Camino de Santiago Day 41: Lisbon to Ireland
My journey has come full circle, taking me from someone who knows nothing to someone much the same; which is to say: same, same, but different
This is the final edition of my day-by-day real-time (kind of) story of my recent trip on the Camino de Santiago.
The whole experience was incredible, as I’m sure you can tell, and the experience of recreating the trip in such a fashion has been a creative journey that has mirrored the walking journey in an uncanny fashion - in terms of the physical and mental challenge of it, the ups and downs, the questionable effect on my short-term sanity and the spiritual and creative growth I’ve experienced in setting my goal walking every day towards it.
Thank you to anyone who has joined me, in stages or in reading the whole thing.
There’s still an awful lot to put into words and share, though this creative process has helped me digest and reflect on the whole thing in an unsually complimentary manner.
I’m going to take a break from writing over Christmas (and maybe get back to walking), though I’ve great plans for the new year which I can’t wait to share with you.
I hope you’ll join me, so subscribe now if you haven’t already, or please do share with anyone you think might enjoy my writing.
I’d also love to hear from any of you who’ve read and have any observations, thoughts or experiences of the Camino or any travel they’ve done - I read and reply to everything and love getting messages.
Thanks again for reading, and Buen Camino.
Sight-seeing
After breakfast I decide to climb up to the castle. The hills yesterday were nothing compared to the ones of Alfama. There’s a castle up on a high hill which I’m sure will be cool, so I slowly make my way towards it under the weight of my backpack. I feel like exactly what I am: a complete and utter tourist, a nobody with no destination and no real reason for being here, other than I heard other people say it was a cool place. I decide to embrace my state of ignorance, not caring whether or not I blatantly do everything wrong, how many stupid questions I ask or how many times I look at my map, or how I look doing so, even pausing every now and then to hitch up my shorts around my waits like a man forty years my senior, the new shorts I bought in Logroño having loosened up considerably along the way, and not having fit me properly since the momentous ordeal on the Dragonte.
When I get to there’s a long queue so I turn around and leave. I have no time for such ordeals just to see something that the world has deemed to be popular, important or cool. I’m sure the castle looks nice for its own sake but for me now it seems that the journey is all that matters, whether highlight or lowlight it’s just another step on the trip, and by now I’ve no time for walking any way other than exactly how I want.
Alfama is a wonderful jumble of hills, side-streets, alleyways and steps, all piled on one another, like a more colourful Edinburgh but twice as hilly and twice as confusing, and instead of looking like a haunted house it looks morel like a marzipan cake. I notice there’s been an unusually high number of active fire engines whizzing by the last couple of days, and feel for the drivers of cars on the one-way cobbled streets – it looks like a nightmare, albeit a beautiful one, maybe more of an aesthetic adrenaline rush than anything else.
I try to take the hills at my own pace. Tourists everywhere, they all seem to be going at someone else’s pace, like they’re all in a big guided tour being led by no-one. I take a seat at a neighbourhood café in a narrow street, a line in front of me with the yellow trams ringing by every minute or two. I lock eyes with the Americans, the Chinese, the Irish hanging out the windows with neutral expressions, dead eyes, their tongues hanging out.
Hundreds if not thousands of tourists roaming around the hills, all looking lost, they all file in the same direction looking like they’re following each other, though no-one seems to know where they’re going, all looking for something. No-one is happy, or seems to be enjoying themselves, one in a hundred smiles, all look lost, like they’re all taking some sort of test.
The sun is still out, open skies hang over the ends of crowded streets, the whole world looks upside-down.
I am exhausted. The whole trip has taken its toll on me, although a pleasant experience and almost comfortable existence, it has also been an odyssey, an endurance event and a mental challenge of undergoing a never-ending process of death and rebirth over and over and over again. I traipse around Lisbon struggling under the weight of my backpack, today perhaps the most gruelling day of them all. The sun is the hottest it's been even though it’s late October.
No matter what direction I’ve tried to walk in it’s like a rubber band around my waist has always dragged me back into the centre of gravity of the tourist trail, though I guess it’s where I’m meant to be. I cannot know what it’s like to live here, to be from here, and must - and should - accept that.
Sitting in a café near the river by the train station, I see two heads walking by the front door in the blazing sun. Ah, of course: it’s Conor and Nathalie, two of my closest Camino friends who were with me right up to Fisterra, whom I’d known since Zubiri. I left them in Santiago, they’re in Lisbon for a couple of days. Without any contact since I last saw them, they’ve just happened to walk by the window of this sprawling city in another country – I wasn’t even that surprised when it happened.
So it goes.
I traipse around Lisbon struggling under the weight of my backpack, today perhaps the most gruelling day of them all. The sun is the hottest it's been even though it’s late October.
I have nothing left to give this place. If you’d told me before I left Ireland that I’d be spending the last couple of days of my Camino trip in Lisbon I’d have expected this part to be the highlight; as it happens I’ve no time for highlights now. I’ve made my home in Spain over the last few weeks and now I’ve nothing to give another country or city, even one as impressive, historic and currently buzzed-about as Lisbon.
I can’t escape the tourists, though I am one of them, and so embrace my role. I don’t belong here. I walk up and down streets looking for nothing and finding it, I sit in cafes and watch the world go by. The locals all speak English to me before I even open my mouth, despite the backpack on my back this wouldn’t happen in Spain, or at least the part of it that I now know. I’m too tired to resist, to care, I welcome the comforting suffocation of being spoken to in English, the last hurrah before they just put a pillow over my head and put me down. I am a useless person to them, only fit to be herded from tourist attraction to tourist attraction like zoo animals, as if we’re the ones being watched, by bemused locals, by some international police surveillance state apparatus, by a young Irish writer sitting at a café and observing the comings and goings of the crowds and wondering what in the name of god they’re getting from this existence, as tourists, as pilgrims, as people at large.
This travel without purpose, this sight-seeing on someone else’s recommendation, this ticking of the boxes with no ticking of the heart, this endless journey to nowhere with no intention or destination in mind.
I just want to go home.
Terminal 2
My old reliable injuries from the now long-forgotten Camino I once did flare up a final time as I descend a random convergence of hilly streets and alleyways under the weight of my luggage and pilgrimage. Although the river-that’s-not-the-sea is an obvious half of the world to orient my direction towards, it’s the sort of mazy city where you can spend five minutes walking down a flight of stone steps in one direction only to bizarrely end up looking down on where you started from the other side, so I resort to travelling by google just in case.
As I march down a grand avenue I hear an American accent shout “Buen Camino” – I turn and wave to two older ladies who must’ve spotted the shell still affixed to my rucksack, though more likely they could just tell by the gimp on me.
At least I’ve given myself three hours to catch my flight.
The train station is just over there; the airport is just up there, it’ll just be twenty minutes or so judging by the map. The sky is still blue, the sun is still hot. The guy in the station tells me I’ve to get the metro, not the train. After figuring out my ticket I get a seat on an empty carriage before the metro starts going the wrong way. I get out at the first stop so I can catch one going back in the direction of the airport, though it terminates at the station I just got on at. I look at the metro line legend which informs me, in a fairly straightforward manner, that I need to take several stops before changing for the line for the airport.
At least I still have two and a half hours left. I change in a sweat, my clothes starting to show the effects of being off the albergue self-laundry circuit for a few days now, knees up near my ears so others can sit. A girl with a square suitcase you could fit a motorbike into sits across from me, unmistakeably Irish head on her, clearly also going to the airport. I turn around as the train reaches Terminal 1, she’s gone, I’ve a sneaking feeling I’d seen the name of the penultimate station written near the airport somewhere, but it’s only sneaking, and there’s nothing I can do about it now.
At least I’m here, and at least I still have two hours left. I see a single sign for Terminal 2 and make a beeline for it, past escalators and closed car rentals and taxi ranks and plastic crescent-shaped trolley-bays through the carpark and onto the road going for a roundabout where police are doing a checkpoint on the far side; they’re European police, the kind with machine guns, so I don’t want to ask them for directions. Must be just down here anyway.
I cross another roundabout and then the road as it goes down the hill. Google Maps tells me it’s just a ten minute walk. Cars fly by and at one point I’ve to leave the path to walk on the highway as there’s overgrowth. There’s still a clear footpath and a zebra crossing, though I seem to be the only one on the way to this other terminal, trying to tell myself it’s just a quiet night to be flying out. I cross another zebra crossing over the slip road that’s heading towards my destination, though my footpath is going the other way, under a huge bridge and towards a big sign on a roundabout, a friendly sign but one that indicates I might be going the wrong way:
“WELCOME TO LISBON”
I’m bursting for a piss so I dart over to a large hedge between the bridge and the sliproad. I probably look a bit mental to passing traffic but I keep reminding myself I’m embracing being a tourist who knows nothing and that I shouldn’t care what I look like. While I’m relieving myself thinking of the cops with machine guns I hear rustling and a load of barking. An enormous rat or a normal sized weasel darts out of the darkness and right behind me – which at least is better than right in front of me given my current activity – but I’m not out of the woods yet because weasels or rats don’t bark, and he’s followed by a series of dogs on a mad hunt darting out of the hedge: one, then two, then three, then four. Thankfully they keep their eyes on the prize as they do two laps and dart past me a second time, also pausing a second time, trying to work out if I’m a weasel. They pause for a minute, startled, as if their hunt has turned into a sweaty tourist, and I momentarily consider that I might be arrested by a team of Portuguese cops with machine guns as a bunch of dogs chew at me with my pants around my ankles, pissing everywhere, the gravity of my pilgrim’s rucksack pulling me onto my back and exposing me to the sky, not caring whether or not I look foolish. It doesn’t come to that though, and I manage to kill their interest by stamping and shooing once or twice and continuing on my merry, if slightly delirious, way.
At least I still have an hour and 45 minutes left. Around the corner and I’m clearly barking up the wrong tree myself here, though I’m also still resolute in my choices: I’d rather make it there this way, sweaty, lost and confused but still having made it, than worry about going the ‘right’ way. If I’ve learned anything on this trip it’s that doing things right all the time is overrated, and to embrace the unknown, which includes much making a fool of yourself, and it’s most likely of course that not a single person will ever see this series of events.
I do begin to wonder though if I somehow died between here and Terminal 2 how it would look.
Following another slip road off the roundabout and I finally admit to myself that this road goes nowhere. Eventually I’ve to cut my losses and admit defeat. Headlights of cars blind me as I stand on the grass verge, a dishevelled idiot with a backpack and hiking boots, looking like I’m just moving into the nearby roundabout and am checking out the best place to indefinitely pitch my tent.
At least I still have an hour and a half left. I start marching back towards the Terminal I just left, ducking off the footpath to dodge the overgrowth and taking care not to get run over in the process; putting my head down as I pass the cops questioning a taxi driver so they don’t ask what the fuck I was just doing down there for the last twenty minutes, and heading back to where I started, where there’s a conveniently located bus stop advertising a free shuttle to Terminal 2, which I passed on my way out of the train station. Instead of panicking I think of Patrick from Thurles, forever willing himself to get lost and simply looking at every step of the journey not in rights and wrongs but as the next step of an adventure that’s always in your own hands; the less attachments you have to a particular outcome the more you can enjoy where you end up. There’s no right way to Camino, after all.
At least I still have over an hour left.
Standing on the bus I am hungry, impatient, stoic in the face of the dwindling clock.
I later make it to check in on time, getting through two rounds of security and almost erupting in joy as I find a McDonald’s beside the gate, with just enough time left to embrace my touristic self and indulge in some easily consumed junk before I catch my flight back to Dublin.
At the start of this journey In St Jean I said I expected all this to be easy, before admitting that I know nothing, and accepting now that I still know nothing. But it’s a different kind of nothing, whereas once there was a lack of information signifying ignorance, arrogance, childishness, now there is just sheer annihilation:
I have spent six weeks staring into the abyss, and now I know that nothing is everything.
The Hero’s Journey has come full circle, as it does every day of your life.
It’s time to go home.
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.