Читать книгу Walk It Off - Erns Grundling - Страница 7

Cape Town International Airport

WhatsApp to Sophia

Thanks for the lovely message. Wedding was wonderful but ja, afterwards I was bloody tired and got on the plane with Slagtersnek. I’m going to finish it between Doha and Paris, chuck my laptop into a bin and head for the Camino. I’ve had enough. It’s not work’s fault, or anyone there. I haven’t been in such a bad space for a long time, but anyway, perhaps it’s for the best for what lies ahead. Thanks again for your support, my goodness, yesterday especially. All I can hope now is this whole shitty business will make the Camino all the more meaningful. Ag, I’m going to stop moaning now – as Bun Booyens Snr said to Doc Craven after losing a game: “Grit the back teeth but smile with the front ones.” This too shall pass.

* * *

My mother says we Grundlings are always rocking up with our ears flat, like rabbits, because everything is always such a bloody rush and a fuss. This morning I’m the rabbit with the flattest ears at the airport, tired and bewildered and bloody annoyed and struggling with my heavy red K-Way 35-litre rucksack, the monkey on my back for the next six weeks.

I’m sweating from the stress and last night’s wine. I was best man and incidental videographer at my friend Le Roux’s wedding, on a farm on the Polkadraai road outside Stellenbosch. A wonderful, intimate Boland wedding, but I didn’t get to sleep a wink afterwards. I actually had to sit and struggle with a Go travel magazine article I hadn’t finished, on what was the eve of my Camino – a feature on the Slagtersnek Rebellion of 1815.

I shared a self-catering place with one of the wedding guests, who’d got a bit legless and had a rambling conversation on his cell phone in the middle of the night. “I’m feeling very randy now, honey.” Then, he walked around the house repeating, like a mantra, “It’s a fuckin’ breakdown in communication.”

At three thirty I realised what I had known for days: I wouldn’t be filing the Slagtersnek article on time, before my brother arrives at seven to take me to the airport. The wedding guest was still awake, so we sat down together to watch the Floyd Mayweather–Manny Pacquiao fight on TV. Lauded as “The Fight of the Century”, like so many things it was a massive anticlimax.

The Bag Wrap machine wraps my rucksack up in thick plastic, the two trekking poles poking out on either side like short kieries. It all seems completely absurd. As my friend Le Roux often says, “The lonely places we take ourselves.”

* * *

“At Slagtersnek there is a triumphal arch that casts black shadows on the path taken by South Africa.”

– C.J. Langenhoven

* * *

Qatar Airways flight QR 1370 takes off. I take one last look at False Bay through the window, before the plane banks slowly northwards. If everything goes according to plan, I will see the Atlantic Ocean again in about five weeks’ time, somewhere near Finisterre on the west coast of Spain. The carry-bag on my lap contains a handful of things: my wallet, sunglasses, notebook, a pen, cell phone, a range of wall plugs and a small Samsung N150 Plus laptop (actually a netbook). And J.C. van der Walt’s book Rebels of Slagtersnek 1815. The iPhone and the laptop irritate me the most – they were not supposed to come with me. A voice makes announcements in Arabic and English. The seatbelt lights go off. My only thought is the desire to chuck the phone and laptop in a bin at Charles de Gaulle, then walk away all nonchalant as if I had thrown away an orange peel or a KitKat wrapper. But first, I have to finish the article. I am amazed at how my old patterns trip me up anew. Will these old patterns ever let us be?

* * *

The last thing I showed up on time for was my own birth. Actually, I was born much too early, at thirty-two weeks. My birth was a difficult one. My mother had kidney failure and very nearly died. When she told the doctor she wanted a little boy, all he said was, “Listen, let’s just hope you get through this alive.” The gynaecologist had a slightly different attitude: “This child is either going to be state president or a big crook.” These days, it seems you can be both.

My grandmother Charlotte Rens, a dignified and deeply religious woman, would tell me in later years that, while my mother was in theatre, she sat in the parking area and read the same verse from the book of James over and over again: “But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.”

Now, thirty-five years later and twenty years after my grandmother’s death, I’m leaving – an absolute sceptic – on a pilgrimage that will end in the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela, where this very apostle is said to be buried.

* * *

Douglas Adams wrote: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

I know that whoosh all too well. I despise deadlines; they never go away. And I love testing and teasing them. There must be an arrogance underlying this, the kind of thing one’s not eager to admit. Or total incompetence when it comes to time management. Or maybe a bit of both. I’m not sure exactly when this started. After all, the motto of my primary school, Laerskool Handhaaf in Uitenhage, was “Do it now”. (This was years before Nike’s Just Do It rallying cry …)

In my first year at what was then the University of Port Elizabeth, I realised my procrastination problem was getting out of control. I scratched around in the psychology section of the library and came across Overcoming Procrastination by Albert Ellis, a compact book with a purple cover. This I must read, I thought, and put it on my bookshelf at home.

Every morning I walked past the book, looked at it and thought: I’m reading you all right! Eventually, tail between my legs, I returned the book to the library, unread and two months late. And paid a hell of a fine.

* * *

Last Facebook post on 2 May before my departure

I’m going off the grid for a while. Into the mild. I’m flying to Europe the day after tomorrow to walk the Camino Francés, about nine hundred kilometres over forty days from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to Santiago de Compostela, and then to the sea at Finisterre in northwestern Spain. That’s my plan, more or less. I’m leaving my phone in Cape Town, it’s time for a digital detox and radical mindspace clean-up. Or as Toast Coetzer put it: “One man against himself.” I will probably check in on Facebook again when I return later in June. Until then, adios! #intothemild

* * *

One man against himself. Toast, a good friend and confidant, and my neighbour in Go’s open-plan office, knows me well.

For an incurable extrovert with a kind of teddy-bear persona, I can be extraordinarily hard on myself, especially in my quiet moments. But don’t we all have all sorts of contradictions within ourselves? With masks that slip onto our faces so effortlessly, to the point where we struggle to distinguish between ourselves and our masks?

Walt Whitman wrote: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself. / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

I often joke that I don’t need anyone else to give me a hard time – I do it myself. All I need is a mirror to declare war against my greatest enemy.

* * *

Flickering across the plane’s small TV screens are the first Batman movie, The Big Bang Theory episodes, unfathomable Bollywood hits, a golf game and the GPS map of our route; at the moment, we’re still somewhere over the Great Karoo.

Time for a gin and tonic. I had my first high-altitude G&T in August 2001, when I went to cover the Big Brother eviction in Johannesburg for the Eastern Cape edition of Die Burger. Those were the early days of reality television – to this day it’s a strange thought, to me, how the public and media made such a big thing of Ferdi and Brad’s shenanigans in the garden. “S.A. peeps into the shower”, said the headlines on the lampposts along William Moffett Avenue in Port Elizabeth.

It being the weekend of Govan Mbeki’s funeral, the flight to Johannesburg was overbooked. In a surprise move, I was upgraded to business class. As is fit and proper for a student (I was still studying at the time and freelancing for Die Burger) with one foot still firmly in the trap of late adolescence, I got going on the gin and tonics, and had ordered my third before the plane had even flown over Cradock.

And so I started chatting to the passenger next to me, who had a TopSport tog bag with him. I assumed he was a TV sports presenter and launched with great conviction into a speech about just how pathetic the SABC’s news coverage was. He mostly just listened; I didn’t exactly let him get a word in edgeways.

A month later I saw him again at the Vodacom Journalist of the Year awards ceremony in Port Elizabeth. Turns out he was Phil Molefe, the awards’ chief adjudicator, and head of news at the SABC …

* * *

The plane is not that full. I’m next to the window with two open seats next to me. There are two days of hard travelling ahead before I reach the starting point of my Camino, the little French village of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port at the foot of the Pyrenees:

•First I have to get the nine-hour flight to Doha in Qatar behind me.

•Then I’ll spend the night in the new airport terminal at Qatar, before the seven-hour flight to Paris.

•In Paris, a train and taxi ride will get me to the Gare d’Austerlitz.

•From there I’ll take an overnight train in a small compartment sleeping six people to Bayonne, near Biarritz in the south of France.

•In Bayonne, I catch a train that will stop an hour later in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port.

* * *

A scene from the film 500 Days of Summer neatly sums up one of my life’s great obstacles. The male lead pitches up at a party given by his ex-girlfriend, for whom he still has strong feelings. The screen then splits in two, with the same scene shown in both halves, but one with the title “Expectations” and the other “Reality”. In the “Expectations” screen his ex-girlfriend greets him warmly, and they walk up the stairs to the deck, laughing and chatting. In the “Reality” screen she is still friendly, but keeps him at a distance; on the deck he hears, alas, that she is engaged to someone else. The background music to both the scenes is Regina Spektor’s unsettling ballad “Hero”. “I’m the hero of the story / Don’t need to be saved.”

Here on the plane, I am confronted with two such screens. In the “Expectations” screen I lean back peacefully in my seat, order another G&T, and do whatever I feel like: watch a movie, play a silly game, watch the other passengers, catch up on some sleep, or write a few serious and sensible thoughts in my Moleskine diary about the momentous journey ahead. Meditate, even.

In the “Reality” screen, though, I’m wound up, down a night’s sleep, and can’t stop hauling myself over the coals for not filing the Slagtersnek article before I left as I’d so solemnly promised. It’s not the first time that something like this has happened, either.

Will these old patterns ever let us be?

* * *

“Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.”

– Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst

* * *

My K-Way rucksack lies deep in the bowels of the Boeing, tightly bound in Bag Wrap plastic.

Years ago, former RSG presenter Fonnie du Plooy phoned me to arrange a radio interview. When I asked Fonnie what would happen if he ever lost his diary, his calm, super-polite voice answered, “Then, Erns, I am screwed.”

If my rucksack goes missing between here and Paris, Fonnie, I too would be undeniably screwed.

* * *

I am already wearing the clothes I’m going to hike in: a K-Way fleece, a K-Way long-sleeve shirt, K-Way hiking pants (my only pair of pants: you can unzip the legs if you want to), a pair of black socks and a pair of brand-new Salomon trail running shoes. I bought them in a British size 10. I usually wear a size 9, but apparently one’s feet swell on such a long hike.

The contents of my red K-Way rucksack:

•Two mismatched K-Way trekking poles. The grey one I used in September 2006 on Kilimanjaro and the orange one in July 2013 in the Fish River Canyon.

•A K-Way Chamonix 850 Eco sleeping bag, weighing only 850 grams. The “Recommended Sleep Zone” is between 3°C and 15°C. It’s spring in Europe – I shouldn’t get cold.

•A kind of sleeping sheet, folded up compactly and stashed in a Ziploc bag. Not as warm as a sleeping bag, but you can sleep inside it. I borrowed it from my friend Sarie, who has walked the Camino before.

•A pair of waterproof K-Way pants, bought – and probably last worn – back in 2006 for climbing Kilimanjaro.

•A light waterproof jacket, with the Solo cologne logo on it. No idea where I got it.

•Thermal underwear – long-sleeve vest and pants (possibly unnecessary, because it’s not winter, but the weather can apparently change very quickly).

•A pair of grey K-Way shorts (to wear at night).

•A pair of gym/jogging pants.

•An extra pair of K-Way pants.

•A grey T-shirt with an Ons Klyntji logo (to wear at night).

•A compact, quick-drying K-Way towel.

•A hat.

•Two extra pairs of socks.

•A trump card, hopefully: three pairs of thin, ankle-length stockings to wear as a base layer when walking.

•Two extra pairs of underpants.

•Two handkerchiefs.

•Two pairs of Lycra tights – one pair is my flatmate Magriet’s old cycling tights …

•One pair of pretty worn-in Reef slip-slops.

•A black bag, another disposable plastic bag I could use as a raincoat, and seven empty Ziploc bags of various sizes.

•In a large Ziploc bag, under my clothes: two Moleskine diaries for journalling, two pens (one an ordinary Bic, the other a fancier make with the Cricket SA logo, which my uncle gave me – who knows why anybody would want to travel with such a smart pen), the compact yellow Globetrotter’s Spanish in Your Pocket (Phrase Book and Two-Way Dictionary), John Brierley’s A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Camino de Santiago (the bible for thousands of pilgrims every year) and his A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Camino Finisterre.

•A waterproof toiletry bag containing: a new Oral-B toothbrush in a holder, a small tube of Colgate toothpaste, my sunglasses in a case, two small bottles filled with Radox Shower Gel, 50 ml Nivea roll-on deodorant, 200 ml Nivea Sun suntan oil (factor 50), 50 ml Vaseline, 120 ml Proglyde Anti-Chafe Cream, a roll of Elastoplast plaster, Bactroban ointment, a strip of five Imodium tablets for diarrhoea, a strip of five Valoids for nausea, one bottle of Nexomist nasal spray for allergies. And twenty-two Provent plasters that I hope will help with the sleep apnoea.

•Another small bag: a red Victorinox pocket knife with the words “INTO THE MILD” engraved on it (a gift from friends), a cotton reel with six clean needles (if I have to deal with blisters), a small head torch, two carabiners to hang things on, four extra AAA batteries, a nail clipper and a blue spork (spoon-fork-knife combination).

•One last Ziploc bag: a small bottle of washing-up liquid, a small box of Omo washing powder, a plug (for washing clothes in a basin), eight clothes pegs.

•A coffee mug.

•A 100 g packet of raw almonds, 150 g of biltong, two packets of energy jellies.

•A one-litre Laken water bottle.

•50 Go business cards.

•My Credencial del Peregrino, or Pilgrim Record, which I ordered in advance from the Confraternity of Saint James of South Africa.

The rucksack weighed 11,4 kg at Cape Town airport. That might not sound like much, but throw in about two litres of water and we’re nearing 14 kg.

A strange prospect: for over 800 km and forty days, I’ll be carrying the equivalent of a small child on my back.

* * *

I first heard about the Camino in 2004. One Sunday afternoon, I was sitting fairly anxiously (anxious because I was putting off the mountain of work I had to do) in the offices of the online journal LitNet above the Spur in Stellenbosch. Instead of working, I was aimlessly browsing the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho’s website.

I stumbled upon his publisher’s contact details and wrote an impulsive email asking whether I could send Paulo a few questions. His novel Eleven Minutes had just been published and an Afrikaans translation of his international bestseller The Alchemist was also on South African shelves.

When you send emails like these – just another request for an interview from an obscure corner of the world – you don’t usually hear back. But the very next morning, his publisher replied: “Paulo Coelho is currently on holiday on the French Riviera and would prefer to grant a telephone interview. He is available on Tuesday afternoon from 14:00 to 14:20. Here is his number …”

I nearly started hyperventilating. I spent a sleepless Monday night trying to come up with questions. I borrowed a speaker phone from a friend’s parents so I could record the interview. Paulo was relaxed, friendly and extremely generous with his time – we ended up talking for over half an hour.

My last question was how he would like to be remembered, to which he replied: “As someone who died while he was alive. I’m going to be cremated and my ashes will be spread on the Santiago pilgrim’s road. But if I had an epitaph or something written on a tombstone, it would be: ‘He died while he was alive.’ Because I see so many people who die before death arrives. They consider doing everything, they breathe, they eat, they make love … but they’ve lost their enthusiasm towards life. So I would like to be remembered as someone who died while he was alive.”

* * *

The Santiago pilgrim’s road … Paulo Coelho’s last answer led to my discovering the Camino, the “pilgrim’s way” that has led, since the ninth century, to the cathedral in the little town of Santiago de Compostela where it is believed the apostle St James lies buried.

It’s believed that James, called a “brother of Christ” in the Bible (although they were not family), came to Galicia in Spain to do missionary work some years after the crucifixion (and ascension to heaven, depending on your faith).

John Brierley notes in his guidebook that there is no historical evidence of this, only anecdotal accounts.

But assuming that James did indeed come to Spain, he would have been one of the first of the apostles to carry out Jesus’ injunction in Matthew 28:19: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.”

At that time (about forty years after the birth of Christ), northwestern Spain was a hub of paganism – with Finisterre on the coast a kind of headquarters with stone altars, rituals and initiation ceremonies. The kind of place where Getafix the Druid from the Asterix comics would have felt entirely at home.

Finisterre (the Latin finis terra means literally the “end of the Earth”) was likely one of the places where James tried his damnedest to convert the pagans to accept the message of the Man from Nazareth. But according to tradition – and its almost seamless fusion of fact, fiction and Catholic mysticism – James was no match for the pagans in Finisterre, so he headed for the little fishing village of Muxía, about thirty kilometres to the east. At Muxía he went to sit on a rock to lick his wounds, when out of the blue the Virgin Mary appeared before him in a small sailboat. She comforted him and encouraged him to return to Jerusalem without delay. Immediately after her appearance the sail of the little boat turned to rock, which is still there to this day.

James took Mary’s advice and went straight back to Jerusalem, where he was promptly beheaded by King Herod in 44 AD. So, James became the first martyr in the name of Christ. Did Herod ever do anything but murder babies and chop people’s heads off?

Despite his failed attempts to persuade the pagans of the error of their ways, James loved Spain, so a few of his followers brought his mortal remains back to the country by boat so that he could be buried at Finisterre. But the pagans didn’t approve; James’ followers fled to the interior and buried him somewhere there.

Almost eight centuries later, in the year 813 or 814, a shepherd named Pelayo or Pelagius had a vision of a bright star, which led him to the place where James had apparently been buried. This is the spot where the cathedral was later built and the little town of Santiago de Compostela established. The name of the town tells the story: Santo Iago (Saint James), Compos (field), Stella (stars). James is also the patron saint of Spain.

The first written record of a pilgrim walking the Camino dates from the year 940. In the subsequent centuries tens of thousands of people walked from every corner of Europe each year to pay homage at James’ grave, and in the process be granted forgiveness for their sins. The Camino starts at your front door, the moment you put a foot over the threshold.

There were apparently also forced pilgrimages: instead of serving jail time, some of those convicted were made to walk the Camino. You could even “delegate” someone else to walk your Camino and to receive forgiveness on your behalf at Santiago de Compostela.

The Camino became so huge that it began to overshadow the other two famous and ancient Christian pilgrimages – those to Jerusalem and to Rome – in popularity.

Brierley mentions that this early growth must be seen against the background of the Catholic Church’s attempts to consolidate its presence in Spain in the early Middle Ages, especially once the Moors had been expelled during the Crusades.

Here too the apostle James played a mythical – and controversial – role: He is known in Spain as Santiago Matamoros (Saint James the Moor-slayer). According to the legend, the apostle appeared on a white horse during the Battle of Clavijo and crushed a numerically vastly superior army of Moors with his sword.

From the Milky Way to the Moors … it remains a magical story that stirs the imagination of millions to this day.

* * *

9 March 1816: 5 rebels hanged … only Stephanus Cornelis Bothma’s rope did not snap … prosecutor Jacob Glen Cuyler … . “It will perhaps be a satisfaction to His Excellency to hear the prisoners one and all died fully resigned to their fate …”

10 October 1815 … “ruffian” … Frederik Cornelis (Freek) Bezuidenhout (55) from the farm Baviaansrivier … now Silverbrook (Johan Troskie) refuses to be arrested, farm in Baviaansrivier … shot at Pandoers … shot and killed, tried to hide in rock crevasse.

My rough notes on the Slagtersnek Rebellion are becoming unmanageable on my irritatingly small Samsung Netbook.

I can’t stop thinking of the satisfaction I’ll feel when I chuck the laptop and phone away at Charles de Gaulle. It’s absurd: sitting up here in the sky on the way to the longest holiday of my life, after all the flaming hoops I’ve jumped through over the past few months, with an article that’s still not finished. It’s enough to make you certifiably insane.

Bun Booyens, my first editor at Go, gave a talk at the KKNK once in which he described how his journalists’ writing styles differ. Toast Coetzer’s words flow like a waterfall, and Bun imagines him writing with one hand, while steering with his knees, holding a KFC Rounder in his other hand. Dana Snyman has a different approach. He is like a cat having kittens. Approach him cautiously, keep your distance, and when you look again, there’s a precious new arrival.

And me? Erns sits in front of the laptop like a dog that’s swallowed poison …

* * *

I yield to the temptation of the in-flight entertainment despite (or maybe because of) the pressure of work. The laptop’s batteries are not going to last until Doha anyway; I’ll have to come up with another Slagtersnek plan at the airport during the eight-hour stopover.

I scroll through the movies. My eye catches Wild (2014), with Reese Witherspoon in the leading role, based on the bestseller with the same title by Cheryl Strayed.

Wild tells the story of Cheryl’s epic solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail in the USA. She covered almost 1 800 kilometres on her own in 94 days, with hardly any hiking experience and infinitely more baggage than she had in her rucksack.

Her hike began in the Mojave Desert in southern California. During the hike she has constant flashbacks to her childhood, the death of her mother, rough sex with strangers, and a heroin phase for good measure. Oh, and the collapse of her marriage, and an abortion. One is tempted to ask her, in the vein of a New Yorker cartoon: “Other than that, Mrs Kennedy, how was your trip to Dallas?”

The film is incredibly inspiring. I can’t help making certain connections between Strayed’s story and my own imminent hike.

Look, I don’t foresee having to lick the dew off my tent when I run out of water, or covering the distances she covered without seeing a single soul. The Camino is far too popular for that. My guidebook tells me that in 2014 exactly 237 886 pilgrims arrived at Santiago de Compostela. Of these, 161 994 walked the Camino Francés, the route that I’m going to take.

But like Strayed, I also have a lot of baggage I’d like to get rid of. Physical and emotional. Baggage that has kept me very busy for a very long time, that I don’t necessarily want to think about, but that is always lurking just below the surface. The cracks in the “room beneath the floor”, as the psychoanalyst James Hollis refers to the unconscious. Let’s face it, I don’t think people decide, without reason(s), to take six weeks’ leave to go and backpack around Spain alone without a cell phone, watch or camera.

I scribble a few quotes from the film in among my Slagtersnek notes, especially from the part where she reaches her destination at the Bridge of the Gods on the Oregon–Washington border after so many challenges, crises and adventures:

•“There is no way to know what makes one thing happen, and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish, or die, or take another course? What if I forgive myself? What if I was sorry?”

•“We are never prepared for what we expect.”

•“After I lost myself in the wilderness of my grief, I found my own way out of the woods. Thank you … for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn’t yet know.”

•“It was my life – like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.”

* * *

What thoughts and sensations will I arrive at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela with in about forty days’ time? Or, firstly: will I make it there?

The obvious psychological challenges – in themselves a morass – aside, four physical aspects worry me constantly:

1. At 92 kilograms I am seriously overweight.

My body mass index (BMI) is a staggering 31,1 – so technically I am obese. A bit like the title of the Valiant Swart song: “Diknek en klein tandjies”. So, getting over the Pyrenees on Day One won’t be fun. I was full of good intentions and little schemes to take on the Camino considerably lighter and leaner, but alas. It’s a vicious cycle – I am an emotional eater, constantly stuffing my face to ward off the anxiety.

2. I am unfit.

The story I keep trying to tell myself is one that travel author Dana Snyman once told in a Go article on club rugby in small towns. The one about the farmer who lives a little way out of town and won’t travel back and forth into town on weekdays to train with the local team, because he “farms” himself fit. I hope I can “walk” myself fit on the Camino.

3. I am injured.

I don’t tackle anything with a measure of balance. It’s always full-on or fuck-all – I’ve often thought this would be a good epitaph on my tombstone. On 2 January I hiked up Skeleton Gorge above Kirstenbosch, hung around for a bit at the reservoirs at the top, then bounded back down like a nimble mountain goat – only, I’m shaped more like a juvenile rhino. The next morning my right knee started hassling me, so much so that I couldn’t bend it without a shooting pain. Several physiotherapy sessions and Pilates classes followed, as well as acupuncture needles from knee to hip. I even ended up at an orthopaedic surgeon, who took X-rays and diagnosed tendinopathy. That was ten days ago. The orthopaedic surgeon had good news and bad news. The bad news: I will definitely have ongoing knee pain, especially up steps or steep inclines. The good news: I’m not likely to mess it up more than it already is, especially if I start slowly and stretch regularly. He even claimed that my knee could start to heal with all this exercise.

This unsettles me deeply. In September 2006, I left for Tanzania to climb Kilimanjaro. I was also pretty unfit, and had the final stages of an upper respiratory tract infection. I boarded the plane with an irritating little cough, which only got worse. I don’t know if the dreaded altitude sickness played a role, but it couldn’t have helped. After four days I was so ill that I had to admit defeat, barely ninety minutes’ walk from base camp, the start of the final climb. Being denied the sunrise from the roof of Africa was a huge disappointment.

4. I have serious sleep apnoea.

In February I went for a sleep study at a clinic in Cape Town. My father had recently been diagnosed with sleep apnoea and now uses a CPAP device at night – an expensive affair at R20 000 with a mask that makes him look and sound a bit like Darth Vader from Star Wars.

My results were not good. Apparently I don’t sleep deeply enough because of obstructive sleep apnoea – my throat muscles and tongue become so slack that I stop breathing, but I don’t wake up. This may explain why I so often wake up dead tired. But sleep apnoea has all kinds of other scary and dangerous consequences: a higher risk of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, obesity and accidents, because you could fall asleep while driving, for example.

My results showed an apnoea episode up to thirty times an hour; I sometimes did not breathe for as long as half a minute, during which time the organs need to work twice as hard. Sometimes you do wake up, gasping for breath, or choking, or from snoring loudly and irregularly, and with pounding heart palpitations – all symptoms I know well. Especially the snoring.

It’s not really something I’m proud of, but I am a seasoned snorer. At university, a friend and I once went on a road trip from PE to Cape Town. One evening we pulled into a backpacker lodge in Knysna to overnight in its dormitory. Sometime in the middle of the night my own snoring woke me and I looked around. Only backpacks remained – everyone else had sneaked off to escape my thunderous snoring …

Weight also plays a big role in sleep apnoea – extra fatty tissue around your neck can add to the obstruction of the airway. After my tests the specialist immediately wanted to prescribe a CPAP device. But I resisted, especially when I heard about the new Provent plasters, which are practically invisible and much less of a drama than a machine. But the specialist insisted: I needed a CPAP device to help me get a good night’s rest, to boost my metabolism and help me to lose weight, and also to prepare me for the Camino. In fact, in his view I did not stand much of a chance of completing the Camino without a CPAP device. He also recommended a special lightweight CPAP machine to make travelling easier. It all just felt too much like a one-sided push to sell me an expensive machine, so I went for a second opinion and decided to take my chances on the Camino with one packet of nice and expensive Provent plasters (R1 140 for thirty), which would hopefully bring some relief for my fellow hikers in the night if my snoring were to become unbearable.

* * *

The pilot announces that we are flying over Mecca and that those sitting on the right of the plane should be able to see it. I’m on the right. It’s already pitch dark outside. Mecca’s lights glimmer far in the distance, the holy place where millions of Muslims end their pilgrimage. From up here it looks like a massive power plant in the middle of nowhere.

* * *

Midnight at Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar. About 24 hours ago I was still at a Boland wedding, twirling a bridesmaid around on the dance floor with clumsy enthusiasm to Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best”.

It’s a song that always brings back memories. At high school I was a sprinter, believe it or not. Our U-19 relay team at Uitenhage’s Hoërskool Brandwag was pretty sharp. Our X factor was the guy who ran the home leg: Wylie Human, who played for almost every Super Rugby team in the country in later years.

Tina Turner’s hit was our theme song. In the heats at the Volkswagen Prestige meeting on the tartan track at the University of Port Elizabeth, we were way ahead of all the other teams timewise. The final was going to be broadcast live on television.

I was to run the third leg of the race. But poor Gideonfell at the starting block and we literally bit the dust. Later that evening, watching the grown-up athletics, half-stunned, we heard “Simply the Best” blaring from the loudspeaker …

* * *

Doha’s new airport is overwhelming. I feel like Dorothy’s little dog Toto, in The Wizard of Oz, when she says, “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more …”

I reckon Qatar looks ready to host the Soccer World Cup in 2020 – but they’re going to have to do something about the weather. It was uncomfortably hot and humid when we got off the plane – this, just before midnight.

I move with the mass of new arrivals in rows through passport control and reach the shiny and hyper-modern arrivals hall with a TV screen as big as a tennis court. Images advertising the Al Khaliji banking group flash across the screen.

But the TV screen is nothing compared to the huge bloody bear in the middle of the arrivals hall. At first I thought the seven-metre-high yellow bear was a Lindt chocolate advert, but apparently it’s a legendary work of art: Untitled (Lamp/Bear). It was created ten years ago by Swedish neo-Dadaist Urs Fischer, and has been on display at Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous Seagram building in New York – the building, I might add, on which Go’s home, Cape Town’s Absa building, is modelled.

A member of Qatar’s royal family bought the bear, which weighs about 20 tons, for $6,8 million at a Christie’s auction. Impressive, but also a bit unsettling: a reading lamp sticks out behind the bear, as if someone has forced it into the teddy’s back.

The reading lamp reminds me that Slagtersnek needs finishing. My flight leaves for Paris in under eight hours, just enough time to finish and email the article before Monday kicks off in Cape Town for my editor and colleagues. A sterile hotel room nearby would have been perfect; alas, I bought my ticket on special, so I don’t qualify for accommodation.

* * *

I check in at the Oryx Lounge, a luxurious space that looks more like the domain of business class passengers, to bat out the night at the airport. My friend Le Roux often speaks of “the high premium on self-entertainment”. Forty euros for eight hours in the Oryx Lounge is certainly a high premium, especially since what lies ahead for me can hardly be called entertainment.

But I really don’t want to struggle with Slagtersnek in the arrivals hall, near the yellow bear, with the laptop on my lap.

The Oryx Lounge is clinical yet luxurious: a spacious room with laminate floors, hyper-modern standard lamps and rows of comfortable leather chairs. And no shortage of food: a buffet with dates, olives, dried fruit, rolls, cheeses, pastrami and a Nespresso machine. There is a family room, a games room with PlayStations and a computer area where the Macs’ little white apples gleam.

I drink the first of many coffees and settle into a leather chair. Okay: time to wring this Slagtersnek article’s neck. Starting the Camino without finishing this thing first would be career-limiting, to say the least. I might as well not bother going back to work when I get back to Cape Town in mid-June. The thought of walking for forty days with that sword hanging over my head makes me feel sick.

I’ve always found airports to be good spaces to work in. I’ve seen countless articles through their dying moments at airports, sometimes in transit between flights. I’ve even often wondered whether I should open an airport satellite office. I’m just more focused at airports, for some reason. Maybe it’s just that, when an article is dangerously late, my tail feathers catch fire, so to speak, to such a degree that my grey matter really starts shifting gears.

The Man Who Wasn’t There is a movie by the Coen brothers in which Billy Bob Thornton plays the lead. I also feel, sometimes, as if I’m not really present in the places I find myself. There’s certainly a case to be made for the old AA saying “Wherever you go, there you are”, but I don’t always experience it like this. At least not psychically.

Around me tourists are lounging – people in transit, between airports, between past and future experiences, adventures, loves, disappointments, business transactions … Some are sleeping, others are trying to, squirming and fiddling. Most are absorbed in the small screens in their hands, earphones plugged in. It is quiet in here – no background music, just the soft clink of cutlery every now and then as people help themselves to something from the buffet. A long night lies ahead for all of us. A long night under bright neon lights that remind you of a university library.

The article is slowly taking shape. I’m listening to Micah P. Hinson, a troubled singer from Texas who, at the age of 33, has the gravelly, husky voice of an 80-year-old taking the last puff of a Lexington.

A deeply strange way of working, this. The man who wasn’t there. How many times haven’t I been in this position? Every time, I promise myself: this is the last time. But like an addict who buggers up the finest intentions and promises with a relapse, it’s not long before I’m here again, in the discomfort zone I know so intimately.

The worst is when I embark on the next Go story before I’ve even completed the articles I’m still working on.

In a seedy two-star hotel in freezing Belfast (Mpumalanga’s, not Ireland’s) I once had to write an article about game ranger Christiaan Bakkes and his Jack Russell, Tiger, under extraordinary pressure – as all the town’s characters reported to the bar, one by one.

In a guesthouse in Winburg I struggled half to death to finish an article about the Gifberg resort outside Vanrhynsdorp. In a rondawel in the old Transkei, with the sea as a soundtrack, I wrestled with the closing paragraphs of a piece about a road trip between Carolina and Barberton.

In Tsumeb I literally locked myself in a room at the Minen Hotel for a weekend to wrap up a story on the Knysna forest’s characters (including two of the last true traditional foresters). A kind of boot camp for the psyche …

Here I am, freaking out at Hamad International Airport, building sloppy sentences in the vague hope of generating 2 500 readable words on Slagtersnek before the new day dawns at the start of the Cape Town week. The wi-fi is free: a good thing if you quickly need to check the details of a guesthouse in Cookhouse (near the Slagtersnek monument), but fatal for someone whose attention tends to drift.

I cannot wait to be without my phone for six weeks. To go completely under the radar and not feel constantly besieged by messages and marketing. To try to recall and relive what life was like before we all started walking around with smartphones.

But I’m already having some misgivings about turfing the iPhone and laptop. At the moment I’m just despondent, not visibly angered like before. I’m running out of time and options. Storing this stuff for forty days in a locker at Charles de Gaulle means an (unplanned) outlay of R4 000. I don’t know anyone in Paris. When I got here I sent a quick WhatsApp to a former colleague who knows someone who lives in France, but I’m still waiting for a reply.

Hang on – last night at the wedding I sat next to someone who works in Paris frequently. Martine. We had a lovely chat and she gave me a few great tips on how to spend my last night in Paris on my way home. Before I left Cape Town this morning we said a quick hello on Facebook.

I send her a First World SOS:

Hi Martine, I’m at Doha airport. The only reason I’m still “digital” is that I’ve brought work with me that I have to finish before the Camino. I have a strange Paris request/favour to ask: I’m finishing that work tonight here in Doha, and there’s no way I’m taking the laptop and phone with me on the Camino. But the lockers at Charles de Gaulle seem expensive for 40 days’ storage (about 320 euros) and I’m reluctant to mail/courier them to SA. You don’t perhaps know of a person or a place in Paris where I can mail the parcel (I promise it’s not contraband or something out of Breaking Bad) from the airport and then pick it up on 15/16 June when I’m back there again? I’m waiting for an address from a colleague who knows somebody there, but it’s dragging out a bit and I’m running out of time. I’ll need to mail the parcel from the airport at about 3 p.m. tomorrow afternoon. Phew, this turned into quite a ramble. Maybe I should stick to organising bachelor parties. Looking forward to hearing from you!

She answers quickly:

Just contacted a friend in Paris to find out whether you can mail the parcel to her – will let you know as soon as she replies. Enjoy the evening until then!

There you go – it’s all working out nicely. The Nespresso is strong, the chair comfy, the wi-fi fast and, with a date from the buffet in my mouth, the word count is starting to rise.

* * *

With the address of a South African in Paris – Marcelle (also a journalist) – written in my Moleskine, and the Slagtersnek article now about three-quarters done, I board flight QR 039 for the Doha-to-Paris leg of my journey. It’s just after eight on Monday 4 May. Six Nespressos through the night in the Oryx Lounge. And a gorgeous hot shower. But I haven’t shut an eye for 48 hours. The lonely places we take ourselves …

This time I’m not alone in my row. There’s a man on either side of me – on my left a Muslim gent with a long beard, in Islamic attire; on my right a young Indian guy who looks really nervous. Arjun has lived in New Delhi his whole life, and is flying abroad for the first time to go and work as a computer programmer in Paris. He is also scared of flying and heights.

Luckily, I don’t have that problem. The worst turbulence I ever experienced was in a Boeing above Mossel Bay. People either screamed or started negotiating under their breath with their notion of divinity. A flight attendant went down on her knees, arms embracing the food trolley. Fortunately, the worst of the chaos was over within a minute.

Heights don’t bother me: it’s confined spaces that drive me to distraction. A few years ago I visited the Cango Caves to write a story for Go. I scraped through the Tunnel of Love, but by the Devil’s Chimney my courage began to flag. Ahead of me, a young family were hauling themselves through the chimney. The father was egging on his chubby wife: “Are you in, Mouse? Are you in?” With barely half my body wedged into the chimney it felt like an All Black ruck had collapsed on me. I was out of there in a flash, and took the detour.

Just before take-off, the Boeing already powering up on the Doha runway, the pilot informs us in a heavy Arabic accent that there is a technical problem. We’ll have to wait for technicians to investigate. Arjun is rubbing his hands together. There’s not much we can do about it. When I’m sitting on the runway, I often get the feeling that a team of doctors is about to wheel me into the operating theatre. You are powerless, delivered unto others’ mercy and expertise.

I read somewhere that the first ninety seconds of a plane’s ascent are theoretically the most dangerous part of any flight. If something serious goes wrong during this critical period, your family will soon be wiping away the tears in a National Geographic Air Crash Investigation episode.

I have since developed a faintly obsessive habit. As the plane leaves Mother Earth, I diligently count up to ninety in my head and then relax into a false sense of security. “You realise it’s not going to make any difference to your fate whether you count or not,” a friend who likes to think logically has pointed out to me. Obviously she’s right, but I do it anyway.

The technicians apparently on their way, Arjun and I start chatting about our fate in the air.

“Well, I guess if it’s your time, it’s your time, nothing you can do about it,” he says stolidly.

“But what does it mean for us if it is the pilot’s time?” I tease him.

Arjun laughs and shakes his head.

Again, a liminal place, a dormant no-man’s-land. I was hoping to be in the air by now, laptop open, in the death throes of the article. Not here on the runway, where all our electronics have to stay switched off.

The minutes tick by.

* * *

-----Original Message-----

From: Erns Grundling

Sent: 04 May 2015 02:54 PM

To: Pierre Steyn

Subject: Here is Slagtersnek!

Importance: High

Hi Pierre

Attached find Slagtersnek. A bit long, but better now than never.

I’m now between Luxembourg and Paris. Altitude: 39 829 ft. Ground speed: 482 mph. Outside temperature -67 F. Still 525 miles to Paris, where a mad rush for trains awaits me. Tomorrow morning I’m mailing my laptop and cell phone from Bayonne to a journalist in Paris. I’m picking it up from her on the 16th.

Please give a quick heads-up that you’ve received the file. Because then my holiday’s bloody close.

Au revoir!

Erns

The past few hours have been a manic blur. I notched up twenty dollars on my credit card to access the plane’s wi-fi to check the last few facts and contact details for my Slagtersnek story. My laptop battery only just made it.

Not my best piece of writing, but for now the mantra “Don’t get it right, get it written” is more important than producing a tour de force. I suspect, in any case, that the story of a small band of rebels who died under difficult – even unjust – circumstances two centuries ago is too depressing to make Go’s pages. It’s not exactly a comfortable fit with the magazine’s genial tone and its articles’ uplifting escapism.

What an absurd little scene: desperately clicking “Send” somewhere between heaven and earth on the other side of Luxembourg so that a Word doc can announce itself with a bleep seconds later on my editor’s computer in Cape Town, the old Muslim gent mumbling and bowing in prayer beside me, Ice Age 3 paused on his screen, and Arjun, having abandoned the in-flight quiz shows, watching a Bollywood dance scene from Slumdog Millionaire.

Pierre lets me know all’s good, and that I need spend only the first week of the Camino contemplating my deadline-related sins. Finally. I can shut the laptop for six weeks.

The last words I type are an Out-of-Office message:

I’m on holiday in Europe. Digital detox, into the mild. I’ll be back at the office on Monday 22 June. Please email Esma Marnewick for any Weg/Go matters. Adios. Erns

* * *

Entry in Moleskine diary

Maybe it’s like a train riding into rain, Gertjie. I’m somehow thinking of you now in the train between Charles de Gaulle and Saint-Michel–Notre-Dame. It’s almost three years since my father and I were on a similar train not riding into rain but riding into the most autumnal autumn that I can remember and there are so few. Around me people are on their phones or reading books there are umbrellas and accents, I constantly feel I’m hearing Afrikaans but I’m mistaken the robot voice (woman’s voice) of the train has just pronounced Parc des Expositions I just hear “Sex positions” my first impressions of Europeans are probably wrong but I detect a sophisticated indifference, almost as if ubuntu will never fly here – not that ubuntu flies in Africa anyway. At the airport Gert a quick young Frenchman started coming down on me in front of a whole lot of people in an ever-lengthening, stressful queue of Doha-Paris-bound passengers for deliberately brushing up against a woman, according to him, as if I wanted to dry-hump her in a split second like dolphins that have sex in a flash, but his outburst caught me off guard and I couldn’t find the words “I didn’t bump into her on purpose” and went into a whole long explanation of the trains I was chasing instead and said I was just in a rush and not looking where I was going and he just shook his head like the Head Boy of Life and said “Blablablabla” and spoke to the girl and her boyfriend in French and he almost became involved and people started staring and my only comeback was “You should come to Africa” but God knows why I defaulted to that maybe I just wanted to make a point about personal space in Africa or rather the lack of it and that he would have a lot to say in a queue at Home Affairs but there was no time to say everything but at that moment I became hyperaware of a type of pretentiousness and profoundly First World luxury and decorum. Anyway, Gert, God only knows why I’m not reading or doing crosswords rather I’m buggered Gert dead tired from sleep apnoea and fuck-all sleep. It’s dismal in Paris. Hitting pause for a bit.

* * *

I feel a deep ambivalence towards the two Moleskine diaries I packed for the Camino.

I could easily have arranged in advance to write a freelance story or three to help cover expenses. And there’s nothing stopping me from writing a column or a feature article for Go on my Camino experiences when I get back to Cape Town. I could even consider writing a book or a guide. But I just don’t want to. Everything in me is fighting the thought. I’m just completely written out.

In “Famous Blue Raincoat” Leonard Cohen sings: “You’re living for nothing now / I hope you’re keeping some kind of record”. I like the idea of “some kind of record”, even if it’s for me alone. And who knows? Maybe an idea or two finds me halfway along the Camino, in which case I’ll definitely need pen and paper. Maybe I’ll write a bit of poetry again. Or a song, for the first time in ten years. What happens to us when we detach ourselves from all the distractions, especially the cell phone screens that keep us so busy?

* * *

SMS to my father, Monday 4 May, 19:38 p.m.

Guess where I’m standing right now? At Notre Dame! Going to Bayonne just now, then mailing my laptop and cell phone to a journalist in Paris. I’ll fetch them again on 15 June. Got all my work done, holiday starts NOW. Much love.

His reply:

Bon Voyage! Go well on the walk and so happy you are going to enjoy it to the full! Will miss you. Look after yourself! <3 Pa / Ma

Ja, Pa. Full-on or fuck-all.

Paris. The city of love. Hemingway’s “moveable feast”. “Paris is always a good idea,” as Audrey Hepburn said. It was this city whose street life Jan Rabie described as “a history book of the whole world” in his diary. And the place about which André P. Brink wrote: “I was ‘born’ on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris – when I was 23 years old.”

After all the running around and battling with my luggage at Charles de Gaulle, I sit on a bench to catch my breath. There are heavily armed policemen everywhere, vigilant and intimidating and not missing a thing about their surroundings. The Charlie Hebdo attack was just four months ago. For the first time since leaving Cape Town, I feel truly alone. And I realise: I am completely dependent upon myself for the next forty days.

At the Saint-Michel station I totter up the stairs with my heavy rucksack to see the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris (French for “Our Lady of Paris”) looming ahead of me. I’ve always got excited about monuments, iconic buildings, even natural phenomena. I remember the first time I saw Table Mountain as a four-year-old through the car window in 1983. One of my uncles was an NP MP for Uitenhage and my parents and I stayed with him in Acacia Park. More than two decades later I stood in absolute amazement in front of the Taj Mahal in Agra and felt that childlike Table Mountain feeling again.

It felt the same to see Notre Dame, a cathedral I first got to know in a Disney movie about a gypsy, who was attractive even for an animated character, talking gargoyles and a kind-hearted hunchback.

This is my second visit to Paris. In September 2012 my father and I flew in to Charles de Gaulle and had less than four hours before catching a connecting flight to Verona in Italy. Rather than idling away a few empty hours somewhere in a restaurant at the airport, my father wanted to take a quick dash around Paris. The woman at the information counter strongly advised against taking the train into the city – she thought we wouldn’t make it back in time for the connecting flight. We decided to take a train to Saint-Michel anyway. Near Notre Dame we enjoyed a glass of French champagne and some rabbit pâté.

The masses of tourists in front of Notre Dame on that beautiful autumn afternoon three years ago are not here tonight – there is just a cluster here and there, most with their backs to the cathedral taking selfies.

I stroll over the Pont des Arts, one of the city’s famous bridges. Lovers attach so-called love locks to the bridge, often with their names written on them, then throw the key into the Seine. This tradition may only have started in 2008, but there are already hundreds – if not thousands – of locks of all sizes and colours all along the railings of the bridge. It’s a tradition that has caused concern, as bridges have been damaged as a result. It’s feared that the weight of all that love – or rather, the valiant declaration of it – could cause some of them to collapse.

I read some of the names on the locks: Jackie and Benn (17-05-12 Wedding), Eddy and Delia, Michael and Candice, one has only Rubí … Six months ago there was a name on my lips, too, one I would have liked to write on a lock next to my own and fasten it to this bridge.

* * *

I walk for about half an hour to the Gare d’Austerlitz, the station where the overnight train to Bayonne in the southwest of France awaits me.

Laurika Rauch sings about Austerlitz in her song “Hot Gates”, a moving ballad listing historical battlefields and places of conflict. The station in Paris is named after a major battle fought on 2 December 1805 near the little town of Austerlitz in the Austrian Empire – one of Napoleon’s most renowned victories.

The lack of sleep is beginning to catch up with me. At a busy intersection I look right as usual before crossing, and just don’t see the motorbike coming from the left. We miss each other by what feels like centimetres … it happens too quickly for me to grasp how close it was. I freeze, then I realise how it happened: I crossed the street as if I were in South Africa. First look right, then left, then right again, as Daantjie Kat taught me on the record player way back in the early eighties – so I just didn’t see the motorbike bearing down on me.

I suppose I could put it down to the shitstorm I’ve been through. Or to exhaustion. Or both. But even an hour later, having a pizza and a beer, I’m still rattled. I could have been killed, or at least seriously injured. My Camino could have ended in Paris before it had even begun. The difference between a sigh of relief and a hell of a drama was literally a fraction of a second. Why did nothing happen to me? Luck? Grace?

“There is no way to know what makes one thing happen, and not another.”

* * *

At nine o’clock I step onto the overnight train. Bayonne is many hours away. My thinking was that I could just as easily sleep on the train as look up a cheap hotel in Bayonne.

Ahead of me in the queue there’s a girl with a ponytail and a green rucksack with something embroidered on it that looks like a flag or an emblem – a cluster of colourful blocks arranged diagonally. Could she be the first of my fellow walkers? I kind of hope we’re in the same compartment.

The compartment is tiny, three bunks stacked on top of one another on each side. The woman with the rucksack is not in my compartment after all; Tom, a tanned young French surfer who lives near Bayonne, is. He’s on his way home after a few months’ surfing in Australia. While we’re chatting, a middle-aged Frenchwoman and two Belgian girls also come in. The Belgians are on holiday in France; the Frenchwoman doesn’t talk much. None of them is heading for the Camino. The Belgians are astounded to hear that I’m tackling it alone.

The train slowly pulls out of the Gare d’Austerlitz, creaking and groaning. It’s so cramped that all we can do is lie like sardines in our bunks. The small talk stops. I go to brush my teeth. Standing in front of the mirror, I consider using the sleep apnoea plasters. No, I’ll be too self-conscious – the others will just have to endure my snoring.

When I get back to the compartment, the lights are already off. I might as well have used the Provent plasters.

* * *

Train journeys always take me back to Uitenhage, where I grew up. I often say that Uitenhage is the most beautiful song Bruce Springsteen will never write. The Boss would feel at home there, especially near Volkswagen, the area’s blue-collar mecca.

Sometimes, my father would take me to the nearby Willow Dam on Sundays, where we would ride three laps of the circular 300-metre track on a small steam engine, Little Bess.

My first trip on the Trans-Karoo, known these days as the Shosholoza Meyl, was in 2002 during my Honours year in journalism at Stellenbosch. Our annual class excursion that year was to Gauteng and we were able to persuade the lecturers to let us travel by train rather than by bus.

I was 22, full of plans and dreams and things. I remember the plastic bag with the five bottles that Gerjo, Borrie and I unpacked onto the little table in the compartment: Old Brown Sherry, Tassenberg, Smirnoff vodka, Bell’s whisky and VO brandy. Sometime during the night, as the train rolled past Makwassie, a joint also did the rounds.

* * *

Despite having had so little sleep for two days, I keep waking up in my bunk. So much for the soothing sound of wheels on rails – instead, there’s jangling and clattering. Sometimes it even feels like the coaches are being shaken from side to side.

At eight in the morning the train pulls into the station in Bayonne, almost 800 kilometres southwest of Paris. It feels good to get out of the stuffy compartment. I stumble out into the light drizzle and head for the station building. Once again I see the woman with the ponytail and rucksack with its flag.

“Hi, I guess you’re also walking the Camino?” I try to start up a conversation.

“Uh-huh.” (With a heavy American accent.)

“I’m Erns from South Africa.”

“Oh wow, that’s far from here! I’m Claire, from the US.”

“Ah. You’re also taking the train to Saint Jean?” I ask.

“Nah, I’m taking the bus.”

“Oh, okay. I’ve got a train ticket. I guess I’d better go sort it out.”

“Cool. Well … see you in Saint Jean.”

There’s already quite a crowd of walkers here – old and young, some in groups, an elderly couple here and there, and a few solitary souls with only their rucksacks and trekking poles.

According to the ticket I bought in advance on a French website, Capitaine Train, the train leaves for Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in less than two hours. I walk to the ticket office, where the man behind the counter – entirely predictably – seems prepared to help me in any language but English.

I have heard that you should just start speaking Afrikaans if this happens; it makes the French more sympathetic when they think you’re not a Brit or an American. So, I wave my ticket and mumble something in Afrikaans. It works! The man’s whole attitude changes. He explains in fluent English that the railway track to Saint Jean has been damaged in a storm and is currently being repaired, but that I can use my train ticket for the bus that leaves Bayonne at the same time.

But I need to find out something much more urgent from him: Where is the post office? I have to get rid of the laptop and cell phone right about now. Before boarding the bus to Saint Jean. I don’t have much time. It’s raining and I have no idea where to go.

After some vague directions and sympathetic hand gestures from the man in the ticket office, I head off down the street in search of the post office. The city is waking up. I walk past a few small shops and delis where old men sit reading the newspaper and sipping coffee. I could do with a coffee, but that will have to be my reward once the parcel is in the mail.

In the distance, on the other side of a bridge, a huge Gothic cathedral towers over the city. Half running, with my heavy red bag on my back, I spot a pharmacy and dash in to buy a few last-minute things: mosquito repellent, an ointment with a whole selection of insects on the box that looks as if it might protect me from bed bugs – one of the great potential evils of the Camino – and some cold and flu medicines that look like Grand-Pa headache powders. The pharmacist assures me, happily, that the post office is open today and only some hundred metres away.

Fortunately the woman behind the counter at the post office speaks good English. She looks slightly amused as I hastily unpack all my items on her counter: my laptop, the laptop’s cable, my iPhone and charger, three different wall plugs (I had to make sure that my laptop would work in Doha and in France), the Croxley notebook, a thicker notebook, two pens and J.C. van der Walt’s Slagtersnek book.

I find a five-kilogram box. For the last time, I see the glowing white apple with a bite out of it as I switch my phone off. I throw everything into the box. On it, I write the address of a person in Paris I do not know and have never had any contact with. I do not have Marcelle’s email address or contact number, but I can get those at the end of the Camino. I pay seven euros; the box is sealed and thrown into a huge bag.

And suddenly I am free.

* * *

My digital detox has begun, but the feeling of emancipation is short-lived. Before I even get back to Bayonne station I’m experiencing the effects of going cold turkey. My left hand keeps reaching spasmodically for my pocket, like a reflex, for the iPhone that’s no longer there.

The poor phone has been through so much it’s a wonder it’s still working. In October 2014 it fell into a toilet at the tourist bureau in Groot Marico. It had more than five hours of recordings of Go interviews on it that I hadn’t backed up. If I lost them, I’d be screwed.

Luckily I remembered a trick involving rice that would help to rescue a phone with water damage – the rice absorbs the moisture. I charged off to a café; before the cash register had even stopped ringing I’d plunged the phone into a bag of Tastic. The Bangladeshi behind the counter was a bit surprised.

It worked, but I did not take into account the fact that grains of rice could find their way into the phone’s sockets. Three grains of rice had a nice leisurely swell in the charging socket … This had me lying on my back on Egbert and Santa van Bart’s stoep in Groot Marico on an inflatable mattress, wearing a head torch, trying to pick the rice grains out with a needle. Mercifully my efforts were successful, but hell … the lonely places we take ourselves.

For the next forty days, no one who knows me (or doesn’t) will be able to phone or contact me. No one at work, not my parents or friends, not even the salespeople from those Unknown Numbers who phone you to try and sell you vehicle or funeral insurance or a cell phone contract you definitely don’t need. No Facebook. No WhatsApp. No Google.

I thought this would be easier to deal with, but I should have known better. Isn’t our dependence on – addiction to, even – the cell phone astounding? The longest I’ve ever been separated from my phone was five days in June 2014 when I went hiking in the Fish River Canyon.

Back at the station, and a bit unsteady on my feet – must be the lack of sleep – I go to a small café and order a baguette and coffee for four euros. There are many more walkers here now – you need to tread carefully between all the rucksacks and trekking poles and hats. I sit and look at the people. People watching remains my favourite spectator sport. I hear many languages: snatches of French, English, Spanish, German and something that sounds like Korean. A kind of United Nations of pilgrims. What brings all these people here? What brings me here … ? I have my reasons. But I hope to find even more reasons along the Camino itself.

Two large buses – France’s answer to Greyhounds – stop in the parking lot. Time to leave for Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, where my Camino begins tomorrow. It looks like these buses will carry only walkers.

“You must be from South Africa?” somebody asks next to me, while I’m getting ready to load my rucksack into the belly of the bus. I’ve attached a piece of fabric with a few small South African flags to my rucksack.

I immediately recognise the accent. It sounds so familiar that I intuitively want to place it somewhere in the Eastern Cape. And would you believe it, Robert, the second pilgrim I meet, is from Port Elizabeth, where I was born! What are the chances?

Robert, a tall man in his early fifties, is really excited about meeting someone else from the Eastern Cape here in Bayonne. “I actually have no clue why I’m here, but here I am. I read about the Camino and thought why not, it’s time for a new challenge,” he says, laughing, and offers to help a young woman next to him with her big rucksack.

The bus driver is a lanky Frenchman with sunken cheeks who stood around grimly before our departure smoking Gauloises. A caricature. All he needs is a beret and a well-thumbed copy of Albert Camus’s The Outsider. And a baguette under his arm. Local cartoonist Fred Mouton would have captured the likeness nicely.

I sit at the window and watch the scenes that flash by as the bus leaves Bayonne: a few suburban neighbourhoods with billboards, then the landscape turns into pure French countryside. It’s spring in Europe and all the fields look cheerful and green. We travel through valleys, farmlands and forests, and approach the foothills of the Pyrenees; according to my guidebook, the Pied-de-Port in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port means “foot of the pass”.

The bus is packed, but the seat next to me is open. The average age of the people on the bus is probably about 30. Almost everyone is busy on their phones or listening to music with earphones. I keep reaching towards my empty pocket.

Robert sits diagonally opposite me, Claire a few rows ahead of him. Between them is a young woman – probably in her twenties – with an alert sheepdog at her feet. The dog is clearly going to walk with her, and even has its own little rucksack with zips. A purple rucksack.

God, no. I could never lug a dog with me on a pilgrimage – the thought of the admin alone tires me out. Coping with my rucksack and two trekking poles is already enough of a challenge for me.

I can see, though, how a faithful dog could be a wonderful travelling companion. Jock meant a great deal to Percy FitzPatrick. And John Steinbeck’s poodle Charley accompanied him on his road trip throughout the States. Maybe it’s because I’ve never really experienced the dog-as-man’s-best-friend thing.

When I was about five, my first dog, a Jack Russell called Bobby, tore my orange blow-up octopus lilo to shreds. Things were never the same between us again.

My next dog, Guido, was the most asocial spaniel in the Eastern Cape in the eighties. In the garden, he would run around me in ever-diminishing circles and bark at all sorts of non-existent threats. Paranoia on four legs.

“So tell me, Erns,” Robert says, turning to me, “what made you decide to do the Camino?”

The bus feels silent, as if I have an audience. Robert looks like a kindly soul who just wants to chat, but I am hesitant. “I’m hoping to find out along the way, Robert,” I say and smile.

This is true, but it’s only one of the reasons that made me decide to undertake this pilgrimage on my own.

* * *

I’m sitting on a small stone bench at La Porte Notre Dame, the gateway to the old part of the Basque town of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. The old part of town lies along a steep and narrow cobbled street that stretches into the distance, the Rue de la Citadelle. On both sides of the street are white buildings with red-tiled roofs, some dating from the fifteenth century. It feels deeply Middle Ages here.

An information plaque on the wall states that dirt-poor pilgrims have been using this very bench for centuries, waiting for food and shelter.

Right next to me is a little church, the Church of our Lady at the End of the Bridge. In the Middle Ages there was a hospital here, too, that was linked to the church by an archway – in a way the hospital and the church were one and the same. Early tomorrow morning I’ll walk through this archway again, in the general direction of the Pyrenees and Spain.

The Nive River, which has its source in the Pyrenees, flows close by. Some of the locals, and tourists, are strolling along the bank.

The Rue de la Citadelle is already part of the Camino. If I were to turn around and walk 1 000 kilometres north, I’d eventually end up back in Paris – where pilgrims have been starting from for centuries. You can start walking the Camino from many places all across Europe, such as Lisbon, Amsterdam or Geneva. In Spain alone there are six or so different Caminos that all end at Santiago de Compostela.

But Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port is the most popular and practical starting point for modern-day pilgrims who want to walk the full 820 kilometres of the Camino Francés, or “The French Way”, to Santiago de Compostela.

I feel a cold coming on, a scratchiness in my throat. Probably inevitable after all the flights, airports and train rides. All that breath. I’ve been wearing the same clothes for almost three days and last had a decent night’s rest an impossibly long time ago. The French answer to Grand-Pa powders will have to work its magic. I mix the powder with water in my coffee mug and gulp it down. I don’t know how I manage it, but the mug falls off the stone bench and cracks.

The clock tower shows it’s half past one. I usually check the time on my cell phone, but from now on the churches and pilgrims along the route will be my time-keepers.

Our bus arrived in Saint Jean about ninety minutes ago and stopped about two kilometres from here, near the train station in the more modern (or less medieval) part of the town. It was a stiff walk up quite a steep hill to the Rue de la Citadelle. A warm-up for the mountain that lies ahead tomorrow, I reckoned.

I also realised, again, that I was by no means comfortable yet with the heavy rucksack and the two trekking poles that tick-tock-tick-tocked like a metronome on the cobbles. Well, sometime during the next forty days I’ll hopefully find my rhythm.

Generally, you don’t book accommodation in advance on the Camino. You walk every day at your own pace and decide which little town along the way you’re going to find a hostel (or albergue) in. But for my first night, after the long journey from Cape Town to the south of France, I booked a place at an albergue: Beilari, a typical Basque house in the Rue de la Citadelle that sleeps eighteen.

According to the website, Beilari is the Basque word for “pilgrim”, but the literal meaning is “one who awakes”. The hostel only opens at two every afternoon, so when I arrived in Saint Jean I first went to the Pilgrim Office, which happened to be just across the street from Beilari.

* * *

I don’t know how the Brits do it, but I detest queueing. My idea of hell (hang on, I have many ideas about this … ) is to take the escalator into the bowels of the Absa building in Cape Town only to see a queue of twenty souls at the bank’s Enquiries counter. Especially if all I need is some or other form or stamp.

I prefer the chaos of an Indian train station, where you vie in a desperate ruck for a chance to beg a man in a small glass booth for a train ticket.

Maybe it’s an inborn irritability, or a fear of boredom, or an existential realisation of just how ridiculous and futile our attempts at control are … I don’t know, queueing just gets to me. So much so that sometimes, I shamelessly squeeze in – or, let’s be honest, push in – when my frustration gets the upper hand. And feel guilty about it for a long time. A vicious cycle, then.

An example: in December 2007, a group of friends and I arrived at the Noordoewer border post in Namibia for a four-day rafting expedition on the Orange River. It was about eight in the evening, and the snaking queue that met us reminded me of a voting station in the 1994 elections. It would take us at least four hours to get to customs. And we’d only get to the rafting camp long after midnight.

After half an hour I reached breaking point and began to worm my way into the queue fairly close to the front. I also managed to persuade – force, even – my mates to join me. They were, naturally, reluctant. Especially when a group of Americans right behind us began a loud protest.

It may have been the arrogance of my youth, which has hopefully been tempered a bit since then, but I didn’t let the collateral damage bother me. I focused purely on the goal, which was only about two counters away.

But it’s always possible to be too clever by half. I’ve found that selfishness or hubris of any kind catches up with you sooner or later, and not in a good way. Call it karma, or your just deserts, or life calibrating things in inexplicable ways … whatever you like.

It happened that very same night. There are many rafting camps along the Orange River. Over New Year, there are easily up to 2 000 rafters on the water. When you go on a guided rafting trip, you are generally divided into groups of twenty.

Lo and behold, when we arrived at the camp we found we’d been put in exactly the same group as the Americans. Things were really uncomfortable at first, but a day later we could at least make peace on the river over some beers – once I’d paid for my indiscretion.

* * *

Luckily there’s not much of a queue at the Pilgrim Office in Saint Jean: four people, to be precise. The last thing I want to do is cause an international incident so soon after getting to the start of the Camino. The office is a tiny room. Three old guys are dutifully handing out and stamping booklets. There’s a large map of the Day One route on the wall, from here over the Pyrenees to Roncesvalles.

Most walkers receive their Pilgrim Record or Credencial here, the most important document for the Camino. This booklet is your proof that you are a pilgrim. It gives you access to the albergues along the route, and discounts at restaurants – most eateries offer pilgrim menus so that you can enjoy dinner at a bargain price. You also need this passport if you want to get the official “Compostela” at the end of the Camino – the certificate showing that you have completed the pilgrimage.

You qualify for a Compostela if you have completed at least 100 kilometres on foot or on horseback up to Santiago de Compostela, or 200 kilometres on a bicycle. You also need to collect stamps (called “sellos”) that you paste into your Camino passport from the albergues and restaurants you visit. If you start the Camino here in Saint Jean, for example, you need to collect one stamp per day and, if you walk only the last 100 kilometres, you need two stamps per day (for one restaurant and one hostel along the way, for example).

I had already received my Pilgrim Record from the Confraternity of Saint James of South Africa, so I needed only my first stamp in Saint Jean.

There is also a basket full of shells in the office. For a small donation (I put two euros in the little collection tin) you can choose a shell to take with you on your Camino. Most walkers tie the shell onto the back of their rucksacks with a piece of string. I pick a nice scallop shell – it looks a bit like the Shell logo. This shell, like the little yellow arrows indicating the route, is one of the symbols of the Camino.

There are several stories and legends about the symbolism of the shell. The lines on the shell apparently refer to the various routes that all converge at one place: Santiago de Compostela. In the Middle Ages the pilgrims used to tie the shells to their coats, hats or staffs. In fact, on my pilgrim’s passport there is a sketch of a medieval pilgrim with two shells neatly tied to his coat, almost like lapels. It is also believed that in the old days the pilgrims used the shells as a small bowl for scooping water or soup. They obviously did not have the luxury of a range of outdoor products and stainless-steel mugs. And at that time, when the pilgrims reached Santiago de Compostela from wherever they’d started, they’d often walk another 100 kilometres to Finisterre. They’d collect scallop shells from the beach and take them back home as further evidence of the distance they’d travelled.

This is something we modern walkers easily forget: when the pilgrims of old had walked the 2 000 kilometres from Paris, or the 820 kilometres from Saint Jean, to Santiago de Compostela or Finisterre, they would walk all the way back home again. Unlike us, who get on a convenient bus or train or plane.

Legend has it that, at the very same Finisterre, the apostle James rescued a knight from the sea. Rising up from the waves, like a mythical sea creature, James was covered in shells. Before the arrival of Christianity, the shell was a pagan symbol of fertility and birth.

Outside the office, with my passport stamped and my scallop shell tied to my red rucksack, I run into Robert from Port Elizabeth again, who’s standing in the queue. I have a sudden urge to let my father know I’m okay and ready to start the Camino. Robert takes a photo of me and texts it to my father with the words: “In Saint Jean and ready for the Camino! Lots of love, Erns.”

I also see Claire again. She tells me she is heading for the Orisson hostel, about nine kilometres from here, already quite a way into the Pyrenees. I advise her to phone ahead and book a room: I had originally planned to spend the following night there, but it was already fully booked.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking, maybe intuition, but I sense that my path and Claire’s will cross again as she heads off towards the high green mountains on the horizon.

* * *

“Do you have wifey?” a man with a thick German accent and a wildish look in his eyes asks as we stand in the lobby of the Beilari albergue. For a moment I think the man is looking for a wife, or a female companion, maybe.

The host, Josele, answers firmly but with Zen-like calm. “Yes we do have wi-fi, but we don’t switch it on for guests. The whole idea of the Camino is to be more present. If you really need wi-fi, there are coffee shops outside.”

The German introduces himself as Karl-Heinz. He looks a bit unsettled to hear that there’s no wi-fi. It doesn’t bother me in the least; I don’t even have a phone.

I try to remember the last thing I googled. It was most probably something about Slagtersnek. The last video I watched on my phone was a short clip leaked from the Kgosi Mampuru II jail showing Oscar Pistorius playing soccer with fellow inmate Radovan Krejčíř.

Josele is a neat middle-aged Frenchman, quiet and friendly. The pilgrims arrive one by one and introduce themselves. Reiner from Germany. Michelle from Ireland. Moss from the Netherlands. Chris and Ann, an elderly couple from Australia. George from Belgium. Bill from Canada, and Jim, an American who looks a bit like the old NP minister Piet Koornhof.

Karl-Heinz has calmed down a bit about the wi-fi. He mentions he’s booked into the Orisson, so his first day won’t be too bad at all. I feel a bit jealous that I left it too late to make a booking there.

The Beilari albergue is spacious, clean and tidy. Much cleaner than I imagined. I walk up the stairs to leave my bag in my room. There’s an aerial photo of the lighthouse at Finisterre on the wall, with only the word FINISTERRE on it. End of the Earth. It looks a bit like Cape Point, but more beautiful.

When I arrive at Santiago de Compostela, the plan is to walk the additional 100 kilometres to Finisterre. To the point where you can literally walk no further. I like the symbolism, here at the very beginning of the Camino, of this glimpse of the final destination, about 920 kilometres away.

Next to the poster of Finisterre there is a quote by the Buddha (or rather le Buddha – it’s in French: “Ne cherche pas le chemin du bonheur, car le chemin c’est le bonheur.” My French is about as bad as my Spanish, so I write it down and ask Josele to translate it. He smiles: “There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.”

I no longer need to pin my hopes on a Damascus moment or some or other revelation on the road. I’m glad I came across le Buddha’s words before starting the Camino.

* * *

In 1999, my first girlfriend gave me a small Buddha statue as a gift. She apparently came across it in the caravan of some old lady who was a freelance fortune teller. It was a nice round, fat Buddha (is there any other kind?), with long earlobes and the smile of someone experiencing enlightenment with a capital E in his every cell.

But what made this particular Buddha so distinctive was the Afrikaans phrase on the statuette: VIR GEWIGSVERLIES (for weight loss). I was a bit surprised by the Afrikaans: the Buddha was still a bit of a cultural oddity for the volk, especially in earlier years.

The poor Buddha has been no help at all for weight loss. On the contrary, since the late nineties I’ve become something of a weight gainer, and I don’t mean like a Bulgarian Olympic muscleman with bulging veins. (I don’t blame this on the Buddha.)

In that same year, my girlfriend left me after just five months. I didn’t see that one coming. I was only nineteen after all, young and naïve. My over-emotional response was really not necessary: I stormed her bookcase like a tarantula on tik to reclaim my books, ran sobbing to my Volkswagen Chico, and only realised when I got there that I’d left my keys on her bed.

It was also not necessary to sit her down on a seaside bench a week later and read long paragraphs from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning out loud, to the soundtrack of screeching seagulls and the ice-cream cart’s tinkling – my desperate attempt at using the insights of a Holocaust survivor to breathe life back into a feeling that had clearly died within her. Oh well. As Kevin Kline’s character says in the movie Life as a House: “Hindsight. It’s like foresight without a future.”

When all my attempts had failed and I’d felt sorry enough for myself, my buddy Langes and I started experimenting with weed. “Experimenting” may sound a bit sinister, but it wasn’t like that at all. I’d been Mr Exemplary at high school and hadn’t so much as touched a cigarette, a beer can or a girl’s hand. So the first ten times Langes and I smoked weed together, I didn’t even know how to inhale. I puffed, at best, which naturally didn’t get me high in the least. I don’t know whether Bill Clinton was lying, but I can honestly say about my first attempts: “I didn’t inhale.”

I also acquired a small Zen garden, one that fitted easily into a flowerpot on my desk in my student flat in Summerstrand, Port Elizabeth.

A few months later, when I’d got over the worst of the break-up, I was sitting in the office of the festival newspaper Krit at the KKNK, typing a review with one hand, with a brandy and Coke in the other. Next to me actor Lochner de Kock, who had popped in, was speaking in his best Sarel Seemonster voice, much to everyone’s delight.

My cell phone rang. It was my mother, who was phoning to tell me she was at my flat “to clean up a bit”.

I got such a fright I sobered up instantly. My mother cleans well, for which I was deeply grateful as a lazy, spoiled student. But she’s also inclined to scratch around. Forensically. And on top of my bookshelf was an FNB bankie full of weed.

I had hardly registered this when she asked, “Erns, when I dusted your bookshelf I found a little bank bag full of … seeds. Is it dagga?”

The lie just rolled off my tongue: “No man, Ma. They’re seeds for the Zen garden on my desk.”

“Oh, so how’s it going at the KKNK?” she wanted to know next.

* * *

The afternoon at Beilari is quiet. I shower and wash my clothes. That’s my fate for the next forty days – on the Camino you wash your own clothes. By hand, or you cough up a few euros to use a washing machine.

This is something I’m really looking forward to: the simplicity of washing my own clothes by hand, as often as possible. I never do it at home; my hands usually only work on the laptop.

I while away the rest of the afternoon sitting at the table with Josele and some of the other walkers. There’s an esoteric painting on the wall depicting a shell with a person standing in the middle of it. Two lines coil from the person’s left leg and head, to create a kind of labyrinth and also to form the shell’s inner lines.

It looks like something nice to try and draw. I may have no talent for this, but I do have some time on my hands. While everyone around me is chatting about logistics, or wondering about wi-fi and how bad tomorrow’s walk across the Pyrenees will be, I try studiously to copy the painting into my diary. I’m not going to become an artist overnight, but I’m quite satisfied with the result.

* * *

Entry in Moleskine diary

It’s just after five, and I’m sitting alone on the back terrace of a small French deli. I spent €6,50 on a workmanlike baguette with salami and an awesome artisanal beer – Bob’s beer – a light-coloured beer, deeply workmanlike. A child is laughing in the background, there’s French music on the speakers, a sort of Piaf Lite, and you know, life is good, as Liezel van Beek said after the Fish River hike: we live, and that’s enough.

* * *

After my break at the French deli, I still have half an hour to stroll around Saint Jean before I have to be back at Beilari for our communal evening meal in the garden. I step into one of the souvenir shops and buy two pens and a new aluminium coffee mug.

The girl behind the counter speaks English and mentions how popular the Camino has become in recent years, even now in May. Just yesterday, 500 walkers started their Camino from Saint Jean alone.

I walk up along the Rue de la Citadelle to the gate of Saint James, through which walkers starting their Camino at three other points must also pass. At the gate, someone’s graffiti: “Le voyage est la seule chose que tu payes et qui te rend plus riche.” Travel is the only thing you pay for that also makes you richer.

This is deep rural France, pastoral scenes wherever you look. A short distance away a rugby team is training – must be the town team.

It reminds me of the local teams from my youth in the eighties: Old Collegians (OCs or Ousjas), Swifts and Despatch. My father was a teacher in those days and school psychologist at Daniel Pienaar Technical High School in Uitenhage. On weekends he was also a rugby referee, often for club matches.

I attended many of the local derbies at Uitenhage’s Central Field, as it was known then. I’d sit among the spectators and watch my father in action. They’d complain about the ref and make all kinds of comments about him, not knowing his son was right among them.

It was only years later that I realised how privileged I had been to watch players like Danie Gerber and Frans “Domkrag” Erasmus playing club rugby.

Fists would often fly during these matches, especially when Despatch and OCs faced off. Inevitable, with hotheads like Adri Geldenhuys and Armand du Preez in a ruck.

But no one could touch Japan le Roux – at one stage captain of Uitenhage’s first rugby team. Japan, a firebrand of an eighth man with a fine blond fringe, had a unique trick: he would go down with the scrum, but as soon as the men had locked he would drop to the ground, leopard crawl forward and punch the opposition’s hooker in the face. The scrum would obviously collapse, but Japan would have had enough time to leopard crawl out of the scrum backwards. He’d then look up innocently from the back and ask the referee what had happened.

Japan got his comeuppance one evening years later when he knocked a referee unconscious during a match. I wonder where Japan is these days?

* * *

I walk up to the Citadel, a fort built in 1628. There’s an information board here listing facts about the town and the origins of the Citadel. I catch myself jotting down Go-type notes:

•King of Pamplona, García Ximénez, founds the town in 716

•12th century – San Juan del Piede Portus

•King of Navarre – King Sancho VII the Strong

•Pyrenees + Protectors – John Baptist

•4 passes over Pyrenees: e.g. Lepolder (1 440 m)

•Stronghold, frontier town + commercial crossroads

•Wine and cider made here

It’s going to be a challenge not to tackle the Camino as a Go article. I want to write as little as possible, actually.

To test my problem knee, I climb the 269 steps to the viewing site at the top of the Citadel. Here I can see the whole of the little town with its white buildings and terracotta roofs spread out before me, with the mighty and bloody intimidating Pyrenees on the horizon.

There’s a quotation here from Aymeric Picaud, the twelfth-century monk and pilgrim who wrote the Codex Calixtinus on his own Camino pilgrimage. This is regarded as the first guidebook for pilgrims. Picaud writes about the Pyrenees: “It’s eight thousand miles high and as much down.” Look, he’s exaggerating a lot, but I’m definitely going to have a hard time climbing up and then down that mountain on my first day. It’s a full 25 kilometres from here to Roncesvalles in Spain.

I’m going to have to keep calm and walk myself fit – quickly.

I make a line drawing of the Pyrenees in my notebook, really to stop myself from making more Go-type notes. All along the outline of the mountain I write: So the plan is to climb this fucken high mountain tomorrow in one wild go because I am not a German who booked a room, for example, at the very cool hostel Orisson back in January. Now I and other walkers like the friendly Canadian Bill, for example, just have to put our heads down and get over the ± 27 km of bloody mountains down to Roncesvalles and get to the other side hopefully with our knees still in one piece and be okay.

Another walker, a middle-aged woman, also comes to stand at the viewing spot. I really want a photograph of this moment, so I hand out the first of my Go business cards. My plan is to take no photos myself, but every now and again to ask a stranger to take one, hand them a business card, and then keep an eye on my inbox when I’m back in Cape Town.

* * *

During supper in the garden we play a kind of getting-to-know-you game – call it a Basque icebreaker. Not the weird icebreakers I remember from the CSA camps at Jeffreys Bay in the nineties, luckily, when we had to pass apples to one another with our chins. For our game, everyone at the table throws an imaginary ball to someone. If you “catch” the ball, you call out the name of your country and then throw the ball to someone else.

After that, everyone has to say why they are doing the Camino. Joe from the USA is almost 70 years old and is walking his third Camino. “I have to come back every year. It’s the Camino,” he says, his face a picture of peace and calm.

Chris and Ann from Australia do it to spend time in the outdoors and reflect on the past. The large and kindly Canadian Bill says confidently: “I know it sounds strange, but God wants me to be here. He has a plan for me.”

Michelle, an Irish woman, has been caring for her mother, who had cancer. Her mother passed away two months ago; she is walking the Camino to process her death. “I will meet myself,” is all that the wi-fi-less German Karl-Heinz says with great certainty.

My answer: “I hope to find out along the way why I’m doing it. I’m looking for new answers and new questions. And as a journalist I always travel with my camera and mobile phone. I’ve decided to leave it all behind and go for a digital detox.”

Dinner is vegetarian and healthy: cabbage soup, carrot salad, green salad, brown rice and lentils. For dessert we have yoghurt, almost a kind of sorbet. And we drink red wine.

Josele is an inspiring host and calls us a “planetary family”, from all over the world, of people who come together to walk.

He emphasises the importance of silence and a sense of “landing and grounding” that one should experience on the Camino. He points in the direction of the Pyrenees. “Don’t be anxious. The mountain is ready for you. It’s waiting for you.”

Josele tells us about the Basque language – it’s even older than Latin and developed entirely independently of other European languages. And he describes the Basque people’s constant struggle for self-determination – the border between Spain and France cuts the Basque region in two.

He teaches us the word “ultreia”, a word you can take with you every step of the way on the Camino. It means “onwards, forwards”.

Or on with the corpse, I think to myself.

Years ago I heard this little anecdote from a friend’s mother. There was apparently an old man in a little village, let’s call him Elias, who was exceptionally lazy. Uncle Elias was such a lazy good-for-nothing that the congregation decided it would be better to bury him alive. He was so lazy that he regarded this as a relief.

The day of the funeral arrived and, after the church service, the congregation headed for the cemetery. The pall-bearers solemnly bore Uncle Elias, lying very much alive in the coffin, towards the open grave. But one of the ladies from the congregation could not bear the thought of Uncle Elias being buried so prematurely. “Is there not even one little job that Uncle Elias wants to do around here?” she wanted to know. “Could he not chop a bit of wood, or …”

But before she could even finish the sentence Uncle Elias grumbled from the coffin: “On with the corpse! On with the corpse! What’s this wood-chopping nonsense?”

* * *

By eight o’clock we’re all in our rooms, getting ready for bed. Plastic bags and rucksacks rustle. No one talks; a time of quiet has descended. The sun is still bright outside.

I can sense the excitement, the light tension, in the room – the gnawing uncertainty. My plan is to get a good night’s rest. I’m still exhausted after the three days of travelling and the chaos of Slagtersnek and everything I had to sort out in the week before I left.

“Would you mind if we walk up the mountain together?” Bill asks me, tentatively.

I immediately agree. Although I plan to walk mostly alone and can’t see myself dealing with others’ expectations or pressure, Bill seems like a good companion for the first leg. And, if I walk with someone, hopefully I won’t push too hard on the first day.

* * *

No one complains about my snoring, so hopefully I didn’t keep anybody awake last night.

We eat a quick, simple breakfast: croissants, biscuits, cheese and jam. Josele reminds us to visit a tree at the bottom of the garden. From it hangs a huge bag of small plastic balls. In each ball there is a slip of paper on which walkers have written what they wish to achieve on the Camino.

After breakfast I go and sit next to the tree in silence for a few minutes, take out a pen and write on one of the slips of paper: “To learn to love myself, be present, know my worth, walk the earth.”

* * *

One Friday afternoon in November 2014 I was sitting head in hands in Go’s Skukuza conference room at my six-monthly performance appraisal with my editor, Pierre, and assistant editor, Esma.

I had just sketched out my difficult situation stemming from a personal crisis, not very elegantly or coherently. Maybe it was a desperate attempt to justify my inability to meet deadlines.

At that stage I was so messed up I no longer really cared. I had prepared myself for something like an official warning, or for someone in high heels from HR to stride up here to the fourth floor and set some process or other in motion.

I have always been bad with deadlines. My saving grace was that, when I did eventually submit something, it satisfied expectations and often even exceeded them. In fact, a previous editor gave me the nickname “Late but Great”. Not something I’m proud of, necessarily, but at least I didn’t lose my job.

But instead of taking disciplinary action or delivering a tirade (not that he is known for doing this anyway), Pierre said quite calmly: “Erns, I know now is not the time for platitudes, but this too shall pass.”

This too shall pass. It’s a common saying, and yes, sometimes even a platitude, but Pierre’s words nevertheless resonated somewhere deep within me.

On my way back to my desk after this meeting, a quote from Dana Snyman on the wall caught my eye: “By travelling we not only discover this beautiful, awe-inspiring earth; we also discover our own humanity and that of other people. That is why I shall always be a traveller.”

I remembered that as a young child – I was probably seven or eight – I found a book in my father’s study called Light From Many Lamps.

It was one of those books with inspiring anecdotes from all over the world. The only one I remember very well was a story about a ruler in the Far East who had many worries and concerns. One day he presented his wise advisers with a challenge: come up with a universal phrase that will apply to all times and situations, good and bad. And, make the phrase short enough to be engraved on a ring.

The advisers puzzled over this for a long time and eventually came back to the king with the following words: “This, too, shall pass away.”

I googled “This too shall pass” when I was back at my desk. Several photos of people who had these words as tattoos came up. And further down the following:

This too shall pass.

Until then,

Fetch wood,

Carry water,

Walk the Earth.

Fetch wood. Carry water. Walk the Earth. I instantly appreciated the simplicity of this. And as far as “Walk the Earth” was concerned, only one word came to mind: Camino.