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A Pilgrim's Guide To The Camino De Santiago: St. Jean * Roncesvalles * Santiago (2009)

by John Brierley(Favorite Author)

4.22 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1844091562 (ISBN13: 9781844091560)

languge

English

genre

Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction

publisher

Findhorn Press

review 1: This seems like a helpful guide - but since I've yet to take my trip, I may have to adjust my rating post-pilgrimage. The cultural information is minimal, so I'll read up on my history before I go. The maps here seem clear, and I like how Brierley has delineated the various choices by color (main road, alternative side roads, quiet paths, et cetera). I think he's packed a ton of information into a relatively slender volume (flora/fauna/altitudes/distances/albergue locations). Still, every gram counts, and I wish the paper pages were thinner! I also liked his short paragraphs located at the end of each stop - one is called "The Practical Path" and the other is "The Mystical Path." I'm not very mystical, but I'm certainly decent at contemplation. Finally, the guide ma... morede me more confident about walking the 500 miles from St. Jean Pied de Port to Santiago (although I'll go through to Finisterre). The actual trek will show if this little book is worth its salt.
review 2: Buenos días, peregrinos!The loudspeaker blasts this message at 6:00 am in the refugio in Burgos, waking up any pilgrims who managed to sleep through the zipping open of their neighbors’ sleeping bags. Other refugios just turn the lights on at 6. At the 12C Cistercian monastery in Santo Domingo, the den mother shooed the pilgrims out at 7 with a broom and various herding gestures.Granted, the book is not a memoir but a guidebook, it still does not quite capture the flavor of pilgrimage. It lists the places, distances, elevations, refugios, and alternative accommodations (if and when the snoring, thievery, exposed bedsprings, bedbugs, and sweet cloying scent of 76 pairs of throbbing and festering hiking boots start getting to you), but it does not quite capture the dominant experience of the trail. Namely, the camino is full of other pilgrims. Everyone is in physical pain, and most people are in a fairly advanced state of mental anguish as well. One or two km of walking with anyone and a heartbreaking story will shake out. By Day Two, people are comparing blisters at the dinner table, and offering each other lengths of tape and dental floss. The camino breeds an instant intimacy.This guidebook to the Camino covers the trail from St. Jean-Pied-le-Port (one of the camino’s traditional starting places) to Santiago, broken into the traditional stages of 20-30 km/day. Racing over hill and dale, the fit pilgrim can make it in 33 days. But I recommend lingering a bit. Staying an extra day at Logroño to attend the festival of San Mateo, for example, or trying some of the 4-star tapas in Pamplona. Or spending a day in Burgos to study its cathedral (where the guard let me charge my iPhone!). My biggest gripe with this book is that the publisher seemed not to have pictured it in the hands of its users. Or rather, weighing down its users' backpacks. Frankly, it’s too heavy. Next time I’ll leave the book at home and either wing it, or just take more opportunities to ask other pilgrims where the best Menu por Peregrinos is to be found. Absence of book = increased reliance on moments of social contact. less

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