Learning How To Walk: Toulouse to St.-Jean Pied de Port

Hello again, The old Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles (or in my case, 1200 km) begins with a single step, and my first "step", as a day's walk is called on the Chemin, was an interesting one... I followed the sign indicating "Le Chemin de St.-Jacques" across Pont Neuf, Toulouse's medieval bridge, on May 10th and followed the waymarkers for the route along a lovely path through the town, along the river, through forests, and past an 2nd Century Roman amphetheater, thoroughly enjoying the long walk. Imagine my surprise when, after many hours of walking, I topped a rise along the riverside and saw, laid out gloriously before me, the spires and bridges of the beautiful town of... Toulouse! I have no idea how, but I had somewhere joined the route into Toulouse and walked in a huge circle! I groaned, then laughed a bit at myself and went on to have lunch in the town before trying again. I walked back to the roundabout where colourfully dressed and loudly singing Roma women of all ages were washing the windshields of (unwilling) drivers at the red light and I boarded a bus to Colomiers to make up some lost time. From Colomiers I made the short walk to Pibrac to visit the imposing 20th Century structure of the Basilique Ste.-Germaine, then went to a phone booth to call the gite (pilgrim inn) in the village of Leguevin. Standing in the booth I turned around and saw two broadly grinning pilgrims festooned in symbols of St. James waving at me from outside the door. They told me they had been to Santiago and were now walking to Rome, asked me directions to the Basilica, and advised my route to Leguevin. I limped into the village with several blisters from my unexpectedly long walk and found the Maison St.-Jacques on the main street of the little village where I spent the night alone. The next day, which was very hot, I made the 30 km step to the Gite de Giscarro. I began through farmer's fields, some tilled golden and bare, some green with barley, some yellow with canola, and some fallow with the bright yellows and pastels of wildflowers, the long line of snowcapped Pyrenees crossing the horison in the distance. As the forest came near I saw an older couple sitting at the base of the waymarker with wodden walking sticks who rose and joined me as I walked. They had walked to Santiago in 2006 and were eager to share advice and chat. The forest gave way to a road which passed along the crest of a ridge with vast fields falling away on either side and bounding away over hills in the distance, the furrows glistening like Emily Carr's skies to the pinpoints of church spires marking villages on the horison. I parted with the couple, and the man thrust his hand in the air declaring "Bye bye! Buen camino! Bonne route!" and I descended the ridge into the little medieval town of L'Isle Jourdain. As I sat eating a pancetta and brie baguette sandwich in the park a man walked by and asked if I was a walker, and proudly listed off all of the places he had been, Istanbul and the like. I continued on the road which was alternately rutted tracks, paved road, ancient packed rubble paths, earth baked an cracked by the sun spangled with flower pettles like a wedding aisle, or thick with mud marked by pilgrim's boots, bike tires, horseshoes, and paws and cloven deer and wild pig hoofs. The songs of colourful birds filled the air, and that of church bells as I approached villages. A solitary figure with a large white moustache and blue-overalled belly greeted me at the corner of a field at the top of a rise, leaning on his cane and critically observing his neighbour plow his field, greeted me cheerily and told me it was 1 km to the gite and wished ma a bonne route. The gite, set back from the path amongst the fields, was a beautiful timber-framed earth and rubble house, and when I greeted the patron at work in his barn, he told me his English was better than his French. Hia name was Andreas from Germany, and he and his wife Penny, from Toulouse had met on the camino and started the beautiful little gite. After spening the night in an alcove of the dormitory I set out again, the air pleasantly cool with mist, and bought food for lunch and dinner in the tiny ridge-top medieval village of Gimont with a 14th Century church. Outside of Gimont I took a wrong turn, and returned to the misleading waymarker to stare at it until a window behind me opened an a woman popped her head out. She asked if I was a pilgrim of St.-Jacques, and directed me to go straight past the chappel of the cloister to find the route again. Further along my feet began to hurt quite bad, and I spied a long stick leaning against a cement bridge. I shortened it to length and found that it releaved a lot of strain as a walking stick, and have used it since. At last I arrived at the Gite La Motte, near an 18th Century chateau and an 11th Century church. If the previous gite was beautiful, this one was gorgeous, built of sun-baked brick and timber-frame with a cob oven, tile floors, and an enterance dome and reading alcove with a mosaic of a bare foot on the floor. As I was cooking pasta for dinner in the kitchen another pilgrim arrived, Luc from Marsaille. He took a private room and left the next morning as I was putting on my shoes. The next day I walked to the city of Auch, pausing to eat a lunch of croissaunts at the foot of the ruins of a hilltop medieval watchtower overlooking the Renaissance chateau and church spire of the minute village of Montegut. I passed through Montegut as the church bells began ringing and people of all ages poured out of it, including many old men with medals, uniforms and moustaches. Finding my way again after the route was obscured by a new highway, I walked over two hills to see the town of Auch spread out bellow me. I approached the huge gothic cathedral and medieval bridge along the river and crossed the bridge and climbed up to the cathedral through the narrow allies. It was Mother's Day, and I searched for an internet cafe or a place to buy a phone card to contact Mom, but it was Sunday and everything in town was closed. As I approached the cathedral, the gothic body worn with age but the twin turrets restored in a classical style, the sound of organ and baroque voices eminated from the stone. I entered the magnificent structure and circumambulated the aisles of stained glass windows and statues as the organist, tenor, counter-tenor and baritone rehearsed Marc-Antoine Charpentier and a contemporary piece which made the organ sound intreaguingly like a piece of industrial machinery for a concert that evening. I walked down the ally next to the cathedral of 14th Century timber-framed buildings to the Presbytery and entered through the gate and cortyard surrounded by four stories of shuttered windows. A woman sat patiently at a desk in the foyer of the 18th Century building and led me up the flights of wide spiraling stairs to the pilgrim dormatory with a breathtaking view of the Old Town and the cathedral. I attended the baroque concert that evening, had dinner with Luc, who was also staying at the Presbytery, and fell asleep in bed looking at the cathedrals illuminated turrets. The next day I walked through the ancient streets and caught up to another pilgrim at the enterence of the forest. It turned out she was not only Canadian, but a fellow British Columbian from Nelson! She was not walking to Santiago, but had come to scatter her parents' ashes in their homes of London and Paris, to visit a feudal agricultural community in the Pyrenees, and to celebrate her 60th birthday. She said her name was Clodette, and asked if we could walk together because a truck with two men in it had passed her several times giving her strange looks. We walked, and eventually descended into the moated and formerly walled village of Barran. We visited the church with its rare helictically spiralled spire, and stood in awe at the rows upon rows of white crosses of the village's dead from the First World War. The local gite was closed, but we stayed the night with a hilarious couple who had enthusiastically volunteered to host pilgrims in their 250 year-old home, Madeline and Jean-Michael, and a German pilgrim who had walked to Santiago seven times on various routes and was now stuck here with a strained tendon. In the morning I ate a large breakfast and Clodette and I bid farewell to our hosts and continued on to Montisquoiou. We accidentally took a very long, though beautiful, route and had to join the road to ensure our arrival in Montisquoiou, and Clodette hitch-hiked. Just before the village I passed one of the many gates marked "Attention au chien", this one open, and shortly after heard a loud snarling growl at my heels. I instinctively spun around, planted my feet, and leveled my staff in a pike stance, and let out a shout. Had the closer of the two big black guard dogs taken one more bound it would have had my staff down its throat, but hearing my bellow it spun around and retreated back to the gate. In Montesquiou we stayed in a hotel with a Swiss pilgrim on his second walk who had walked all the way from Montegut in the same day, what I had done in two and a half! We had a huge four course meal together and went to bed. The next day I headed off alone through the gate in the medieval fortifications and down through the village's gardens and along a beautiful trail past the ruins of a castle to Marciac meeting two pilgrims from Nice, Bruno and Jean-Luc, along the way. We stayed in an old timber frame gite next to the gothic cathedral, and I played guitar with the owner's Parisian son in the garden. Marciac is known as the Jazz capital of Europe for hosting a huge international annual festival, which our hosts are prime organizers of. The next morning I continued to Moubourget with Bruno and Jean-Luc, blessed with a magnificent view of the Pyrenees. It had been several days since I had been able to see them, and their shadowy bulk was now visible. Moubourget was the last stop of the annual steps toward Santiago that Bruno and Jean-Luc were undertaking, so they invited me for a drink and I bid them farewell as they drove back to Nice. No sooner had they left than a sudden and heavy rain shower began and I took shelter in the gite. I walked the next day to the tiny village of Anoye with Patrick, from Marsailles, and we shared a huge meal cooked on the solitary double-burner with another group of pilgrims from around France. I continued with Patrick the next day to Morlaas, then continued with George, Rene, Jean, and Claudette of the other pilgrim group. We toured the bakeries and butcheries and converged on a bus shelter to assemble and devour a very fresh lunch before visiting the cathedral, its Romanesque portal crawling with musical kings and torturing demons. We walked through the rain, turtle-like with our grey-green ponchos pulled over our backpacks, through forests and past cats nestled in deep window sills to the hippodrome of the city of Pau where we became lost and eventually found the gite. We were rewarded by a magnificent meal, beginning with a Basque patte, followed by the most exquisite of duck and ham garbures, which was in turn followed by a salad and a perfect combination of goat cheese and black cherry jam in the Basque tradition, with strawberries and cream for dessert... Manifique! The next morning we dried our shoes with hair-driers and I set out again with Jean, Rene and George, the three rough-hewn but incredibly good-natured faces which had weathered up to seven years of pilgrimage on up to three different routes. We walked to Lacommand, the medieval commanderie of the Knights Hospitaller. We stayed in the original pilgrim dormatory attached to the church and commanderie, next to the Hospitaller cemetary, with Giles, a cheerful fourty-year-old Toulousaine acupuncture doctor practicing near Carcassonne, and Meis, the Dutch woman who was the first pilgrim I had met I had met in Toulouse. The rain and the wind heavy the next day, Rene, George, Jean and I walked along the road rather than the muddy and dangerous chemin to Oloron Ste.-Marie. We topped the final hill and the city exploded magnificently bellow us: the cathedral spires, the turrets, the medieval bridges spanning the convergence of two mighty rivers, all set against a backdrop of the Pyrenees, guarding the pass of Somport into Spain. Oloron was a crossroads for me, the place where I finally had to decide whether to take the Col du Somport and continue on the Chemin d'Arles which I had been so thoroughly enjoying, or to continue west in France to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port and cross the Pyrenees at the Pass of Roncanvaux. The wonderful time I had been having in France and the light snow that was falling in the Col du Somport convinced me to continue on the Voie du Piemont to St.-Jean and join the Camino Frances there. The next morning I bid farewell to my friends continuing over Somport, including a 21 year-old who had bicycled from his home in Belgium. Before leaving I visited the moorish-influenced gothic cathedral of Notre Dame in its shades of grey, the dark and grounded sanctuary of the Romanesque St.-Croix, its flagstones inscribed with the names of the 18th Century deceased and resonating with barely audible Gregorian chant, and the sprawling gothic magnificence of l'Eglise Ste.-Marie. In l'Eglise Ste.-Mairie, as I slowly circumambulated the side-chapels on my blistered feet, the darkness pierced by spires of stained-glass light, I was clubbed by a sense of overwhelm. I was suddenly severely humbled by what I already knew: that I know virtually nothing, that I have been virtually nowhere, that there is so much to learn, experience, do and see, so many places to go. I was overwhelmed by the desire to learn everything there was to learn, to visit every place and experience each one fully, and I was overwhelmed by the knowledge that I would never be able to satisfy that painful desire. As I slowly recovered, leaning on my staff in the darkness, I realized with horror that at some point I would have to leave the peace of that sanctuary and re-enter the city and the world. I fortified my courage and did so, like plunging into icy water, and I walked. Departing the city, I walked next to a fast-flowing stream, and I realized that we pilgrims are like the water. We run in channels dug by a thousand years of foot and hoof, we are propelled by the energy of a thousand years of prayers and dreams. We get caught in back-eddies, we encounter barriers and experience turbulence, but ultimately we continue on our way, our streams joining into rivers and infallibly reaching the sea... That day I walked to l'Hospital St.-Blaise, an 11th Century church beautiful with very heavy moorish influences, and I spent the night in the little gite with Giles and Frances and Monique, two French women in their 70s who, despite being devotedly catholic, seemed to talk about nothing but food. The next day I continued with Giles in the morning as the mist rose silently from the forested hills. "Wow!" Giles pronounced emphatically at the beautiful sight, "Superb!" I enjoyed learning a lot of French adjectives to that effect from him, and listening to his incredibly musical whistling and singing as we passed over extraordinary mountain vistas, serenaded by cow bells, (and slogging through hoof-churned muck) for the next three days. In the town of Mouleon I visited the powerful 15th Century castle, and from there we continued to St.-Just Ibarre, Giles stopping to chat to the Basque characters of the countryside: a farm family of which only one member spoke French, the others only Basque; a woman who gave us water, her toothless face all wrinkles, alone in a house while her family was out in the fields; a strong little man who had walked from his home to Santiago and was eager to give me plenty of advice... We were greeted by a cheerful elderly woman at the gite next to the church across the medieval bridge. As I sat outside writing my journal and watching the swallows swirl in the sunset a little boy "vroom-vroom"-ing on his bike with his dog stopped and asked me if I was writing a book, and wished me "bonne courage" after a short conversation. From St.-Just Ibarre Giles and I continued to St.-Jean Pied de Port, immediately noticing a huge increase of pilgrims as we converged with the Chemin de Puy, and entered with great gusto through the Port St.-Jacques into the medieval walled city. The pilgrim's office was churning with people, most of them just getting their new credential, while I was given my 19th stamp. I toured the medieval fortifications and the 18th Century revamped citadel, marveling at the seemingly impervious defensive engineering. The eight pilgrims and our hosts sang grace together before a wonderful dinner. After dinner three of us - Alexandre, a Basque Roman Catholic philosopher, Hans, a Dutch agnostic capitalist private equity consultant, and myself, a "spiritual" Canadian social democrat anthropology student - strolled and conversed along the riverside through the medieval town as swallows flitted about us in the magnificently setting sun. Alaxandre, our pipe-smoking guide, had received his doctorate in Toronto and was the grandson of one of the primary Basque leaders in and after the Second World War. Today I am resting in St.-Jean before crossing the Pyrenees tomorrow, so I finally have time to get you caught up on everything! Sorry this is so long and unedited... I don't know when I'll next have the chance to write, or even see a computer, but if you need to get in touch with me for something important send me an email with the word "urgent" in the subject line, or if you'd just like to be in touch put the word "camino" in the subject line and I'll hope to get back to you soon. Right now I've got over 350 unread emails, and I don't know when I'll have the chance to look at them... I hope that all is well with all of you, and I am so greatful for everyones well-wishes and support. When I feel weak I think of all of you, and all of the strangers who have wished me a "bonne route" and "bonne courage," and know that those wishes give me strength. Tomorrow: the Pyrenees and Spain! Ultreia! Bradley St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, Pays Basque, France