I’m off to Santiago de Compostela in a couple of weeks. I didn’t realise when booking it, but it’s the second most important pilgrimage spot in the whole of Christianity after Rome. Several thousand people every year walk between 1400km and 1500km to get there on one of four well-established routes through France and Spain.
A whole low-income industry has grown up around it, with pilgrims’ hostels taking in weary travellers at little or no cost on the condition that they have either accreditation from their local parish, or enough stamps from hostels in France to show that they really are serious pilgrim walkers.
There are also innumerable manuals and guides on how best to walk the route, how to gain entry to the gites d’etape, what to pack, what goals to set yourself so you complete the route in two months or less… And then, of course, there are the travelogues, including On Foot to the End of the World
The diary-style story follows Rene and Barbara as they walk from Le Puy to Santiago de Compostela, and then ride the bus to Finisterre. Star of Radio 4’s shipping forecasts, its name literally means End of the World, and I’m thinking I ought to make an effort to get there.
Ultimately, though, this book is a minor disappointment. The first half of their journey – through France – seems to take far longer than the Spanish section, and the narrative is introverted, focusing on our two intrepid walkers, their aching hips and their cold, wet sleeping bags, more than the history of the towns and barren land through which they are passing.
There is some light relief as they follow Ursula and Marco, two solo walkers we never meet, but who outline their experiences in each hostel’s guest book, allowing us to follow their walk, eventual meeting, blossoming romance and, ultimately, break-up, in a series of 50-word snatches of fly-on-the-wall reality.
But that’s not enough to justify the words ‘armchair traveller’ that appear on the dust jacket. Rene and Barbara don’t take you with them on their journey – they simply tell you what they do. Perhaps its brevity (less than 200 undersized pages) gives insufficient scope for a truly satisfying exploration of their expedition, and on this occasion the constraints of publishing budgets are to blame for what is ultimately a fairly unsatisfying read.
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