Cycling the Camino and Cycling the Return
Clare and Rory Wilson cycled over 1500km in 2006 on the Camino Frances. Last year in September they returned to Santiago de Compostela to cycle the return journey.
Here is Clare's account:
We started our 2006 Camino from Juillac in France, a tiny village in Limousin just south of Limoges. My sister and her husband are renovating a very small house there. It seemed right to leave from a 'home' as per tradition. Our first stamp in our credential was 85 km further west at Perigueux.We started our 2007 Return Journey (obviously) at Santiago de Compostela and ended at Pamplona. The two journeys were so similar and yet so different. Although our flights were booked back from Pamplona, there was a greater sense of cycling into the Unknown, a sense of listening to our own inner voices more. So much easier to access that inner voice of what is one's 'own pace' when cycling against the tide. The pressure to conform to the masses is so huge. What was remarkable too was the way we could feel the mood of the pilgrims change each night as we backtracked towards their start. Our first night out from Santiago was of course spent with pilgrims who would be completing their journey the next day or so and there were all the mixed feelings that go with that. As we travelled backwards we met those for whom the journey felt endless as they despaired of ever getting there, or others who were in a timelessness that pleased them deeply. The honeymoon was definitely over for some pilgrims we met at Burgos. In Pamplona there were those who were starting off the next day or had done so from Roncevalles a day or two before. A bitter/sweet juxtaposition of our feelings and theirs. Throughout the return journey, as cyclists, we were aware of being treated more like people rather than some lesser life form by the walking pilgrims. (I know that the walking pilgrims feel the same in reverse). It was as if by seeing that we were cycling the other way pilgrims realised we were 'serious' pilgrims after all and not just on some exercise jaunt or whatever catch-all category we had been assigned to. A memory remains of a grey haired man glancing at us as we approached each other along parallel pathways. He then suddenly registered that we were Returning Pilgrims and in the slowest and mostly gentlemanly of gestures he lifted his hat and bowed his head to us.
Two cyclists and four walkers
Rory Wilson (left), Clare (right) with fellow South African pilgrims, Hazel and Richard and Ron and Christine Coates
