Europe @ 2.4 km/h (45 page)

After emerging from the chapel I sit peering up at the spectacular mass of stained-glass work — 1800 square metres in all — when the cathedral calm is shattered by a squalling child of five or so years who is capering and yowling, totally uncontrolled by his mother. When I venture to hush him, she finds her voice. ‘Tranquilo! Tranquilo!’ she spits. My chastisement is cut short as her mobile phone goes off, in plain disregard of the signs in five languages enjoining silence in the House of God.

1346-1351 km

The bus journey from León, 400 km from the Castilian plateau down to the Atlantic coast, ushers you into the land of the Gallego (pronounced hal-a-hoe). The whom? While everyone has heard of the Basques and Catalans, even if their famous individuals are unknown abroad, the Gallego are a forgotten collectivity. These inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula’s ‘top left-hand corner’ — long thought to be of Celtic origin (anthropologists now doubt they were) — may be better known as Galicians. Oh, and one of their descendants has achieved some individual renown: Fidel Castro, the collectivist
commandante
.

La Coruña is a triple-fronted city. One frontage overlooks the sea to the north-east, a second faces due north, the third due west. The city occupies a peninsula shaped like a hammerhead shark patrolling the wild Atlantic. It has two names, just like San Sebastián/Donostia — La Coruña to the Spanish, A Coruña to the Gallego — and locals will interpret what you choose to call it as your position on the vexed issues of national unity and ethnic autonomy. (Or you could just act the part of an ignorant foreigner. It always works a treat for me.)

Tonight completes 200 days of travel. In 500 hours of straining sinews I have now pushed myself 1350.7 km/h — 575 km in the first 100 days, powering up to 775 km in the second. (This means I’ve added 2 km to my average daily distance of late.) When you combine the distance pushed with the distance travelled by public transport, I’ve covered 21, 946 km since setting out last May, almost 110 km per day. At the 100-day mark I was almost €2 a day over budget; now I’m 62 eurocents (or A$1.03) under it. Avoiding all those French restaurants and similar acts of self-restraint have manifestly paid off. I try not to wreck all this progress with one blowout. But I must say the skewered delicacies at one of (L)A Coruña’s tapas bars tonight are particularly appetising.

1353-1359 km

This afternoon I make for the outskirts of town, to the Tower of Hercules, the oldest working lighthouse in the world. These days the Roman tower from the second century AD is automated. I am pushing my way up the long approach path, leaning into the wind, when the unmistakable strains of
Waltzing Matilda
waft my way. Did I take a wrong turn somewhere? Halfway up, a man in his late 20s is puffing that great Gallego invention, the bagpipes, for all he’s worth. On drawing within earshot I ask, ‘How did you know I’m Australian?’ My surprise is reciprocated by Franck, or Francisco (like the town and the people, he goes by two names). ‘I didn’t,’ he replies. ‘I just like the tune.’

One thing I should know about the Gallego (or Galicians), Franck tells me. Like the Japanese and Icelanders, they are renowned for longevity. ‘Ten people in my street are 100 years old,’ he says, almost boastfully, ‘and the oldest is a woman of 109.’ But quantity goes with quality. ‘The old folk don’t go into nursing homes. They are out doing manual labour, cultivating potatoes and tomatoes.’ Or indoors writing, I later reflect, on seeing the bust of a Gallego writer in a public park, inscribed Murguia (1833-1933).

Franck offers a tantalising hint on his ancestors’ possible migration routes when he tells me the Gallego word for ‘bagpipe’ is
gdita
, the Bulgar name
guida
and the Turkish
gaida
. Having said which, he swaps his
gdita
for a Gallego piccolo (a lively musical phrase in itself) and in doing so inspires the thought, If pan-Europeanism is a pipe dream, maybe true Europeans dream of pan pipes.

My hostel in A Coruña charges another record low, an unbelievable €7, which will not be bettered by journey’s end. Guests are supposed to pay €10.30 (A$17) a night if they’re over 30 but the receptionists accept my word that I’m 29. My word that I’m 29 is ‘twenty-nine’: others’ word for it is ‘self-deception’. I’m comfortable with being 29 — not surprising when you consider that I’ve had 24 years to get used to it.

It was nearly dark when I reached Santiago de Compostela, the terminus on Europe’s most heavily tramped pilgrimage route, and after dark when I made it to my appointed hostel, Monte de Gozo, which, as its name suggests, is on a mountaintop. But, heresy of heresies, I was to miss out on visiting the burial site of St James that others came thousands of kilometres to see, because the only bus to Portugal would leave at 10 am and just now I hadn’t a day to lose. The bus driver dropped me at the foot of Monte de Gozo. After straining myself to the maximum until the road became too steep, I waited for some minutes — 300 metres shy of my goal — until I flagged down a driver who gave me a lift the rest of the way.

Monte de Gozo offers three varieties of accommodation: hotel rooms, comfortable hostel rooms and basic rooms for religious pilgrims who have schlepped across Europe to get here. Perhaps it was because I looked rough around the edges; more likely it was the sack of wet laundry I’d been carrying since France, where the dryer at the Biarritz hostel had stopped in mid-cycle. The first I knew of my presumed identity was when the receptionist — staring at me and then at my humble sack — asked in puzzled tones, ‘Aren’t you a pilgrim?’

1362-1368 km

Moses came down from the mountain with ten fresh, crisp commandments. This non-pilgrim descended Monte de Gozo carrying the same old wet laundry on his lap … Right, there’s no comparison.

Braga, in Portugal’s northern Minho region, is steeped in Roman and medieval history. But what will always fix this hill town in my memory is the extraordinary friendliness shown to me by a local family. I was still lugging my wet laundry load — this time across the town’s main square — when an amiable but sensible-looking woman, Maria Teresa Almeida, approached and asked whether she could help. Normally I say no, but I did need clear directions to the
pousada da juventude
, the youth hostel. Maria Teresa accompanied me there but didn’t leave it at that. Waiting only for her husband, Eduardo, and 13-year-old son Henrique, she offered to drive me to Bom Jesus do Monte, site of a popular hillside temple and pleasure gardens 5 km out of town. It was already on my list of things to see but arranging transport there and back would have been tedious, so her unexpected kindness was gratefully received. The steps into Bom Jesus chapel (to say nothing of the grand staircase cascading below it) rendered it as inaccessible as the 19th-century funicular to the gardens, but Maria kindly bought me a booklet as a memento.

Before reaching Southern Europe I knew there were differences between the Portuguese and Spaniards but could not have told you what they were. Now I’m here, the Portuguese tell me that they regard themselves as Spain’s ‘poor relations’. This perception is supported by hard economic facts. Portugal’s relative poverty is a boon for tourists: this is a destination where your euro goes further. Tonight’s soup course costs €1. Across the border it would be three or four times that; in Paris, seven or eight.

1370-1375 km

This morning a poor man in an orange T-shirt selling Braga’s
Metro
newspaper in the rain overrides my initial response of ‘
Não, obrigado
’ with a winning sales pitch. ‘You should take it anyway,’ he tells me. ‘It comes with a dictionary. Portuguese is the hardest language but it’s a lot of fun to learn.’

Many towns in Old Europe boast a coffee palace so venerable it has become an institution, and not to visit it would disqualify you from any entitlement to claim you had seen the town that boasted it. In Braga that institution is A Brazileira, well described as a ‘mildly decadent corner bar attracting effortlessly stylish regulars’.
⁴¹
Notching up a century this year, its octagonal gilt-edged mirrors with the stylised motif of an old lady sipping coffee (you can see her real-life descendants reflected in them) create an atmosphere, yes, of mild decadence. Well, it is only ten in the morning …