Tag: climate change

The Answer is Blowing in the Wind

The Spanish leg of the Camino Frances begins in the province of Navarra. Alto del Perdon, the Mount of Pardon, is the first serious ascent for the pilgrim after crossing into Spain over the Pyrenees. Napoleonic armies are said to have sacked the 13th century basilica at the apex, dedicated to the Virgin of Pardon (Virgen del Perdon), who expunged the sins of repentant souls. Though just 500 meters high and insignificant compared to the mountain pass crossed just days ago, gale force southern winds and squally rains are the norm on this road to atonement.

Just one small wall of the medieval church has been preserved. But that is not the main attraction for the dozens, often hundreds, of hikers, strollers, cyclists, pilgrims and assorted tourists, who brave the elements to reach the peak every day. Over the last quarter of a century, Alto del Perdon has become invested with a new mystique, as the point where ‘the path of the wind crosses the way of the stars’.

We left the famous walled city of Pamplona on an overcast autumn morning. Past the tiny town of Cizur Menor, the path starts to ascend steadily up through grassy meadows. There are dozens on the road already. More tourists will join the final 2 km ascent after parking their cars in Zariquiegui. Here the path is rocky underfoot with no trees to break the unrelenting pressure of the wind.

A couple of miles after Cizur Menor, as the clouds lighten a little, we see a light spark to our left. Inauspicious if that was the first flash of lightening. A kilometre on, an ark of light cuts through the still deep grey. Minutes later another. Then another. And again. Clearer. Bolder. A moving blade of white gold.

As the pilgrims progress slowly up they see more and more and more arcs of light – spreading from the left across the horizon in front. Something metallic is catching the sunlight.

Sudarshan Chakra, says my inner-Indian, the Splendid Wheel, Lord Krishna’s weapon of choice, sent to cut down the sinning universe in the blink of an eye!

Of course not! Wind turbines. Some forty of them in the hills ahead of us. As the sun comes out more brightly, some keen photographers are starting to take pictures of the massive magnificent machines, still several kilometres away.

In the early 1990s the first six wind turbines in the province of Navarra were installed here on the mountain where all is forgiven, and the wind is eternal. Elsewhere in Spain there were 400 already. Now there are 40 windmills here, each 40 meters high, extending North to South along the Alto Perdon mountain range. From here on, right through the ancient St James’ Way, the pilgrims will be accompanied by the vision of windmills on the horizon. Standing on hills, on the plains, the white and silver windmills move to the rhythms of the weather. In the first two months of this 2018, wind farms generated nearly a quarter of Spain’s electricity. Spain is the second largest wind-energy producer in the world and with government support for over two decades, Spanish companies are exporting their know-how around the world including Asia. (See http://aceer.uprm.edu/pdfs/wind_power_spain.pdf)

The tiny town of Zariquiegui, just 2 kms from the oldest of Alto Perdon turbines, has seen significant population growth since the establishment of the wind farm. From the town, the windmills on the surrounding hills look like the little paper fans I remember buying from balloon-wallahs on street corners of 1960s Kolkata. A kilometre further up the hill, you can hear a hum, like the distant sound of women blowing conch shells at an Indian wedding. It gets louder, but never loud enough to prevent the increasingly excited conversation as the walkers converge on the top. Someone starts singing a hymn in Korean, others recognising the melody are joining in, in other tongues – the turbines’ drone a bass note scaffolding the human voices, without overwhelming them.

As we reach the top, the handful of Australians in the crowd, inevitably remember how various brands of environmental vandals, led by the then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot stopped the expansion of wind power in Australia in 2015. Abbot denounced wind turbines as ‘ugly and noisy’. I wonder if we might entice the self-proclaimed devout Catholic Tony Abbott to walk the Camino. Shall I get the Australians on the Camino to write to him: ‘Dear Mr Abbott, Climbing Alto Perdon will absolve you of your environmental crimes or perhaps help you look upon windmills with a new reverence? There is no shortage of dirtier sources of power along the way either. Two hundred kiliometres down the road, the city of Burgos, will hail you from 10 miles away with its industrial wasteland of chimney stacks spewing grey smoke on one side of the track, while to your right you will see bright white wings of the turbines dancing to the breeze…’

But I am soon distracted from my political purpose by the buzz of excitement. A big group of Koreans, determined to be photographed in mid-flight are taking turns to jump off a rock at the foot of the nearest turbine, which is astoundingly tall this close up and impossibly quiet. Some of the crowd are mesmerised by the wide open plains below. Others are taking photos of the most recognisable pieces of public art in Navarra: a silhouette of twelve pilgrims, sculptured in steel. They represent generations of wanderers who have passed along this way. The figure at the centre is riding on a donkey. On its flank is written the words: ‘Donde se cruza el camino del viento con el de las estrellas’; ‘where the path of the wind crosses the way of the stars’

Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the road of Saint James in the field stars. In poetic imagination the Camino is the earthly parallel to the milky-way. The sculpture by Vincent Galbete was opened in 1996, about the same time as the first wind turbines were being installed here on the mountain where mortal sins are forgiven, where medieval symbolism, contemporary art and twenty-first century technology live in perfect harmony and draw hundreds of tourists every week from all over the world.

Ah, Mr Abbott and all the other Mad Monks of Australian environmental politics, wish you were here – to see, to learn and to repent your environmental sins!

We follow the line of the pilgrim sculpture, cross the path of the wind, and drop down from the peak following the path of the stars. Within minutes the blustery wind disappears. A gentle breeze eases the pilgrims down a sharp and rocky descent.

Blogging the Slog

Photo: bitumen roads I loathe

Camino blogs and books are endlessly cheerful and helpful. But friend, cousin and blogger KD (not Lang, check her out at http://daytimedreamz.blogspot.in/ if you want) has asked for a blow by blow of the ‘slog’, ‘the bits you hate’. It turns out that a slog-blog is hard to write. Read on if you want to know why.

Saugues, in Upper Loir Valley, 43 kilometres from Le Puy along the GR 65 on the way to Santiago in Spain. Population – 2000. Cars – too many to count. Temperatures – rising.

A heatwave had swept through France in early August 2018. If you had walked through Saugues any time in the 20th century, the chances of getting temperatures over 30 degrees centigrade would have been nil to negligible (in Australian translation ‘Buckley’s or none’). In 2018, the mercury rose to 30 or more 12 times in August alone. At mid-day on 22 August it got up to to 31. If you don’t believe in climate change and think greenies are making this up, check out accuweather.com and NY Times on http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=4z5Q7LhI+KVBjmEgFdYACNmd6jwd34+mWAxqXJXikvjKUyEQPbfuA7oPETN/gXckaokVgSSO2yA=&campaign_id=61&instance_id=0&segment_id=5238&user_id=eb3d4c3f88598c8c16546fe5a3012e11&regi_id=73312224ries)

From Le Puy the GR 65 passes through the Massif Central, the French highlands. Most days involve climbs and descents. On day three we climbed out of Monistrol through beautiful forests and on to a plateau, which rolled along for about 7 kilometers then descended 150 meters into a parched and dusty track with no shade. By now the mid-day sun is right overhead.

First sign of Saugues, the settlement which for hours had held out the promise of lunch, water, rest, was an ad for a patrol station! Unique. Never have I ever, in hikes across 4 continents seen a patrol station being advertised on a walking trail. Next, a 30 meter high wooden monstrosity, adervertising Saugues’ main attraction, the Museum of the Fantastic Beast of Gévaudan (Musée fantastique de la Bête du Gévaudan), not to be missed if you like being scared to death by four floors of display about giant wolves, which killed a hundred or more people in this area from 1764-70. Even if you give the museum a wide birth, you are accosted by images of these ogres in the main drag of the city and farewelled at the last round-about out of town by a grotesque metal sculpture of the creature standing across the cowering body of a female victim.

Hotted up cars, and their inevitable consequence, wrecks and service stations, complete the horror that is Saugues. No rest here for the wicked or the weary. So with mercury still rising, we leave town at 2, not anticipating that the remaining 11 kilometres to Le Villeret is going to be on flat, unvarying bitumen roads, with no trees. In retrospect I wondered if this torment was discreetly implied in Maggie Ramsay’s self-published My Camino Frances, which rather politely writes off the day as ‘not having much scenery’.

The next key moment in the slog is best described from the point of view of a 30 something French man washing a mechanical plough with a power hose on a concrete yard, 20 meters off the road. He dodges furiously as a small female, the colour of slow-roasted egg plants rushes into his pressure hose with a tall man the colour of sun-dried tomatoes, hot on her heels. The Tomato man is screaming ‘ je suis désolé monsieur! Ma femme tres chaud’ and other things that make even less sense than ‘I am desolate sir, because my wife is very hot.’ The young Frenchman manages to make the barest sense of what is going on, the woman is drenched to the skin and both strange creatures stagger off dripping with ‘Merci beaucoup.’

Half an hour later my clothes are dry and I am starting to feel the familiar heat-stroke symptoms again: rashes all over my back and waves of nausea. This time a trough of water, recently used by passing herds, by the side of a highway provides the necessary wet respite. Hindus believe cow-dung is sacred, so I am sure a bit of cow spittle can’t hurt. Still another hour, one foot then another, one foot then another…Villages appear in the distance like mirage and disappear. The road is always there, one step ahead, ashen, burnt out, cinder.

It’s 4 p.m. Google map shows we have done over 20 km. I know the end is nigh: death or the auberge where we are booked for the night. At Le Falzet, an old building is getting a make-over. A spout with a welcome sign of ‘au potable’ appears for the first time since we left Saugues. It’s been two hours and a life time since I have seen clean water. One final wetting of tee-shirt and we are off to our delightful rest for the night, Auberge Le Deux Pelerins (the Two Pilgrims Place).

Later in the evening, bathed, cooled, and two home made fruit liquors later, I wonder why so little is written about the contemporary pilgrim’s woes. Most of my dozen or so dinner companions have done the same 23 kilometers, in the same 30 degrees heat. Most did not think it was the worst day’s walk. Beautiful, 20 year old Elle (not her real name – but she looks a bit like a super model) likes walking in the heat. It reminds her of summer walks with her father. She finds the last hour of each day a drag – her feet hurt after about 4 hours of walking. But by the time she wakes the next morning, she recalls only the delicious food and the delightful host of the auberge and she walks again.

Cecile (all names are fake of course) is my age. And like me she is a bad sleeper. She hates those morning when she has just fallen asleep at 4 a.m and the alarm goes off at 6. But she sets off nonetheless with the hope of a better night’s sleep to come. ‘It is like childbirth,’ she says. ‘You forget labour pain – a mother’s brain is designed to forget. Otherwise, no one would have a second baby. Same with the Chemin. Every day you have pain. Every night you forget!’ She gets a round of knowing laughter from the women.

Photo: the daily happy ending at dinner

That is the first problem with trying to blog the slog – when you are that exhausted, you can’t write things down. The next morning, you can’t really remember. There are no photos to jog your memory either – if you still have the energy to take photos, you are nowhere near the end of your tether. So I keep trying in every conversation, to find variations on the theme of ‘when the hike is a slog’, ‘the hard bits of the day’, ‘what parts of this do you hate’ and so on

A week later, I talk to Philip, the only Malaysian I have ever seen on any of my many long-distance hikes and also the man with the whitest teeth. At 48, Philip has pretty much ‘climbed every mountain. And forded every stream’. His nightmare is a day of sub-zero temperatures. Weird. I recall walking in across the French border into Spain in February 2014, as snowflakes floated down all over our rain gear – delight. Nightmares, it seems, are highly individual.

Books and blogs provide distances, temperatures, elevations. Many calculate scales of difficulty on the basis of objective criteria. But the slog-scale is too personal to be standardised or even usefully shared. My system overloads very quickly with heat and bitumen. Those with bad knees suffer whenever a path descends. Philip the smiling Malaysian hates the cold. For Cecile the slog scale operates inversely with the amount of sleep the night before.

To misquote the most famous of opening lines: ‘Happy pilgrims are all alike; every overwrought pilgrim is unhappy in her very own way.’ (Tolstoy, well, not exactly.)