You will face your devils...

Dinner is a particularly fun part of the pilgrim experience. We call it the Game Show, and every time we sit down to a meal there´s a lot of hand-rubbing in anticipation for the frolics ahead.

It works quite simply: you´re given a menu that is completely in Spanish. You have exactly ten seconds to decide what you want, before the camarero/a arrives to take your orders. As you progress along the trip you´ll learn some words - for example, "lomo" can mean anything between pork steaks to friend SPAM. However, it´s considered poor form to keep choosing the same, safe items on the menu. The cut of a real champion lies in picking the most random, yet still digestible dish.

Along the way you have bonus rounds, such as when you ask the waiter to describe what you´re ordering. They will tilt their head to one angle, and say "It´s like cold and white". Everyone at the table has a chance to guess what it is, yelling answers such as "ice-cream!", "yoghurt!" and "winter!". Every incorrect answer causes the waiter´s head to swivel, followed by a drawing in of the breath and an apologetic "noooooo, not like that". Eventually you´ll give up guessing and just order the mystery dish. Though it hasn´t happened yet, such a gamble is always prompted with the phrase "you´ll probably be eating testicles tonight".

Unfortunately, the game show came to an end for me a few nights ago when a new traveller joined our posse. Let´s call him Mr Spain.

Mr Spain is skilled in multiple languages, is very well read, thinks a bit too much about everything, talks more than he thinks and calls me "Hemingway" as an insult. He´s also incredibly helpful and insightful, which means that he´s present at every meal as our convenient "phone a friend".

Mr Spain is representative of why a lot of modern Spaniards walk the camino. Sick of his hospitality job and in the throes of kicking a cocaine addiction, he left his home and arrived in Roncesvalles to begin his journey. For him the camino is a chance to complete something in his life and, hopefully, it will be the first completed achievement of many more.

When I first came across Mr Spain, he was walking with two other men - Mr Italy and Mr Poland. Mr Italy took to the camino like a moving mountain, big and silent, though able to utter "Hola!" in a booming voice. Nothing, it seemed, was able to sway Mr Italy. Opposed to him was the mysterious figure of Mr Poland, equally gigantic but more in the way that a gorilla is as big as a rhinocerous. Guitar always in hand, Mr Poland sang pop songs in a doggerel mix of English, Polish and Spanish while walking.

Our first night together was fun, ending in a local Spanish tavern where everyone decided that I was a capable singer. After scaring the locals away, we called it a night and went to bed. Except for Mr Italy and Mr Poland.

In the days that followed, after Mr Spain had distanced himself from the other two, he told me that he could not walk with Mr Italy or Mr Poland anymore because they were cocaine addicts. Though they tried to quit, they were constantly falling into and out of the habit, and this was not something that Mr Spain wanted to remain connected to.

I took careful note of Mr Poland the next time I saw him, asleep in a refuge. When awake he was proud and warm, usually with a glass of wine in his hand. But, when wrapped up in a blanket, his face shrunk and aged, looking more like Socrates in his hemlock stupor. His teeth, I noticed, were also black - permenantly inked by his addiction.

Several days have passed since we last walked with either Mr Italy or Mr Poland. Though I look forward to seeing them again, Mr Spain is happy that they´re not around.

There is a saying about the Camino, that you will meet your devils on the road to Santiago. Perhaps Mr Italy and Mr Poland were the smiling, charming demons that Mr Spain was to face in his efforts to completely throw off his past. Hopefully they are the worst that he´ll have to confront.

I have seen signs of other pilgrims´ devils. For example, a few nights ago we slept in an old nunnery. No-one slept well at all that night, and everyone had strange, vivid dreams. But one girl awoke during the night, screaming and almost leaping from the top bunk. She said that she´d seen the walls of the room collapsing in on her. For most of the trip she has been worried about every minor detail in her life, whether related to the road or to her home life, and it seemed that it was now stopping her from sleeping.

The only dream I remember having that night was this one where I was put in charge of an international team of detectives, and we had to solve some supernatural crime. Two team members come to mind: one was a grandmother of five, while another was a B- grade, direct-to-video horror movie.

As for my own devils, I´m hoping that I only have to face my blisters and other physical ailments. In case you´re worried, most of these things are sorting themselves out, and the other day I cruised along at the healthy speed of 6km per hour.

Then again, if there is a place to confront your inner demons, it is certainly the mesetas. For the last six days, and probably for the next four to come, I have walked through this cursed landscape. If you can imagine the entire camino as a wrinkled t-shirt, the mesetas is the single point that God decided to iron.

Completely flat, the mesetas spreads out in all directions before dipping below the horizon. There are no trees in sight, except for newly planted eucalyptus that will one day bring someone shade. The landscape forms into a patchwork of green and red - fields of young wheat and baked clay that roll on and on forever. Overhead the sky is blue, though often dominated with fat clouds in procession towards the Atlantic.

That is pretty much the extent of the mesetas. You will walk for hours seeing nothing but the road snaking into the distance. And, if you ever do see a town, it will sit and taunt you upon the horizon for several kilometres until it finally reveals, with a cruel flick of a slight hill, that it was never on your path in the first place.

In short, you have a lot of time to think about things, and this is why a lot of people suffer from "meseta madness". Too much introspection is not good for the soul.

Then again, not many people seem to be out here for their soul.

"It´s like the Camino is becoming more of an endurance race, rather than a spiritual pilgrimage," Scott said on the last morning that I saw him.

Scott, aka John the Scottish Pastor, has been collecting information during his walk about whether or not spirituality is still a major reason for modern pilgrimages. At the surface this doesn´t seem to be the case at all.

There are now hundreds and thousands of pilgrims walking to Santiago every year, and in these warmer months you will often find yourself in the middle of a race for beds. People will wake up as early as 4am to rush ahead 30km to the next bed. Curses upon anyone caught walking beyond 4pm, because you will more than likely arrive in a village to find it completely filled and an aggravating 8km trek ahead of you to the next potential shelter.

As Mr Poland put it, "this is not a pilgrimage, this is a box that you tick off: you go from bed to bed, eat the pilgrim meal, take photos of the cathedral, collect your stamp and then get your little compostela. This is not how it should be done".

I agree with this view, that the majority of people here are not pilgrims, and perhaps this is another devil that I must face.

Yesterday, exhausted from another stretch on the endless meseta, I was relaxing in a bar in a town dropped from a spaghetti western. Whenever I see a new pilgrim, I´ll call them over to my table, as it´s the best place to meet new people. One of the new faces drinking beside me was a woman by the name of Laurie. She had a relaxing, caramel-rich voice pumped directly from California, and a smile that reminded me of hippies in summer. Her entire camino was paid for by a big food magazine because she was going to write an article about how food is an essential part of the pilgrimage.

One topic led to another and eventually the gripe about the camino being a race fell upon the table. Laurie beamed flower power right at me and said:

"Maybe they´re looking at you and thinking the same thing - that you´re not doing the camino the way it should be done."

Damn these hippies and their "eveybody wins" attitude; but she was right, and today I´ve walked without a thought of those stamp-collectors and their need to get ahead. And tomorrow, perhaps, I might learn what a pilgrim actually is. Or that there isn´t such a thing as a pilgrim at all.

I think it´s time to go and play with a menu, because this introspection thing will get me nowhere faster than my battered feet.