My idea of paradise is a sandy beach, a suitcase full of novels and easy access to cheap, delicious, local red wine. My second most over-used four letter word is 'taxi'. So to say that I was dreading a proposed 180-kilometre walking holiday along the legendary pilgrims' way in northern Spain would be an understatement.
My mother was convinced I'd be injured. Two Spanish colleagues literally fell about laughing whenever I mentioned it. Friends were appalled. 'At least the weather will be nice.' 'No, we're going to Galicia - they get two metres of rain a year. It's wetter than Ireland.' 'At least your driver will take your luggage each day.' 'No, we're going independently - we'll be carrying everything, including water.' Long pause. 'You haven't gone all religious on us, have you?' 'No, I just thought it would make a change.' Longer pause. 'So, doing anything nice at the weekend?' 'Walking 20 miles to get fit.'
In reality, training mostly consisted of standing in fields shouting at one another because, hopelessly lost, we'd missed our pub lunch. What with my asthma and Lisa's jittery sciatic nerve we constantly discussed forgetting the whole exercise: 'Let's pretend we did it and go to Barbados instead!' When we weren't training we were shopping for kit. Unfortunately, the look was more Tenko than Trinny and Susannah: 55-litre rucksack, walking boots, combat trousers, T-shirts, two sports bras, one top-of-the-range lightweight waterproof jacket, two walking sticks, sun hat and the most expensive socks I have ever bought. When I tried everything on when I got home I realised I'd spent £480 to look like Kate Adie.
On the night before departure it was less a case of what to pack as what not to pack. Out went the designer raw silk skirt which never fails to cheer me up. Ditto my posh shampoo. In the manner of Desert Island Discs I was allowed one book and one luxury item. I needed something substantial to read which would last the whole trip. I plumped for Middlemarch until I weighed it and discovered it was 58g. I settled on George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia safe in the knowledge that: a) it only weighs 30g, b) it's set in Spain and c) he gets shot through the neck so at least he'd be having a worse time than me. My one indulgence was a Clarins red lipstick: it co-ordinated with the scarlet piping on my walking boots and meant that my inner Carrie Bradshaw wasn't quite dead yet.
You might imagine that with all this fuss we were pioneers, the very first people to walk the Camino de Santiago de Compostela which, in its entirety, runs over 750km from the south of France through to the western tip of Spain. In fact, it is the world's earliest venture into mass tourism. Ever since the body of St James was said to have pitched up in a stone boat and been buried on the site of the cathedral in Santiago, millions of pilgrims have walked the ancient route. Most have done it for religious reasons, some as a penance, some to bring their village luck. I confess my reasons were wholly secular - I was going in the hope that I'd lose weight and find some muscles in my legs.
Our plan was to fly to Santiago, take a bus to the town of Sarria and then re-trace our journey over a week, stopping for the night at small towns along the way. The devout walkers usually stay in refugios - religious hostels with communal bedrooms - but these sounded a bit Cliff Richard so we booked into B&Bs instead. Once back in Santiago where most people stop we'd carry on for another three days to Finisterre, a tiny fishing village, once thought to be the furthest point you could go without falling off the end of the world but also notable for the fact that it used to be mentioned in the shipping forecasts on Radio 4. It's also a more peaceful stretch of the walk - more than 250,000 pilgrims are expected on the main route in 2004.
In Finisterre you can mark the end of the trek by picking up a scallop shell on the beach, the traditional souvenir for pilgrims on the Camino. We'd be walking a maximum of 25km a day (carrying rucksacks and two litres of water each).
Day one was rather good fun. I didn't actually start crying until the morning of day two, setting out from our first overnight stop in Portamarin. It might have been the rain (it poured for most of day one. Great fat rods of water which hadn't cleared by the second morning). It might have been dinner the night before (tasteless soup, indefinable fish, flan from a packet). It might have been breakfast (we couldn't find any). It might have been the realisation that I was already weary from the first day and I was going to have to do it all over again. In the same pair of trousers . Call this a holiday? Anyway, I blubbed. Luckily I was wearing my top-of-the-range waterproof jacket.
Then suddenly, without warning, the sun came out. The yellow broom glowed, the wet oak leaves glistened. The soft, watery light was the kind Van Morrison likes to sing about. Once I'd stopped crying and actually got going the endorphins kicked in and I stopped obsessing about how far we had to go or what the weather was like (this part of Spain has a lot of weather. One moment it's 20C sunshine, the next dark clouds gather. The week before it had snowed.) The landscape is utterly unlike the rest of Spain but strikingly similar to Ireland. I began to appreciate the narrow paths between the dry stone walls, the rows of cabbage trees growing in remote gardens, lone farmers, dressed like Compo. I started to enjoy the thump thump of my boots and the clack clack of my walking sticks on paths which so many people had walked before me. (A note here on walking sticks: in the unlikely event of being called up by Vogue magazine for my favourite summer accessory I'd nominate my Brasher compact sticks. They help propel you along, pulling you up hills like cross country ski sticks. Also very useful for pointing at things and thwacking nettles.)
We'd worried that the trek would be more like a sponsored walk with queues of pilgrims shuffling along in long, penitent rows. In fact, there were far fewer people than we had imagined and after the breakfast rush hour you naturally start to spread out (although it does get busier later in the summer when the devout try to get to Santiago for 25 July, one of the holiest days in the year).
We encountered very few British pilgrims. There was a Scotsman called Frank who walked the whole way in a kilt (I worried his inner thighs were chafing dreadfully) and a counsellor from Cambridge whose clients were depressed priests. But mostly there were lots of Spanish and French, Americans and Germans. There were old men walking in pairs, fathers and their truculent adolescent sons, gaggles of Spanish girls who would giggle at our Spanish. Each time we passed someone they'd grin and nod and say 'Bien Camino' or 'Hola'. Half an hour later they would inevitably overtake and you'd do the grinning, nodding ritual all over again.
The days took on a similar timetable. We'd set off at 10 (despite best intentions, we found it impossible to get up any earlier) after eating as much breakfast as possible; walk for several hours, stopping for a break along the way. On shorter stints we'd get to our destination in time for a late lunch, other times we'd swing by a restaurant or cafe en route where despite the Spanish dictionary (weighing 20g) we'd end up eating the same food as the day before (most Galicians speak as much English as we spoke Spanish, ie none).
I found the first hour and the last hour of each day the hardest. Most of the time, reaching a main town meant the slog of road walking. Then when we finally arrived we'd discover it was exactly the same as the town we'd left that morning. All towns in Galicia seem to be closed and most comprise only a handful of bars, several furniture shops selling improbably huge wardrobes, two shoe shops (we came back with precisely eight new pairs) and one knitting shop. Plus the local Catholic church. On arrival we'd nip to the church to have our credencials stamped - these are booklets to prove we'd done the walk - by stern women who always seemed to be shouting, but perhaps that is just the Galician way. Then we'd congratulate ourselves with several beers, fall asleep, wake up at 8 in time for wine, tapas and telly (all Spanish bars have very loud TV sets showing either bull fighting or fabulously camp soap operas, imagine Footballers' Wives on Seroxat) and fall into bed.
Worries that we were hopelessly slow and unfit and the only people desperate for a drink disappeared. Some people walked painfully slowly, others puffed on roll-ups and uncorked their bottles of red at midday. On the other hand, neither were we the fastest or the fittest. Roar, a 50-something Danish man was doing 40km a day minimum. He strode past us like a Great Dane out for a run. Ideas of winning or losing, being fast or slow, seeped away. Keeping going was good enough. Any bitching about our fellow pilgrims was reserved for the cyclists who are universally loathed mostly because they whizz past without warning - and the art critic Brian Sewell, who once did the whole route in a Mercedes.
I'd hoped I might have some blinding epiphany, or a sudden notion of what the universe is all about. Instead I realised the running commentary in my head went something like this: 'Right stick, left stick, right stick, left stick; will I have red wine when I get there? Or white wine? Red wine, white wine, red wine, white wine; oh, look a lovely black thingamajig bird, must look that up, must look that up; right stick, left stick.'
What was more meaningful was the fact that I stopped worrying what I looked like or how everyone at work was getting on for possibly the first time in my life. I subsequently discover that it's a proven medical fact that prolonged walking quietens down the left side of the brain - the admin department - freeing you up to relax and think.
Finding the way is blissfully stress-free. The path is marked by yellow arrows, on the ground, painted onto tree trunks or lamp posts. As if by magic, the moment that we had a niggling doubt that we'd lost our way and were heading towards Alicante, we'd spot a welcome arrow in the distance. Most of the time we were just surrounded by lilting, mellow countryside. There were forests of oaks and eucalyptus, wild foxgloves in the hedgerows. Mauve gorse clashed with lime green grass and eye-shadow blue skies and put me fondly in mind of a Pucci handbag.
We took to spotting horrerios - ancient, Celtic hut-like structures used for storing corn. Other times the 21st century would interrupt: a busy main road to cross; a lorry driver who doffed his cap as a note of respect while we battled along the kerbside in the middle of a hail storm; a pilgrim marching along shouting into his mobile phone: 'I'M ON THE CAMINO!' The most welcome sign of modern life was the enterprising farmer who had plugged in a hot drinks machine by way of an extension lead across his muddy, remote farmyard. Unlike the vending machines on London Underground, it worked.
By the time we reached Santiago I felt partly ecstatic (not least because I was convinced I'd dropped two dress sizes: this subsequently turned out to be fanciful) and exhausted (the last stretch is uphill along unforgiving Tarmac and then you drop down into town, negotiating road works and the first fumes you've encountered for a week). Until we saw the beautiful old town with its towering, mossy cathedral, the official end of the journey is a strange anticlimax. I expected people to be showering us with ticker tape but the locals are inured to the silent stream of walkers and barely gave us a second glance. Presumably if you are a religious pilgrim there is a moment of pure joy when you go into the cathedral and kiss the Virgin's feet. If you're not religious you find a bar instead.
Whereas most pilgrims hang up their walking boots in Santiago, a day later we headed towards Finisterre on the west coast. By this point we were so gung ho about our new-found fitness we left all but the bare essentials behind and strode out like Janet Street-Porter. If anything, the countryside was even more beautiful than before. We ran up the hills and marvelled at the fact that we weren't out of breath. We calculated that the holiday had amounted to eight hours in the gym. Every day. I'd found my own vocation - I'd write to Tony Blair and urge him to beat obesity by getting children to walk to school every day. Walking, I ranted, was the answer to all life's problems.
Then, without warning, blisters struck. At least eight of the little bastards, on both feet. Every step was like walking on shards of glass - not helped by the fact that we'd over confidently left the plasters back in Santiago. I limped into Finisterre, a fishing village slowly recovering from the devastating oil spill off the Galician coast two years ago. Hobbling through streets which had the abandoned air of a railway station at the end of the line, I staggered onto the sandy beach (paradise at last) and fell upon my trophy scallop shell. I'd had the time of my life but I was looking forward to taking the bus back.
Factfile
The Spanish section of the Camino de Santiago starts in the Pyrenees and finishes in Santiago, a distance of approximately 700km. To be awarded the Compostellana, the official pilgrims' certificate, you need only to have walked the last 100km. To walk the entire route you should allow between four and five weeks (averaging 25km a day).
Before setting off you should aquire a Pilgrim's Passport or credencial which is then stamped and dated at each stop on the route. The credencial also gives access to the many refugios along the route. You can obtain this from the Confraternity of Saint James (020 7403 4500; www.csj.org.uk). Their website has useful information on the pilgrimage and its history. Allow plenty of time when applying for a credencial .
Iberia Airways (0845 850 9000; www.iberia.com) flies daily from London Heathrow to Santiago de Compostela, from £207 return.
Buses run from Santiago to Sarria, a well established starting point around 100km away, several times a day.
Several tour operators can arrange organised walking tours along the route. Walks Worldwide (01524 242000; www.walksworldwide.com) offers an eight-day itinerary from £595 per person with baggage transfers, accommodation and most meals included. Flights not included. The journey starts in Léon, northern Spain, with a visit to the cathedral before taking a train to Sarria to start the walk to Santiago.
Also try Martin Randall Travel (020 8742 3355; www.martinrandall.com); Waymark Holidays (01753 516477, www.waymarkholidays.com); Sherpa Expeditions (020 8577 2717; www.sherpaexpeditions.com).
· For further reading: The Road to Santiago by Michael Jacobs. £12.95 (Pallas Athene). To order a copy for £10.95 call the Observer Books Service on 0870 836 0885.
If you liked the sound of that...try these epic walks
The Lycian Way, Turkey
Turkey's only marked long-distance walking route, the Lycian Way runs from Fethiye to Antalya through the ancient province of Lycia. The route offered by Walks Worldwide (01524 242000; www.walksworldwide.com) takes in some of southern Turkey's most stunning coastal and mountain scenery rich with Homeric legend. Eight days including flights, half-board accommodation, transfers and a guide costs from £695 per person.
GR20, Corsica
The footpath runs almost the entire length of Corsica, cutting through pine forests that cover many of the mountains, across deep gorges and over hillsides. Great Walks (01935 810820; www.greatwalks.net) offers a bespoke 15-day 170km walk from £1,045 per person excluding flights (a minimum group size of four is needed).
Stevenson Trail, France
In 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson published a short account of a journey he made through the Cévennes with a donkey called Modestine. Travels With A Donkey is the starting point for this tour offered by Belle France (0870 405 4056; www.bellefrance.co.uk) from £979 per person for 13 nights half-board including rail transport from London. The 135-mile walk starts at Le Puy at the southern end of the Massif Central on the Loire and ends at St Jean du Gard. The walk crosses an ever-changing landscape of rolling hills, lakes and tarns, gorges and boulder-strewn plains.
Lyke Wake Walk, England
The walk follows an old coffin-bearing route across the North York Moors from Osmotherley to Ravenscar on the North Sea coast. The walk is 42 miles across beautiful, but desolate heather moorland. And the aim is to complete it in under 24 hours (the average is about 13 hours, with runners doing it in five). Everyone who completes the walk is entitled to wear the small, coffin-shaped Lyke Wake Walk Club badge. For more information visit the club's website, www.lykewakewalk.co.uk.
