The Road to St Jean Pied De Port.
Siesta, Fiesta and Sundays: Part 1.
I found a library in St Jean Pied De Port.
I had promised myself last year during BlogJune that I would actually try to visit the libraries I found along the way. I managed to get to a few of them but not all of them. But I wouldn't have bothered if I hadn't found a library in St Jean Pied De Port, that was where I decided to actually try to get this project done. My original idea was to try and write an article for something like Incite maybe about the experiences of using a library in a foreign country where language was a huge barrier and trying to find out pretty much anything was nearly impossible. I might still try to write it one day but for now I'll just settle for this rambling travelogue instead.
I was meant to go to Spain and walk across the country in 2012 not 2013, but my dad got into a seriously messy cycling accident in 2012 and as a result we had to postpone everything back a year. This ended up costing us some money because some flights and other things weren't refundable(I say this with all the sincerity of an angry traveller, I seriously hate Vueling Airlines and will continue to hate them for a long time to come, next time I travel I'd rather walk than fly with them). But the year of delay gave us plenty of time to procrastinate about training and also to little to no research on the trip ahead of us. I don't like to research a place I'm going to if I can help it. I don't know why but I do like to find things out on the ground instead of reading about it online somewhere and then arriving and going "Ohhh, thats that thing I read about two weeks ago." As a result I had little to no idea about the trip I was undertaking other than the fact that it was 790kms long and that it could occasionally get very wet in Spain(it is said that the rain over there falls mainly on the plains, this is a lie, the rain falls mainly on the mountains). I'd actually attended a talk about walking the Camino at the Kenmore Library's last Friday Social Club which was fascinating and gave some decent advice on how to actually survive the walk as well as some mistakes people make. This talk led indirectly to the Kokoda Presentation I did later that year so I came out of that pretty well off I felt.
The basic plan to get ourselves to St Jean was for us to fly to Cairns, then Hong Kong then to Paris and take a train from the airport to the main train station heading south(Gare Montparnasse) and then take a train to Bayonne and then a train to St Jean Pied De Port, a small town that marks the start of the walk for many people. We'd planned on having some space between the flight and the train so we'd be okay if there were any delays.
Then there was a train strike.
I had originally intended to go completely off the grid during my holiday, get myself in the medieval groove as it were. This didn't come to pass, mostly because I decided on a whim to check my email while on a 12 hour stop over in the Hong Kong Airport. The email was in French and was from the train company so I ran it through Google Translate and found out that there was a strike planned for the next day and our train no longer existed. This was slightly alarming for a variety of reasons. The chief one was that my dad had planned his flight home on the assumption that we'd start on a specific day and finish on a specific day(we were taking separate flights back to Australia so I had a lot of wiggle room if I really needed it), a delay of basically two days would throw that entirely out the window. So we started hogging every free computer in the airport trying to find an alternative route to the start or to anywhere near the start of the walk. We discussed renting a car(too expensive and no-where to drop it off near our destination), getting a bus(there aren't many buses in France because the trains are so much better), flying to Pamplona(not the official start of the walk but close enough to start from and it would have given us a lot of breathing room for rest days and the like, only problem was tickets were stupidly expensive). We settled on renting a car if we couldn't find another way through. But I insisted that we at least try to get to the train station because the trains were going until 11am or something and our flight landed at 9am.
There is a TV show you might have seen called Louie, it stars Louie CK and shows his surreal life around New York City with his family and friends. In a recent episode his daughter stepped off a train and walked away while he wasn't watching and he and his other daughter had to go to the next stop and catch a train back to their original point. When the train was about to stop so they could switch he looked at his daughter and said "When these doors open we are running, do you understand, we are running." That is what happened once we landed in Paris. After a mostly horrid flight(the people in the seat behind me decided to leave their blinds open which made it impossible to sleep) I got off the plane, orientated myself and then we passed through Customs and set off to get a ticket as fast as possible to Gare Montparnasse, this took a bit longer than it should have because I'd forgotten how to use the ticketing system and the strike meant that all the staff were solidly backed up with a huge line of people with questions(note: This is probably the only day I didn't take more than twenty photos on the entire trip because I was in such a panic, the rest of the trip is full of pictures of stuff rest assured). Eventually I remembered that you didn't need to line up for RAR train tickets and we got on a train, then transferred at Gare Nord(I think, it is a blur now) and then caught the first train to Gare Montparnasse. From there we ran as briskly as we could to the long distance train station where I ran into an information centre and asked about the next train to Bayonne.
The person behind the counter looked at me and said it left in four minutes, it was the last one until the next evening and that my ticket from the striked out train was valid on it if I needed it. I ran outside and then promptly ran back inside to find out what platform it was on. By the time I found out there was two minutes before departure. But the platform was right next to us, so we hurried to get aboard only to discover that the train we thought was ours was actually behind the train which was ours, so we sprinted down the length of a train in some insane time considering the luggage weight we were carrying as well as the sleep deprivation and general feeling of misery you get after two days on planes. And we made it to the worlds most overcrowded train outside of India. My god people were on top of people but no-one was getting off the train because there was no way in hell they were getting stuck somewhere that wasn't their destination.
Me on the train, looking as happy as I could because I had something close to a seat, this would not last.
It was kind of amazing to watch as people were migrating up and down the train hoping to find an empty seat somewhere somehow(someone had the bright idea of setting up shop in the toilets because... a chair is a chair, this led to problems as people occasionally liked to use toilets) . The people actually booked on that service had the best chance of keeping their seats. I really wish I'd taken some more photos because it was seriously amazing how many bags, people and just general junk was crammed into that train. After a few hours of this travel and trying not to pass out standing up we found ourselves in Bayonne, which I'm sure is lovely but the train to St Jean wasn't there because of the strike(apparently this train trip is really lovely, I saw bits of it in the movie The Way after I returned to Paris and some people told me it was nice later on the walk. We ended up catching a taxi the rest of the way with these two ladies from I think it was Norway or Sweden(my journal entry from that day doesn't even mention them which is sad) and split the 90E bill four ways between us. They'd done the walk before and were doing different bits of it at a time, every year or so until they'd finished it.
Once we got into town I don't think we ever saw them again. My dad wanted to go to the pilgrimage office and I wanted to go to the information centre to get a bed for the night, because my philosophy in travel is secure a bed before you do anything else. ALWAYS. I'd rather starve than not have a place to sleep(I did starve once in Israel but I had a bed to sleep in, but that is a whole long story), my experience in travelling gave me some level of authority in these matters(this was how we'd caught the train, I'd insisted that we at least try instead of renting a car from the airport and pointed out that I'd travelled a lot more and knew what I was doing).
The office of the Pilgrimage, the start of the Camino, they had a pet cat wandering around at random, it was a lovely place.
After we got literally the last two hotel beds in the town(there were refuges for pilgrims which were more like very cheap hostels but I wanted a shower and toilet to myself for my last night of luxury), dropped our bags off and changed clothes we went over to the office of the Pilgrimage and signed up. We got a piece of paper with the towns and mountains we'd be walking over on it, a list of all the hostels and hotels along the way and a Pilgrims passport to get stamped every night wherever we were staying so that at the end of the walk we could get our completion certificate. Then I went exploring around the town.
Inside Bibliothèque intercommunale de Saint-Jean-Pied-De-Port.
I found the library on the way back to my hotel. It was a small room in the back of a building with a nice friendly sign out the front(in French). The ladies working there were shocked to see a tourist walking into their library at first but I explained, as best I could, that I was a librarian in Australia and I was looking to explore the libraries of the Camino and that theirs was literally the first one I'd been into but it wouldn't be the last.
I asked them about their library and what they did and who they catered for, they explained that they only really served the local community, I assume that in a town where tourists are only there to leave as soon as possible that lending books to non-locals would cost too much in the long run, and that most of their books were childrens books and fiction with a limited collection of non-fiction. I was pretty exhausted at this point and had to leave pretty quickly, but I took a photo of their very lovely library and decided to carry on with my plan to try and visit as many as I could along the way. The ladies wished me a safe journey and I was on my way to get dinner and then sleep. My bag was packed and I was ready to walk a long way across a country where they call libraries "bibliotecas".
In St Jean I found a library. In Spain I would find many more.
My very very very heavy bag, I would eventually lose as much weight off of my body as this bag weighed at the start. I am not kidding.
My Day.
Today was a pretty easy day for me at the library. I mentioned yesterday that I'm doing volunteer work at a school, I'm not sure what their social media policy is so I won't name the school, but it is a state primary school in a pretty diverse area of Brisbane so a lot of the kids have English as their second language or don't speak it at home at the very least. But I really am enjoying the work I'm doing. I arrived a bit late because I slept in this morning(the joy of volunteer work is you can show up late, the pain of volunteer work is that if you do it enough you fall into bad habits so I'm trying to avoid being late when I can) I was fifteen minutes late and I found a great parking spot suspiciously close to the gate, I couldn't believe my luck until I got out of the car and saw a note painted on the ground telling me it was a reserved spot for someone who was either out on business. So I had to move my car to the furthest part of the car park, near the trees which we'll turn into paper if the apocalypse ever happens and we need to print up new books to lend out.
I arrived at the library to find that seemingly every kid in the school had returned their books from the weekend before classes started. So that was my job for the morning, filling the shelves and cleaning up the shelves to make them more presentable. I was about to resume work on my project to sort every book in the non-fiction out(I'm at five hundred and something on the dewey decimal system right now I'm about 3/8th of the way through) when a class came in and I did the returns and leant out the books for them.
Another class followed them until pre-Lunch at which point I took a bit of a break to have some noodles and discuss the state of the World Cup and the mess over in Qatar right now with the head librarian(Ray), I argued that Australia could probably host the damn thing in a pinch if we needed to. We have the stadia(yes, I know the plural of Stadium!) to do it, the biggest problem Ray pointed out is that we'd have to basically cancel every other major sporting event in the country for the month it takes to play out the world cup, plus tourists would have to travel stupid distances to get to games if they were in Perth and then Adelaide etc.
I'd love to see Australia host the World Cup one day, but I doubt Qatar are going to lose it at this stage no matter what evidence comes to light.
After the lunch rush(people who work in a school library are very likely aware of the lunch rush) there was another class of kids and some more book shelving. I finally finished returning all the books from the last class and drove home, the advantage of volunteer work is I don't have to go to Staff Meetings, the disadvantage is I obviously don't get paid.
I went back to my dads place to grab my clothes for the next few days as well as my laptop, my map of Spain and my journal from the trip so I could jog my memory if I needed it. I also got my copy of Carl Sagans Cosmos which I keep meaning to read. I then drove to my brothers house and we went off to dinner. Steak and Salsa is a strange meal but it is filling and the Corinda Hotel has $10 steak nights every Monday. I've been going a regular as clockwork for I think five years now with my brother ever week except when I'm out of town.
After dinner and shopping I came home and moved his pills into my room because he can't have them in the morning because he needs to get a blood test done and can't have the drugs in his system when they test him.
After that we did the weeks shopping and I tried to find a recipe for Snert which someone talked about cooking yesterday but I couldn't find it on my phone so I'm improvising tomorrow night. Be afraid, be very afraid.
YouTube Clip of the day.
Louie CK on the subject of Piracy and how Australians seem to be really really into it.
I found a library in St Jean Pied De Port.
I had promised myself last year during BlogJune that I would actually try to visit the libraries I found along the way. I managed to get to a few of them but not all of them. But I wouldn't have bothered if I hadn't found a library in St Jean Pied De Port, that was where I decided to actually try to get this project done. My original idea was to try and write an article for something like Incite maybe about the experiences of using a library in a foreign country where language was a huge barrier and trying to find out pretty much anything was nearly impossible. I might still try to write it one day but for now I'll just settle for this rambling travelogue instead.
I was meant to go to Spain and walk across the country in 2012 not 2013, but my dad got into a seriously messy cycling accident in 2012 and as a result we had to postpone everything back a year. This ended up costing us some money because some flights and other things weren't refundable(I say this with all the sincerity of an angry traveller, I seriously hate Vueling Airlines and will continue to hate them for a long time to come, next time I travel I'd rather walk than fly with them). But the year of delay gave us plenty of time to procrastinate about training and also to little to no research on the trip ahead of us. I don't like to research a place I'm going to if I can help it. I don't know why but I do like to find things out on the ground instead of reading about it online somewhere and then arriving and going "Ohhh, thats that thing I read about two weeks ago." As a result I had little to no idea about the trip I was undertaking other than the fact that it was 790kms long and that it could occasionally get very wet in Spain(it is said that the rain over there falls mainly on the plains, this is a lie, the rain falls mainly on the mountains). I'd actually attended a talk about walking the Camino at the Kenmore Library's last Friday Social Club which was fascinating and gave some decent advice on how to actually survive the walk as well as some mistakes people make. This talk led indirectly to the Kokoda Presentation I did later that year so I came out of that pretty well off I felt.
The basic plan to get ourselves to St Jean was for us to fly to Cairns, then Hong Kong then to Paris and take a train from the airport to the main train station heading south(Gare Montparnasse) and then take a train to Bayonne and then a train to St Jean Pied De Port, a small town that marks the start of the walk for many people. We'd planned on having some space between the flight and the train so we'd be okay if there were any delays.
Then there was a train strike.
I had originally intended to go completely off the grid during my holiday, get myself in the medieval groove as it were. This didn't come to pass, mostly because I decided on a whim to check my email while on a 12 hour stop over in the Hong Kong Airport. The email was in French and was from the train company so I ran it through Google Translate and found out that there was a strike planned for the next day and our train no longer existed. This was slightly alarming for a variety of reasons. The chief one was that my dad had planned his flight home on the assumption that we'd start on a specific day and finish on a specific day(we were taking separate flights back to Australia so I had a lot of wiggle room if I really needed it), a delay of basically two days would throw that entirely out the window. So we started hogging every free computer in the airport trying to find an alternative route to the start or to anywhere near the start of the walk. We discussed renting a car(too expensive and no-where to drop it off near our destination), getting a bus(there aren't many buses in France because the trains are so much better), flying to Pamplona(not the official start of the walk but close enough to start from and it would have given us a lot of breathing room for rest days and the like, only problem was tickets were stupidly expensive). We settled on renting a car if we couldn't find another way through. But I insisted that we at least try to get to the train station because the trains were going until 11am or something and our flight landed at 9am.
There is a TV show you might have seen called Louie, it stars Louie CK and shows his surreal life around New York City with his family and friends. In a recent episode his daughter stepped off a train and walked away while he wasn't watching and he and his other daughter had to go to the next stop and catch a train back to their original point. When the train was about to stop so they could switch he looked at his daughter and said "When these doors open we are running, do you understand, we are running." That is what happened once we landed in Paris. After a mostly horrid flight(the people in the seat behind me decided to leave their blinds open which made it impossible to sleep) I got off the plane, orientated myself and then we passed through Customs and set off to get a ticket as fast as possible to Gare Montparnasse, this took a bit longer than it should have because I'd forgotten how to use the ticketing system and the strike meant that all the staff were solidly backed up with a huge line of people with questions(note: This is probably the only day I didn't take more than twenty photos on the entire trip because I was in such a panic, the rest of the trip is full of pictures of stuff rest assured). Eventually I remembered that you didn't need to line up for RAR train tickets and we got on a train, then transferred at Gare Nord(I think, it is a blur now) and then caught the first train to Gare Montparnasse. From there we ran as briskly as we could to the long distance train station where I ran into an information centre and asked about the next train to Bayonne.
The person behind the counter looked at me and said it left in four minutes, it was the last one until the next evening and that my ticket from the striked out train was valid on it if I needed it. I ran outside and then promptly ran back inside to find out what platform it was on. By the time I found out there was two minutes before departure. But the platform was right next to us, so we hurried to get aboard only to discover that the train we thought was ours was actually behind the train which was ours, so we sprinted down the length of a train in some insane time considering the luggage weight we were carrying as well as the sleep deprivation and general feeling of misery you get after two days on planes. And we made it to the worlds most overcrowded train outside of India. My god people were on top of people but no-one was getting off the train because there was no way in hell they were getting stuck somewhere that wasn't their destination.
Me on the train, looking as happy as I could because I had something close to a seat, this would not last.
It was kind of amazing to watch as people were migrating up and down the train hoping to find an empty seat somewhere somehow(someone had the bright idea of setting up shop in the toilets because... a chair is a chair, this led to problems as people occasionally liked to use toilets) . The people actually booked on that service had the best chance of keeping their seats. I really wish I'd taken some more photos because it was seriously amazing how many bags, people and just general junk was crammed into that train. After a few hours of this travel and trying not to pass out standing up we found ourselves in Bayonne, which I'm sure is lovely but the train to St Jean wasn't there because of the strike(apparently this train trip is really lovely, I saw bits of it in the movie The Way after I returned to Paris and some people told me it was nice later on the walk. We ended up catching a taxi the rest of the way with these two ladies from I think it was Norway or Sweden(my journal entry from that day doesn't even mention them which is sad) and split the 90E bill four ways between us. They'd done the walk before and were doing different bits of it at a time, every year or so until they'd finished it.
Once we got into town I don't think we ever saw them again. My dad wanted to go to the pilgrimage office and I wanted to go to the information centre to get a bed for the night, because my philosophy in travel is secure a bed before you do anything else. ALWAYS. I'd rather starve than not have a place to sleep(I did starve once in Israel but I had a bed to sleep in, but that is a whole long story), my experience in travelling gave me some level of authority in these matters(this was how we'd caught the train, I'd insisted that we at least try instead of renting a car from the airport and pointed out that I'd travelled a lot more and knew what I was doing).
The office of the Pilgrimage, the start of the Camino, they had a pet cat wandering around at random, it was a lovely place.
After we got literally the last two hotel beds in the town(there were refuges for pilgrims which were more like very cheap hostels but I wanted a shower and toilet to myself for my last night of luxury), dropped our bags off and changed clothes we went over to the office of the Pilgrimage and signed up. We got a piece of paper with the towns and mountains we'd be walking over on it, a list of all the hostels and hotels along the way and a Pilgrims passport to get stamped every night wherever we were staying so that at the end of the walk we could get our completion certificate. Then I went exploring around the town.
Inside Bibliothèque intercommunale de Saint-Jean-Pied-De-Port.
I found the library on the way back to my hotel. It was a small room in the back of a building with a nice friendly sign out the front(in French). The ladies working there were shocked to see a tourist walking into their library at first but I explained, as best I could, that I was a librarian in Australia and I was looking to explore the libraries of the Camino and that theirs was literally the first one I'd been into but it wouldn't be the last.
I asked them about their library and what they did and who they catered for, they explained that they only really served the local community, I assume that in a town where tourists are only there to leave as soon as possible that lending books to non-locals would cost too much in the long run, and that most of their books were childrens books and fiction with a limited collection of non-fiction. I was pretty exhausted at this point and had to leave pretty quickly, but I took a photo of their very lovely library and decided to carry on with my plan to try and visit as many as I could along the way. The ladies wished me a safe journey and I was on my way to get dinner and then sleep. My bag was packed and I was ready to walk a long way across a country where they call libraries "bibliotecas".
In St Jean I found a library. In Spain I would find many more.
My very very very heavy bag, I would eventually lose as much weight off of my body as this bag weighed at the start. I am not kidding.
My Day.
Today was a pretty easy day for me at the library. I mentioned yesterday that I'm doing volunteer work at a school, I'm not sure what their social media policy is so I won't name the school, but it is a state primary school in a pretty diverse area of Brisbane so a lot of the kids have English as their second language or don't speak it at home at the very least. But I really am enjoying the work I'm doing. I arrived a bit late because I slept in this morning(the joy of volunteer work is you can show up late, the pain of volunteer work is that if you do it enough you fall into bad habits so I'm trying to avoid being late when I can) I was fifteen minutes late and I found a great parking spot suspiciously close to the gate, I couldn't believe my luck until I got out of the car and saw a note painted on the ground telling me it was a reserved spot for someone who was either out on business. So I had to move my car to the furthest part of the car park, near the trees which we'll turn into paper if the apocalypse ever happens and we need to print up new books to lend out.
I arrived at the library to find that seemingly every kid in the school had returned their books from the weekend before classes started. So that was my job for the morning, filling the shelves and cleaning up the shelves to make them more presentable. I was about to resume work on my project to sort every book in the non-fiction out(I'm at five hundred and something on the dewey decimal system right now I'm about 3/8th of the way through) when a class came in and I did the returns and leant out the books for them.
Another class followed them until pre-Lunch at which point I took a bit of a break to have some noodles and discuss the state of the World Cup and the mess over in Qatar right now with the head librarian(Ray), I argued that Australia could probably host the damn thing in a pinch if we needed to. We have the stadia(yes, I know the plural of Stadium!) to do it, the biggest problem Ray pointed out is that we'd have to basically cancel every other major sporting event in the country for the month it takes to play out the world cup, plus tourists would have to travel stupid distances to get to games if they were in Perth and then Adelaide etc.
I'd love to see Australia host the World Cup one day, but I doubt Qatar are going to lose it at this stage no matter what evidence comes to light.
After the lunch rush(people who work in a school library are very likely aware of the lunch rush) there was another class of kids and some more book shelving. I finally finished returning all the books from the last class and drove home, the advantage of volunteer work is I don't have to go to Staff Meetings, the disadvantage is I obviously don't get paid.
I went back to my dads place to grab my clothes for the next few days as well as my laptop, my map of Spain and my journal from the trip so I could jog my memory if I needed it. I also got my copy of Carl Sagans Cosmos which I keep meaning to read. I then drove to my brothers house and we went off to dinner. Steak and Salsa is a strange meal but it is filling and the Corinda Hotel has $10 steak nights every Monday. I've been going a regular as clockwork for I think five years now with my brother ever week except when I'm out of town.
After dinner and shopping I came home and moved his pills into my room because he can't have them in the morning because he needs to get a blood test done and can't have the drugs in his system when they test him.
After that we did the weeks shopping and I tried to find a recipe for Snert which someone talked about cooking yesterday but I couldn't find it on my phone so I'm improvising tomorrow night. Be afraid, be very afraid.
YouTube Clip of the day.
Louie CK on the subject of Piracy and how Australians seem to be really really into it.
Click to view