Postcards Home with Emily Darlow

For years, Kirsten McHugh had imagined herself walking the Camino de Santiago, picturing the towns and landscapes she would pass through on the famous pilgrimage route across northern Spain.
When the opportunity finally came in 2017, however, the decision to go was about more than fulfilling a long-held travel dream.
At the time, Kirsten and her husband Jack were juggling several projects, including a small tea plantation in Foxground and a cheese-making and café business in Gerringong, when serious illness entered their lives for the second time.
“We took the hint and ran away from our real lives for a couple of months,” Kirsten said.
“I had been pining away for years, wishing and waiting for an opportunity to walk the classic Camino route to Santiago de Compostela, about 800kms from the Pyrenees to the Atlantic Coast.”
Jack hadn’t been quite as fixated on the Camino, but Kirsten said he wanted to make her dream happen.
“Once we set off on the adventure of a lifetime, I know it thrilled him as much as it did me.”
Their journey began with a flight from Sydney to Paris, where they spent a few days before catching a train to Bayonne and then joining a small regional train filled with fellow pilgrims bound for St Jean Pied-de-Port.
The Basque town in the Pyrenees is the traditional starting point for the route Kirsten and Jack would follow to Santiago, walking about 20 kilometres a day for the next six weeks.
Kirsten still remembers arriving to find a “cavalcade of people” filling the steep cobblestoned streets.
There were people of all ages, nationalities, shapes and sizes, dressed in every imaginable version of adventure wear and lining up outside the Pilgrim Office to collect their Pilgrim Passports.
“The people-watching opportunities are endless,” Kirsten said.

It was an early glimpse of something she hadn’t anticipated during all those years spent dreaming about the Camino. She had imagined the landscapes and towns in detail, but not the fellow pilgrims who would become such an important part of the experience.
Once they started walking, Kirsten and Jack soon developed a daily rhythm. They would begin with tea and a piece of fruit and hit the trail around 8am, crossing their fingers that a village or hamlet would appear at about the five-kilometre mark so they could stop for coffee and chat with other pilgrims.
Then they would walk again, an activity Kirsten describes as equal parts “meditating, thinking, chatting, scheming, photographing, journaling, sticky-beaking”, until reaching that day’s destination around 2pm or 3pm.
After checking in and exploring the town, they would head for the Plaza Mayor around dusk, where “Pilgrim Cocktail Hour” would be in full swing, giving them time for a glass of wine and some people-watching before finding somewhere for dinner.
The food along the way became another window into the places they were passing through. Camino towns often catered to the rhythms of weary walkers by opening for dinner earlier than usual and offering a menu del peregrino, or pilgrim menu, of simple, seasonal local dishes.
In larger towns, Kirsten and Jack would leave the pilgrim menu behind and go hunting for tapas, which led to one particularly memorable meal in Logroño.
Calle del Laurel and the surrounding streets and alleyways were packed with tapas bars, many specialising in a particular dish.
“Everything we tried was delicious, but it was hard to go past the incredible mushrooms cooked on a huge hot plate by a father-and-daughter team who did nothing but sling mushrooms all night,” Kirsten said.
The history of northern Spain also revealed itself in unexpected ways as they walked. Kirsten was fascinated by traces of the Celts, Romans, Visigoths, Maragatos and Franks who had passed through the region over thousands of years.
Sometimes that history appeared in a column or carving; at other times, she said, it could be found in something as ordinary as the way chickpeas were prepared for the pilgrim menu.
The unpredictability of walking from town to town also meant they occasionally arrived somewhere to discover something they could never have planned.
Viana, about a day’s walk from Pamplona, “really over-delivered” when Kirsten and Jack walked into town to find one of the San Fermin festivals in full swing.
The old streets were crowded with people dressed in white and red, and after joining the party atmosphere, Kirsten and Jack ended up watching the running of the bulls along the main street from an overhanging balcony.
The fellow pilgrims proved equally unpredictable.
“Everyone on the Camino has a story to tell,” Kirsten said, describing some of the people they met as fascinating, others as eccentric and “a few who were totally nuts”.

About a week before reaching Santiago, Kirsten joined a group of pilgrims having coffee in a mountain-top town and became convinced she recognised the woman sitting beside her.
“‘There’s something really familiar about you,’ I said to the friendly and attractive woman sitting next to me, ‘have we met before?’” Kirsten recalled.
“‘You might have seen me in Muriel’s Wedding,’ she explained, ‘I was Deidre Chambers.’ What a coincidence!”
For all the conversations and chance encounters, some of the moments Kirsten remembers most vividly came simply from being out on the trail, including walking under moonlight on Mount Irago after setting off well before dawn.
She loved the anticipation of each morning, stepping onto a new section of the Camino without knowing exactly how the landscape would change or what would be waiting over the next horizon.
One subject, however, followed the pilgrims wherever they went: feet.
Kirsten encountered walkers with an encyclopaedic knowledge of plasters, strapping, taping, sock layering and boots, alongside horror stories about people whose foot injuries had become serious enough to land them in hospital.
Rather unexpectedly, Kirsten and Jack completed the full 800 kilometres with only a couple of blisters.
Kirsten did learn one packing lesson. The “fancy” outfit she had packed remained untouched at the bottom of her bag, while an extra pair of hiking socks would have been far more useful.
Her advice to Starts at 60 readers contemplating the Camino is similarly practical: spend plenty of time in your hiking shoes before you leave.
“Get used to them and, if possible, experience any blisters phase before you leave,” she said.
After six weeks and hundreds of kilometres, the moment Kirsten would most like to relive isn’t the completion of the walk or a famous landmark.
She would go back to a tiny village halfway up a mountain in Galicia, where My Girl was blaring from a Cool Cat Bar and Jack began dancing and singing along.
It’s the memory of laughing at him that she would choose to experience all over again.
The Camino would later become the subject of Kirsten’s memoir, Seekers, Sinners & Me: Walking, love and gratitude, which tells the story of the couple’s walk and their lives together.
Kirsten hasn’t finished exploring on foot either, with another European walking holiday next on her list: the Gargano Peninsula in Puglia.

For more information about Kirsten McHugh and Seekers, Sinners & Me, visit https://www.kirstenmchugh.com.au