Bom Natal from Ponte de Lima

Merry Christmas! Or as they say in Portuguese, Bom Natal!

We have spent the last three days meandering through the Portuguese countryside between Porto and the northern border with Spain. Since we left Vilarinho on the second day, our walking has gotten much more pleasant, with much of the route on back roads or country lanes. Vineyards abound, though the vines are bare for the winter. But other vegetation is lush, covering the landscape with verdant green fields or fruiting citrus trees to complement the red tile roofs of the houses. It is the rainy season, after all, though we’ve been blessed with cool, dry days for walking. Very cool, in fact. There was a hard frost yesterday morning.

Our guidebook referred to this as a "medieval" bridge, the
first of many like it along the route.

The few forests interspersed between fields and villages are predominantly eucalyptus, with some pines and oaks scattered among them. As usual, I find myself wanting to know more about the trees. There’s no doubt that they’re not original forest, as there’s very little of that anywhere in Europe. But the eucalyptus—is it a native species, or has it been introduced as a useful resource to harvest? There’s clearly lots of harvesting going on. I could find out more about this as I sit at a hostel with an internet connection and Google and Wikipedia at my fingertips, but I’ll leave it a mystery for now. This is part of the challenge for me, to take this opportunity to turn off the rational brain that always wants explanations. I may look down on cities as hotbeds of attachment to desires, but I have my own attachments in the “natural” world as well, such as need to know more about my surroundings. Is it possible that I set myself up for suffering by always wanting to know more?

Crossing one of the many stone footbridges along the camino.

A calla lily growing in a roadside ditch.

We’ve picked up a few Portuguese phrases, but I confess that our attempt has been rather half-hearted, since we’ll be in Portugal only a couple more days before crossing into Spain. It has been an interesting experience for me to feel so helpless with the language. I’ve never traveled in a country where either I didn’t speak at least a bit of the language or wasn’t with someone who spoke it for me. Old Bay has done it a few times, and he gets by just fine, but I am extremely uncomfortable trying to communicate with a  waiter or a check-out clerk with a blend of basic English, Spanish, and hand signals. It makes me very self-conscious, as I really dislike appearing incompetent. It’s a humbling experience, to be sure. It’s also rather isolating, which I suppose could be considered a useful phenomenon on this pilgrimage. It makes me feel oddly detached from the people and the places I’m meeting, emphasizing the sort of solitary journey that we’re on.

These little Santas are all over the place.

As I began writing this post, it was 7 AM on Christmas morning here in Ponte de Lima, Portugal. I considered attending mass at this very hour this morning, but decided against it. We stayed at a proper “Albergue Peregrino” (Pilgrim Hostel) last night. It seems that the closer we get to Santiago de Compostela, the more infrastructure exists for pilgrims. This hostel is very pleasant, with multiple floors and rooms, including a sort of sitting room where I am now, watching the sky lighten outside. There are three other pilgrims here with us, one of them being our “holy” friend whom we saw dressed in “monk’s garb” on our first day. I was very happy to see her so I could ask her more about her beliefs, especially about Catholicism.

One of the parish churches broadcasting Christmas music
into the surrounding countryside. Notice interesting sarcophagi
in the cemetery and the denuded hillsides behind. 

This pilgrimage is a Catholic tradition, after all, and we pass a parish church or chapel or cathedral in every village and town. Yesterday, many of them were broadcasting Christmas music from speakers in their steeples. With all of these Christian reminders of the Christmas season, it dawned on me that perhaps the best spiritual text for us to be reading now would be the Gospel of St. James. (Of course I did consider the Bible, but it’s a rather hefty book to bring on such a journey. Our nun friend is carrying a beautiful one, but added to the weight of this netbook, it would be a burden!) But what I should have done was bring at least the Book of James. Why St. James? Well, because the Camino de Santiago is in honor of him, after all, since he is supposedly entombed at the Cathedral in Compostela. In fact, the Portuguese route to Santiago is supposedly the route he followed when he journeyed through Europe preaching the gospel of Christ all those generations ago.

Also, it’s Christmas, for Pete’s sake! What better time to consider the message of Christ? Indeed, it also struck me that Mary and Joseph were on their own sort of pilgrimage at this time of year, to Bethlehem to register for the census, which is how they wound up in a cattle stall giving birth. I’ve always been especially interested in the Catholic fascination with Mary. It’s easy for a confused soul like me to think of her as a sort of goddess in her own right. I was set straight on that last night. Catholics do not consider her a goddess; they consider her a model to follow in their quest to bring Jesus into their hearts.

And yet I couldn’t bring myself to go to mass this morning. The early hour was certainly a deterrent, but I just can’t seem to get over the distaste I have for liturgy and symbolism that just isn’t accessible for me. It makes me feel more distant from the divine than closer to it. Plus, my spiritual beliefs have become very attached to the Earth, which may of course be an illusion, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Contemporary gargoyles? There are dogs at most houses,
and many of them serve guard duty on rooftops or
behind stone walls.

In any case, we cooked and shared a wonderful Christmas meal together with our three other pilgrim friends last night. Besides the “wandering monk” (which is what she calls herself), we were joined by a young couple from Germany, although the man is from California and has been going to school in Germany for three years. We talked about spirituality a bit over dinner. The German couple spent six months in India this year, so they had lots to say about Hinduism. But we mostly talked about that favorite subject of a mixed crowd of young international travelers—American politics. It all started with “Is Sarah Palin for real? Do Americans realize what a joke she is to the rest of the world?”

From the Virgin Mary to Sarah Palin. What a strange route we are traveling.