enough name of Cee. The mist we’d maligned over the morning actually had a noticeable effect of making the walking a lot easier than in the sun, and now it served to make the scene in front of us, the sky overcast and the sea the same shade of grey.
The soft light forces its way through and the world begins to appear as if being painted in real time. I’m more confident than ever we’ll get the sunset.
I meet the lads out the side a packed bar, full of regulars watching horse racing, the owners smoking cigarettes out back in the kitchen. Their team is in the Offaly Intermediate hurling semi-final and they’re watching a live stream of it on their phones.
I leave them as the game heads into extra time. I’m going to finish the walk alone.
For a different perspective on travel and the outdoors, follow me over on Instagram:
and Twitter:
The Walk
There’s less than 10km to go as I loop around the beach-front promenade in Cee. After five weeks on a land-locked road it’s invigorating smelling the ocean in a way I hadn’t expected. Unlike, say, my Canadian friend who hadn’t seen the ocean in three years, it’s only been about five and a half weeks since I last was in it, and despite all the talk about the significance of reaching the ocean, I didn’t think it’d be that exciting just to be beside it. As I’d noted yesterday, the promise of the ocean water wasn’t going to nurse my tired legs until I was actually in it, but then here I am power-walking along the beach front transfixed by the fierce dark denim-coloured waves, sitting like tigers waiting to pounce on their prey.
It's interesting being in a town for the first time in this country that isn’t nourished and fed by river that is the Camino flowing through it, instead here is a place away from that, which has emerged from and developed and co-existed with a different provider: the Atlantic Ocean. There’s a totally different atmosphere in the air here, along with a more pressing threat of rain.
The Destination
The final walk is glorious. Contrary to my pessimistic outlook of yesterday, the sight of the ocean and the meaningful motivation of the impending finish line put enormous strength and energy into my legs. I power-walk up the hill out of Cee, a man on an exciting mission, vigour only building as I round the corner and see Cape Finisterre across the bay, about 5km away, albeit smothered by a heavy grey cloud.
I’m approaching 30km for the day and almost 900km in total since I left St Jean 38 days ago, yet my walking now only gets stronger. Blisters, bruises, tendonitis – they haven’t gone away but I don’t feel them any more. 4 kilometres, 3 kilometres, 2 kilometres, my Camino flashing before my eyes as the metres drop away quicker than I can keep track. As I beat down the boardwalk leading into town I consider the notion of taking it a bit slower “to savour the moment” but immediately dismiss it as nonsense – I’m going to finish this like I started it: a man possessed by nothing but a love of walking and a desire to push himself beyond his own limits for no reason other than to see how fun it could be, just to see what will happen.
For many the assumed-to-be-best-and-correct lesson of the Camino is ‘slow down’, but one of the most important lessons I’ve learned on the Camino has been to say ‘fuck that’ to the things people do be saying about this and that – if everyone’s trying to go as slowly as possible then I want to go as fast as I can. Perhaps many need to embrace and celebrate their feminine side, but it’s important to remember the other side, the innate desire to break boundaries and evolve.
In any case, as with every mountain I crossed from St Jean to Foncebadon to Dragonte and beyond, if I walk like a maniac it’s because, without any further thought and purely in the moment and as my body dictates I must: I want to.
The Beach
In ancient times, before the remains of St James were claimed to be interred in Santiago de Compostela, pagans used to follow the Milky Way along a similar trail to the Camino, to come to witness the sun setting on what was the end of the known world. They would bathe in the ocean and burn their clothes (which were probably disease-ridden rags at this point) in a ritual of death and rebirth. Nowadays Fisterra (the Galician for Finisterre, the Latin-derived Spanish name meaning ‘End of the World’) is a built-up holiday apartment kind of town, with a French riviera-and-surf-school kind of feel. The boardwalk takes me through dunes and sharp grass to the town centre, where there’s a nice calm little beach front. I consider getting in the ocean – it’s 5pm and I still need to find a place to stay, as well as get up to the lighthouse at the end of the road for sunset, whose occurrence is up in the air right now judging by the scattered weather.
This isn’t right though: the sheltered beach is facing back across the bay, facing east rather than west, facing an admittedly beautiful peninsula rather than what the view I came here for:
Nothing.
Cape Finisterra/Cabo Fisterra is narrow, and judging by the map it’s only a mile or so up and over to a beach facing west across the Atlantic: this is where I must go. Rain starts to speckle my head as the wind picks up – the safe option would be to have a dip in the sea right behind me to tick it off the list before finding a place to stay – I haven’t looked into it yet but I’m not here for that. I climb the road out of town and follow another lengthy boardwalk.
Not for the first time today: I can see the sea.
The End of the World
There’s a suitably long parade down to the beach. Half way down I’ve to shelter under a lone windswept tree to put on my rain jacket as the sky makes good on its threats. By the time I’m at the sand though it’s eased off again.
The weather is fitting for the location: changing from light rain to sun to wind to storm to heavy rain and cycling again every two minutes. Sun peeks from one corner of the sky, the other an opaque, almost black cloud. On each side of the beach are impressive cliffs, the sand is the perfect shade for a tropical honeymoon, the sea alternates between tropical teal and stormy steel-coloured and everything in between with each crashing wave. The swell is chaotic, waves coming in from every angle with no rhythm, sometimes two at a time.
The scene is all kinds of everything, there is something for everyone from surfer to hardened sailor to dog-walking non-swimmer to casual dipper. It is utterly perfect. Of course, such a range of offering is verging on the wrong side of dangerous when it’s the ocean you’re talking about. Nonetheless, I’ve a job to do.
The rain comes full mental as I strip off, and I have to cover my backpack and boots and clothes, as the donkey comes to nibble at the straps. I don’t care how wet I get, the irony of worrying about it when you’re about to baptise yourself.
I’ve nothing really to worry about.
I run down the beach not hesitating to get in. The waves are crashing but my demise is inevitable.
Even if I wanted to swim to a destination I couldn’t, the sea collapses and consumes everything, annihilates itself entirely every ten seconds. Once one is obliterated another is forming to repeat the process, there’s barely five seconds between them. The small ones are as powerful as the big ones, if I remain standing I’ll be floored so I dive head on into them as if throwing myself into a volcano.
I’m thrashing through a dream. The waves are breaking right into the sand with the force of a giant’s hand.
The water is shapeless, formless, perfect. No matter how hard I swim I go nowhere, I’m back where I started or surrounded by water, and yet I go again. There is no destination possible and so there is no reason to swim other than to swim for its own sake. I put one arm in front of the other and enjoy the journey.
Just as it has been all along.
The waves are violent, powerful, beautiful, a rainbow of blue to green and back again. Something to everyone and everything for me right now. A world of chaos, a blank slate in which you submerge yourself and die and come up for air, over and over again.
Even if I wanted to float aimlessly, I couldn’t.
The sun comes out and warms the surface, the storm picks up and freezes it again, the whole world is coming to life and dying in moments, the cycle of waves lasting mere seconds, the whole process lasts forever, the whole ocean is infinite.
There is no sunset - the sky is split between burning light and decaying black.
I have practiced presence on this whole journey but only glimpsed it in fleeting moments, but such is life – you taste the world beyond past and future, one found standing where you are right now, and are inspired to reach for it more and more with every step. You cannot create this world beyond words, it is not something man-made, something you can conceive of and create with your hands or mind. You must set out into the world to destroy yourself over and over and over again until only that which is indestructible remains, and accept that it was standing where you were all along.
500 years dead set ahead of me
500 behind
1,000 years in perfect symmetry*
They say the sea is a good place to think of the future, but the real beauty is in not thinking at all.
One last wave falls from the sky, at once crashing down from above and pulling me under, though I don’t swim against it, I let the water surround me and pull me into the abyss, into nothing.
Then I’m gone.
If you’ve done the Camino, are thinking of doing it, or are just interested in discussing the Camino or travel in general - then please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.
*Lyrics borrowed from Los Campesinos! - The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future
A 900k walk all to dive into the Sea’s Volcano abyss. Thoroughly enjoyed your writings.
Well done !😊