Travels with My Donkey: One Man and His Ass on a Pilgrimage to Santiago

by Tim Moore

‘the camino represents the human desire to seek beyond the self, to delve deeper into the soul’.

snuffles. I half-smothered an epic sigh, largely one of fatigued contentment: it was good to be here with all these people, to rediscover the skill of communal coexistence in a trust-nobody age of social exclusion, to be living how man had lived for all but a tiny fraction of his time on earth. Then the lights clicked off, and after a single cataclysmic sneeze about ten beds down, the first steady snores rumbled into life.

Francisco Pizarro, Spanish conqueror of Peru, reported that his Basque sailors were able to communicate with the Incas; an official form of written Basque was only agreed in 1960, and the first Basque dictionary was compiled by an Icelandic farmer. Anyway, I feel oddly keen to stress just what a splendid language it is, and the unique excellence of those who speak