Climbing Mt. Sinai

Yes… the same mountain Moses climbed to receive the ten commandments.  I figured if I got to the top, maybe someone would see fit to dole out one or two commandments my way… you know… give me some direction and all.  For those of you who are somehow unaware of the story of Moses and the Ten Commandments, here’s a link to it from the book Christians refer to as “The Bible”.  Now Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia all have competing claims to be the home the mountain where Moses received the ten commandments, but early christians established St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Egypt’s Mt. Sinai in the 4th century A.D. (St. Catherine’s is one of the oldest functioning monasteries in the world)… so I’m going in with them that this was the place.  Since Mt. Sinai is located pretty much right smack dab in the middle of the Sinai Peninsula, visiting it from any of the Egyptian Red Sea Resort towns is relatively easy.  In fact trips to watch the sunrise on top of Mt. Sinai are pretty ubiquitous, and are offered by every single tour/excursions operator around.  However, I felt those trips left a little to be desired… the standard itinerary being leave in a bus at 11 PM (yes, PM), arrive at St. Catherine’s Monastery in 2.5 hours, hike up the mountain with required bedouin guide (3 hours or so in the dark), watch the sunrise, hike back down, visit the monastery from 9 AM (when it opens) until getting back on the bus and returning from whence you came.   No thank you.  A day or two before, I’d gone by myself for a little snorkeling adventure in the blue hole… and it was all good until about noon, when the busloads of day trippers from Sharm El Sheikh arrived en masse… mostly italians.  And don’t get me wrong… I love italians, but, frankly, large groups of italians are the exact last people you want around when trying to have a quiet moment to yourself watching the sunrise on top of a mountain.  All the tour operators did advertise sunset trips, but when I asked around, those trips seemed to be somewhat seasonal, and there apparently just wasn’t enough demand for them at the moment, so no organized sunset trips.  In a moment of weakness, I asked about the overnight trip to Mt. Sinai for the next night (which was a Thursday), but I was informed that there were no trips on Thursday because the monastery was closed on Friday mornings.  And just like that, the invisible light bulb over my head switched on (okay… it’s really more like the dull flicker of a single lite brite piece)… if there are no trips at sunset and no trips tomorrow, if I go by myself, there’s a good chance I’ll have the mountain all, or mostly, to myself (plus I should choose to go at sunset because who really wants to get up that early).  Planning done… onward to execution.

I got up early the next day as I had a lot to do (i.e. arrange a way to get there, find a place to stay, eat and start climbing early enough to catch the sunset (which is about a quarter past 6 here).  Everything went pretty smoothly for Egypt.  I found a car for a decent price by asking the four local guys I had some rapport with… the guy from my breakfast place, the guy who arranged for me to shoot a machine gun, the guy from my hotel and the guy from my regular bar… they call their driver friends and provide some quotes to haggle over… not instantaneous by any means, but I really had no other option if I wanted to get there that day as buses only went on Tuesdays and Fridays.  The driver recommended a place to stay in St. Catherine’s, which actually turned out to be pretty good (definitely not always the case)… so I managed to make it down to the monastery with a good amount of time to climb.  One of the rules about climbing Mt. Sinai is that you have to climb with a local bedouin guide (I’m not really 100% sure if you actually have to have a guide, but since I arrived by myself and didn’t actually know the way to the route up the mountain I wanted to take, I figured it was a good idea to do so… plus it was only about $15).  From the little research I did (yes, really, I actually looked it up beforehand), I knew there were at least two ways to the top… the most popular one being the camel trail, which consists of about 6 kilometers of gently upward sloping path followed by 750 stone steps to the summit (as you may have guessed form the name, the local bedouins line the trail offering camel rides up and down for those that want them – the only catch being that the camels only go to the bottom of the 750 steps… everyone has to climb those).  The other route I knew of is called the steps trail, which (surprise, surprise) consists of about 3,500 stone steps that, basically, go straight up the mountain from behind the monastery (the top of the steps trail intersects with the top of the camel trail at the foot of the steps to the summit… so after 3,500 steps there’s still 750 more).  Reportedly, the steps were all put in place by one monk doing penance for something.  I tell my man Ahmed (my guide) that I want to do the steps trail (mostly just for the challenge of it) kind of expecting him to balk, but he readily agrees and notes that we’ll come down the camel trail (as that’ll be easier in the dark).  We start walking behind the monastery and all I see is this:

Where’s that trail going?

And then we start climbing… note that I’m in decent shape for walking, but I’m sweating and breathing hard while Ahmed is bounding up and down the steps like a mountain goat… the steps seem to have no effect on him at all (granted, this is his job though… so I’m sure he’s done it more than once).  To appear tough, every time he asks if I need a break I tell him no… but I’ll take one in five minutes… I don’t think it worked.  Onward and upward.

My guide Ahmed bounding ahead.

A view back down…

Just in case you were wondering… yes, cell phones do work here.

We (again… surprise, surprise) see absolutely no one else on our path.  Once Ahmed and I get to the top of the steps trail and begin the 750 steps to the summit, we end up passing, and chatting with, a couple from New Zealand (and their guide of course) who note that there’s an American couple already at the summit.  In short order Ahmed and I reached the summit… and he goes off with the other guides to chat and let the tourists be.  Although I don’t have the place all to myself, there were only two other people initially (plus the Kiwi couple when they finally arrived).  AT first I kind of stayed by myself, but then I and the couple realized it would be best to make nice so we could all take pictures for each other.  We all end up watching the sunset together in (more or less) silence…

After a bit of time letting the experience marinate, Ahmed and I head back down.  He doesn’t use a light (despite the fact that it’s getting pretty dark)… so I decide not to use one either (even though I have one).  But the guy’s done this like a million times, so he knows where every little rock is and he diligently warns me when we’re coming up on steps or slippery spots.  It’s pretty dark.  At times I can see a bit of movement just off the trail… I stop to investigate and realize that I’m seeing camels bedded down for the night (once I reached the bottom there were literally a hundred of them… plus you could usually smell them before you could see them).  I do my best to keep up with Ahmed and somehow manage not to hurt myself.

So for the stats… circa 4,250 steps to the top… took about an hour and twenty minutes with minimal (err… yeah… minimal) breaks.  Spent about 45 minutes at the summit.  And the way down took about an hour an 15 minutes.  Plus I had to walk about 4 kilometers there and back from where I was staying.  I left my hotel at around 3:30 PM and arrived back at 8:30ish.  Total commandments received: 0.  Other observations… there were trash cans all the way up (both the camel and the steps trail), but there was still garbage all over.  Several tiny churches dot the routes (along with several bedouin homes).  There’s little valley set up with a camp just before the top of the 750 steps… so you can sleep there overnight and not wake up to early to get to the top and see the summit.  The last 750 steps contain a whole host of little shops for people selling food, drinks, souvenirs and renting blankets for cold nights (as well as some bathrooms).  Although I brought a sweater, it only a little bit chilly at the summit and I didn’t need to use it (despite all the egyptians telling me it would be cold… it’s all relative I guess).  So there it is… I climbed Mt. Sinai… mission accomplished.

One more mountain shot…

Can you guess the name of this rock formation?

A refreshment stand just below the summit (one of many)…

The church at the summit… there’s also a mosque just behind it.

 

 

 

Dahab… The One in Egypt

Decisions, decisions, decisions… What now?  That’s what I was thinking to myself as I sat in my room in Santiago.  I had completed my Camino, I’ve already explained my… ummm… need… yeah, need… to get out of Europe because I overstayed my tourist visa, but I didn’t quite know what to do.  My lovely camino companera had suggested I find a nice quiet place to relax, recover and reflect on my camino experience.  After letting that thought marinate in my brain for quite sometime, I came to the conclusion that she was right… I’d been on the road in some form or another (basically) since the day I left San Francisco, and I had not yet taken anytime time (maybe some hours here or there) just to sit and think.  I already knew that I wanted to go to Africa… so I fired up the intrawebz and started looking for beaches in Africa that were within reach of a relatively cheap flight from Spain.  Morocco was the obvious choice, but I somehow got the idea in my head that it would be a little bit of an adventure to make an overland trip across the continent… and the only way to really do that (safely) is to go north to south (or the south to north) from Egypt to South Africa.  I thought that Egypt must have beaches right (yes, yes they do)… and came across some articles featuring Dahab.  They sounded good, so I checked skyscanner.com and found a relatively cheap flight from Santiago to Sharm El Sheikh airport (Dahab is 100 kilometers up the coast from Sharm El Sheikh… or 60 miles for those of you who don’t do metric) leaving in two days… so I booked it (and visas are available upon arrival in Egypt… yes, I did check).

I didn’t really know what to expect.  The only thing I had really done was to figure out the expected prices for how to get from the airport to Dahab by various modes of transportation without being ripped off like a total sucker.  When I landed I changed some money, went through immigration, got my bag and found a guy to take me to Dahab.  The first thing that struck me was the landscape on the drive up (okay… that was the second thing… the first thing that struck me was the heat… let’s just say it’s a desert for a reason)… the Sinai kind of looked like what I imagine Mars to look like, just slightly less red.  Very steep jagged mountains, no plants and an unrelenting sun… even with the a/c blasting I was still schvitizing.  The road snaked it’s way along a valley floor between the mountains… we passed a couple of military checkpoints that reminded me that I was definitely not in Spain anymore, and after about an hour we drove into Dahab.  Let’s just say Dahab’s first impression is not what I’d call great… I had to remind myself that I’m in a “developing” country… half-built (or half-destroyed) buildings, goat herds wandering around, trash everywhere, either dirt roads or roads with pavement so pot-holed you have to crawl over it, dust hanging in the air everywhere and lots of very beat up cars.  I had my driver (I like being able to say that) drop me off in the center of town… which was more of the same as above, just with lots, and I mean lots, of tourist shops.  I walked around a bit to get a feel for the main part of town (which I found out was not very big at all).  I asked around and found a place to stay, put my bags down and took a nap.  I woke up about an hour before sunset (which was at around 6:30 PM… even in September… very strange after coming from Spain where sunset is around 9:30 PM) and took a stroll… and I ended up staying for about 8 days.

Sinai desert just outside of Dahab.

Let’s see… how to describe Dahab… physically, the touristy part of town runs from one end of a small, semi-circular bay to the other.  There’s a pedestrian walkway along the water… on the land-side of the walkway there’s dive shops and hotels, and the water-side is lined with cafes built on platforms that extend to, or sometimes over, the water (there’s no real beach to speak of… but each cafe has sun beds on their platforms and usually an entrance into the bay).  It takes about 10 minutes to walk from one side to the other.  There’s one other street parallel to the pedestrian walkway that has a bunch of tourist shops, some places to eat and more hotels… and that’s really pretty much all there is to Dahab (yes, there’s other stuff off the main roads, but as a tourist there’s nothing really to see).  Atmosphere-wise, there’s something about the place that just makes the time drift by… something about the ocean, the heat, the cheap living, or some combination thereof.  A common refrain I heard from people was that they came for a week and ended up staying for a couple of years.  That same feeling crept over me as well… I came to relax after all, and relax I did.  I’d wake up, work out a bit, eat, write, go down to the beach, write, eat, go for a swim, take a nap, eat dinner, have a beer (you could buy alcohol at the majority of places), smoke some shisha and go to bed around midnight.  There weren’t very many people there at all (tourism is way down in Egypt right now, plus it was the tail end of their low season), so there’s not much to do in terms nightlife… there’s not even really that much to do during the day actually.  The main attraction in Dahab is the Red Sea, and the main tourist trade here is scuba diving… there’s desert excursions and the like, but most people are there solely to dive.  So if you’re not diving (or snorkeling), you’re basically just going to be chillin’ at one of the multiple cafes that line the bay… which is what I was doing.  It was perfect for me at the time, but I could see it being very boring for some folks.

One end of the bay…

…to the other.

Camel rides anyone?

People-wise, Egypt is the land of the hard sell… I took me a while to get used to having to ignore all the shop/restaurant pimps working the pedestrian walkway (i.e. the guys standing outside trying to bring you into their shop)… but usually a simple la shukran (no thank you) would suffice.  As Dahab is a tourist destination, all the workers speak several other languages fluently (generally, English, Russian, Italian and German), so communication was never a problem… it actually makes me feel kind of silly when I can’t speak another language and the 20-year old restaurant pimp that has never been outside of the Sinai speaks four other languages fluently.  As a foreigner, I did pick up that there was some tension between the local Bedouin and the Egyptians living their from Cairo (every non-Bedouin I spoke with was from Cairo), even though they both worked side by side… but I never really delved into it with anybody for an explanation.  Everybody is hustling, which is nice for tourists such as myself… because if you meet a couple of people you’re friendly with (for example, the hotel guy, the guy at your bar and the guy at the breakfast place), when you need something (i.e. a camel ride, or a snorkeling trip, or you want to shoot a machine gun), you can ask your three guys and they’ll come back with quotes for you to choose from… and I found that the prices they’d come back to you with were always lower than prices I could get by asking around myself (note that all your guys get a cut of the final price, so they have some incentive to find you a good deal because they know you can get whatever they’re offering from somebody else)… it was an interesting switch to make mentally after coming from a standard issue western county.

The blue hole… a renowned snorkel/diving site north of Dahab.

The crack… an actual crack/break in the reef that allows for easy access to the water around the blue hole.

A little fun in the desert with the Bedouin.

So that’s Dahab in a nutshell… if you want to relax, or learn to scuba, cheaply, then it’s going to be a good place for you (and by cheap I mean private rooms with a/c for $12-$13, good meals for $8 to $10, coffee for $0.80 and beers for $1.50 to $3.00).  Other interesting tidbits, you could see Saudi Arabia in the distance across the water, everybody drives trucks because the roads, if they exist at all, are in pretty bad condition, the call to prayer was audible, but not very loud, many locals did wear full white robes with headscarves, and there are cats and dogs everywhere you look (not exactly strays, as people feed them… more like village pets).

I Become an Illegal Alien

Details… Those of you who know me have likely heard me say this many times.  I’m really more of a big picture type of person… and sometimes the little things slip by me unnoticed (you can ask my former bosses).  So examining the details of those little stamps immigration officials put in your passport was never going to be high on my priority list.  I was vaguely idea of the fact that one cannot just waltz into any country around the globe without first filling out the proper paperwork… and also the thought that even once you get in (if possible), the people in charge might not want you stay.  Not paying taxes, using the social welfare systems, working under the table and destabilizing fragile nation states…. I get it.  There’s a reason these systems are in place.  I’m also aware that as an American citizen I have it pretty good… as we can get most places to visit fairly easily (which is ironic since most Americans don’t ever leave and because America is, apparently, a nightmare of bureaucracy and hassle to visit for everybody else).  But again… details.

I’ve been to Europe before, and never had any hassles with the gentlemen in the booths… nothing but standing in line, a couple questions and the stamping of documents.  Of course these were 1 to 3 week trips so no need to worry about any of that.  When you’re going to stick around for a bit longer though… now you’re getting into to some grey area where you should be aware of the rules.  Here’s what I found out… Spain (and most of continental Europe) are part of the Schengen Agreement.  US citizens can visit Schengen Area countries on a free tourist visa for 90 days out of every 180 day period…. so I, theoretically, could visit all of the Schengen countries, but only for a period of 90 days, then I would have to leave the Schengen area for 90 days before returning again to any of the Schengen countries.  My 90 day clock did not reset when I went from Spain into Portugal because they’re both Schengen countries… the only date that mattered was the date of my arrival into the Schengen area (which was when I landed in Ibiza… my time in London did not count as the UK is not part of the Schengen Agreement).

Why was I even worried about this… I’m sure you’re asking that very question right now?  Well, once I got back to Santiago (the second time… after walking to the ocean and back) I had to figure out where to go next.  I wanted to take sometime to recover (walking for 45 days is difficult after all), relax and reflect.  What better place to do that than on a beach somewhere right?  Cool, but after relaxing for a bit what then?  A friend of mine was just arriving in Paris… Oktoberfest would be happening in Munich… the closing parties would be going off in Ibiza… my only real time constraint is my friend’s wedding in India… which is in late December (I know… what looming constraint right).  What to do…?  I was actually looking into flying to Crete for a bit (mostly because it was a very cheap flight from Santiago), when I noticed something on a website mentioning entry requirements for US citizens.  After a quick glance I figured I should check out my status (fyi… Crete is officially part of Greece, which is in the Schengen area)… I found the Ibiza entry stamp in my passport had a date of May 19th.  Okay, what’s the date today…?  August 25th… as a former banker I’m no math whiz, but I was pretty sure those numbers meant that I had overstayed my tourist visa and was now an illegal alien (future resume line item?).  Whoops… details.  I read up about what to do on the intrawebz and found out that it was unlikely the immigration officials would notice (provided I was not exiting through Switzerland, Germany or the Netherlands) and if they did, if I had a ticket out of the Schengen area (given the rather minimum length of my overstay) the worst I’d get would be a stern wag of the finger… BUT, the official penalties involve fines and banishment from re-entry into the Schengen area for a period of up to five years (which would really suck).  This information really dramatically narrowed down my choices for relaxing by the beach (with a cheap flight from Santiago mind you)… but I managed to come up with a plan and (for a host of reasons) bought a ticket leaving Santiago in three days to fly to Sharm El Sheikh airport in Egypt (making sure there were no connecting flights through Switzerland, Germany or the Netherlands).

As I approached the immigration booth in the Santiago airport I found I was a nervous… but I wasn’t dressed like a travel bum, and I had my story down (it took me much longer to make my PILGRIMAGE on the Camino de Santiago than I thought it was going to… emphasis on the word pilgrimage for those who didn’t pick that up).  Of course, the guy who took my passport didn’t even bother looking at it as he was to busy chatting with the other guy in the booth… he used his peripheral vision to find a blank page and gave me an exit stamp… and just like that, I was no longer an illegal alien.  Lesson learned… I’m going to pay attention to these particular details… especially as now I’ll be rolling through Africa, which may (or may not for all I know) have border guards that, for various reasons, pay a bit more attention than the Spanish.

Learning to Surf in Lagos, Portugal

As I think I said before… I came to Lagos to learn to surf, and, with a dose of irrational self-confidence in my athletic abilities, I was fully prepared to be an excellent surfer within a week or so… not a pro mind you, but you know… mildly excellent at least.  That way, by the time I left Lagos, I would feel comfortable paddling out pretty much anywhere that wasn’t too dangerous.  I came up with a plan (the day I arrived) to take two full-day surfing lessons (you know… to get the basics out of the way), and then I would just rent a board and wetsuit from one of the various surf shops in town and go out on my own (as I had a rental car).  Boom… planning done.  I proceeded to ask around about the various companies, found out what sounded like the best one and went ahead and booked two days of lessons with them starting the next day.  Done and done.

I get up somewhat early to grab breakfast before turning up at the appointed place around 8:00 AM.  There’s several other people milling about already (turns out that most people who learn to surf in Lagos come for a week or two and live in a hostel provided by the surfing company… most of which had already left for the beach).  I get directed to a stereotypical surfer dude, who directs us all up the hill to a garage where the boards and wetsuits are stored.  Everyone picks out a board and wetsuit while we wait for what must have been an early 70’s land cruiser to pull around to take us to the beach.  We load the gear up, get in and start driving.  Turns out that the town of Lagos is on Portugal’s south coast, but all of the beaches with surf-able waves were on the west coast (a 40-minute or so drive away).  Everyone’s chatting away like they know each other (which they do as they’re all staying in the same place) so I settle in and make some small talk and get to know the girl sitting next to me and the driver.  Everyone seems pretty cool… most are Australian, with a Swede and a German thrown in for good fun.

Driving to the beach.

Not a bad place to learn to surf right… praia arrifana.

Once we get to the beach, we unload the gear, trudge across the sand and set up camp for the day.  Everyone’s pretty eager to get in the water, so we all gear up.  As I’m the only first day person there, the same driver surfer dude takes me aside to go over the very basic basics (ocean safety, the equipment, listen to the instructors, how it all works, etc.).  We practice a bit on the beach and the he decides it’s time I hit the waves.  Now… even though I don’t now how to surf, I did grow up in San Diego (and spent a lot of time at the beach and in the ocean)… so I’m familiar with all the general basics of how waves form and break, and what to do get over/under them and all that good stuff that might be much harder for someone who’s never been in the ocean before (one more reason on the “why I’m going to pick this up quickly” list).  So I paddle out fairly easily and surfer dude and I go over sitting on the board, identifying where the waves are the basics of trying to catch a wave.  He (and I of course) feels that I have a good grasp of what’s going on… and that since I’m a big athletic dude… I might as well get in there and try and catch something.  Cool… I’m in.  I haphazardly get in position (with the instructor right behind me to give me a needed boost to help me get into the wave (keep in mind that we’re all learning to surf…so these waves aren’t exactly what you would refer to as big).  We both spot a good one coming… I paddle hard and begin to feel the wave take me.  I put my hands in roughly a push-up position to try and get myself up… I push down to hop up and after a split second of faltering I get my balance, stand up and cruise right in…. I am the fucking man!

Okay… that’s not what really happened… it turns out that surfing’s not quite that easy.  Go figure right?  What really happened was that I did get into the wave just fine, but when I went to push up, one of my hands slipped out from under me and I basically face-planted right back into the board as the wave broke and tossed me over into the ocean… how’s that for an auspicious start?  Whatever… I get back out there and do it again… same result… and again… same result.  Luckily, as my lovely Russian friend Sasha has pointed out to me… I (by virtue of my chromosomal pairing… thank you Mom and Dad) possess the dogged determination of the male mind… the will to keep trying, in spite of repeated failure, to accomplish whatever mission I’ve deemed necessary to accomplish.  I persist, and by the end of the day I manage to stand up (if only feebly) for a second or three before falling off.  I quickly recalibrate my goal of being a mildly excellent surfer in two weeks time to just being a competent surfer.

I go out the next day with similar results, but decide to stick to my original plan of only taking two lessons because I think I know what to do… I just need practice actually doing it.  I find the cheapest rental shop in town (it’s amazing the price discrepancy between places just a few blocks from each other for essentially the same equipment… do people just not ask around?), get a board and a wetsuit (yes, you need a full wetsuit, even in the summer, in Lagos) and pledge to go to the beach every day over the next two weeks before I’m supposed to leave (I need to return my rental car back to Spain by the end of June) and I feel I’m more or less on my way to becoming a competent surfer.

Long story short… I kept my pledge… more or less, which was hard given the distractions of the Lagos nightlife and the fact my room was directly across the street from a bar (I did take two days off and would go for one session a day…either in the morning or in the afternoon, but rarely both since it was too far to come back and too long to just sit there all day waiting on the tides… and occasionally, maybe I was tired from the previous night?).  I’m sure you can guess at my results… by the time I left I was nowhere close to even being a competent surfer… BUT I was able to manage to stand up consistently while heading in the direction of the wave (as opposed to just going straight)… and I felt comfortable paddling out, even in larger surf.  So I’m going to go with mission accomplished here… I’m not very good, but I think I can now get on a board and paddle out with a reasonable chance of not embarrassing myself.  Lessons learned: 1) Surfing is hard, and 2) Maybe I’m not as good at things as I think I’m going to be?  Ha Ha… No, I definitely did not learn that… so actual lesson learned: 1) Surfing is hard.

That’s how you load up the VW rental car… and yes I had to park on the curb to prevent the following:

A Portuguese traffic jam… actually happened all the time… just had to wait them out.

Me and my sweet, sweet rental board.

 

 

Camino de Santiago (part 4)

Or… Best Church Service Ever.

I reached Santiago de Compostela on a Saturday.  I honestly had no idea what to expect.  As, I explained here (towards the bottom), despite really enjoying the Camino… I decidedly did not enjoy those last 100 or so kilometers into Santiago… the mood changed, the general type of peregrino changed… basically everything changed.  For me, the Camino seemed to lose the sense of common purpose and community that it had right up until I crested the hill at O Cebreiro.  Once that happened, my lovely companion and I decided to do what it takes to just get’er done… so we flipped from walking more for enjoyment to walking as far as we could every day to get to Santiago as quickly as possible.  The final day into Santiago (i.e. the last 20 kilometers or so) was no exception… we were basically speed walking at that point.  We’d book it past groups of people singing stupid songs only to walk past them and right into another group of people chanting and singing… it was simply hard to enjoy anything at that point… and that final stretch into Santiago is… well… let’s just say it’s not the most scenic walk on the planet.  I had heard from others that had done the Camino before that Santiago itself was pretty anticlimactic (something about the whole “it’s the journey and not the destination” thing)… so I set my expectations accordingly low.  And of course I was already not in the best of moods from walking the last couple of days (or that morning for that matter), but I have to tell you, the second I walked into into the square in front of the cathedral my whole mood flipped.  It was just something about the place and the people… despite the touregrinos… you could actually feel the joy in the air.  I’m not just talking about my own satisfaction of not believing that I was actually here after walking for a month that I felt as an individual, but the joy of the collective…. the combined feelings of everybody who’d arrived (even if they hadn’t walked that far).  Maybe it was because I had arrived on a day, in month, that traditionally has large amounts of peregrinos arriving in Santiago… or maybe I was just projecting my own feelings onto the group… but whatever it was, it was definitely a special feeling.

My view from the square in front of the cathedral the day I arrived.

I, like hundreds of others, just plopped down in the middle of the square and stared up at the cathedral for a bit… and with all the general milling about going on, I manged to run into several people that I had met along the way (in a scene that was to play itself out about a dozen times over the next couple of days) that I hadn’t seen for days, or sometimes weeks… but we all seemed to find each other in Santiago (I, literally, saw every single person that I had a more than a ten minute conversation with while on the Camino).  After enjoying the moment for quite some time, I headed over to the Pilgrim’s Office (yes, there is an official Pilgrim’s Office) to queue for my Compostela (the official document given out by the Cathedral of Santiago noting that you had completed the pilgrimage)… and after 20 minutes or so received it (I found it pretty cool that it’s in Latin):

My Compostela and Pilgrim Credential

Me getting interviewed by an Italian tour group immediately after taking the above picture.

Once compostelaed, I went to explore the cathedral, which is very similar to most other cathedrals (if you’ve seen one in person) in that it was quite large and impressive.  The only thing noticeably different about this one was… for lack of a better term… that it looked lived in.  And what I mean by that, is that the cathedral was definitely not in perfect condition… there were plants and moss growing on the exterior, faded paint and chipped stonework everywhere, and everything had that look of embedded grime that comes with hundreds of years of candle smoke and people touching everything, etc.  And I must say that the lack of perfection actually made me feel at home somehow… it was actually warm and welcoming as opposed to say… the cathedral in Leon (which I had seen about two weeks earlier), which was arguably much more impressive (massive, massive stained glass windows everywhere) and had been beautifully (and spotlessly) restored, but was somehow sterile… the kind of place that makes you want to whisper and walk silently.  Not that the cathedral in Santiago made me want to shout, but it was just much more inviting and comfortable… you felt like you actually wanted to stay and sit for a while.  Maybe strange that a building could do that… but it definitely did.

Being the focus of a major pilgrimage route, the cathedral performs a special pilgrim’s mass everyday at noon.  Now, I’m by no means a very religious person, but attending the pilgrim’s mass is part of the Camino de Santiago, so it only seemed proper to go… and, using my impeccable timing, the following day was a Sunday… so I kind of should/have to go right?  Right (and for the record, I did want to go).  I was told to get there early… but having a lazy Sunday morning (i.e. sleeping in, dilly-dallying with the hotel breakfast, reading the intrawebz, etc.), my lovely companion and I managed to arrive at 11:30.  Oops… the place was packed.  Now, keep in mind that this is a cathedral we’re talking about here… not exactly a small building… and it was standing room only… even at 11:30 (the cathedral even has crowd control officers working the floor for just such an occasion).  We managed to find a place half-behind one of the columns not too far away (and luckily we both are tall enough to see over the majority of Europeans) and settled in waiting for mass to start (knowing full well that it would not start precisely on time… because we were in Spain after all).

A shot of the crowd from where I was standing… in the transept for you all you cathedral architecture buffs out there.

At about 11:50 or so, what looked to be about an 80-year old nun approached the main microphone and asked for silence (this, and the actual service, is all in Spanish mind you… which I could mostly understand after being in Spain since May), and she then began to walk the crowd through the choruses of the main hymns that were to be preformed during the service.  She, no joke, had an angelic singing voice… the entire crowd (a full house mind you) was absolutely dead silent listening to her sing.  She tried to get the crowd to sing along with her, but I think everyone was just too in awe of the spectacle of that voice coming out of such a tiny old lady to actually sing… simply amazing.

Now, in terms of the actual service itself, there was not much different from a typical Sunday Catholic mass… the only real unique things being that the priests who completed the pilgrimage were all able to join in the service (so there was about 20 priests in white robes up around the altar), at the beginning one of the priests announced the originating country of all the pilgrims that had received Compostelas the previous day (and I did hear Los Estado Unidos) and during the call to prayer each priest offered a prayer in his native language (I recall hearing Italian, German, French, Portuguese and English of the Irish variety).  So nothing exciting enough there to justify my subtitle… but there was just something about the crowd that day… the same collective joy from the previous day in the square was still in the air.  Despite being packed in, nobody was rude or obnoxious (everyone was quite and respectful… well, except for one middle-aged German lady who, backpack on, kept pushing her way through the crowd to get to the front through half the service… but she was at least quite… well done lady).  And since the crowd was mostly Spanish (and Catholic) the audience participation on the singing and responses was very high.  So the collective joy in the (large) crowd, the angelic voice of the nun (over the loudspeaker), the booming pipe organs (in full throttle) with everyone singing and moving together really created a special moment for everyone there… again, I don’t make it to church much myself, but it really was a moving moment (hell… if every service were like this one I’d go all the time).

When I said above that there really wasn’t much difference between the pilgrim’s mass and a regular Sunday mass… I was omitting one little thing… which is alright because the cathedral doesn’t actually do this for every single pilgrim’s mass (once or twice a week, but always on Sunday).  The Cathedral in Santiago has one tradition that pretty much is the best thing I’ve ever seen in a church service… head and shoulders above anything else… and that’s the botafumiero (insert tasteless priest molestation joke here?).  The botafumiero is simply a large incense holder… it’s what they do with it at the end of mass that is most impressive, and instead of describing it I’ll just show you.

It was one of several highlights during my short stop in Santiago that that helped me commemorate my completion of the Camino de Santiago.