The Moor's Last Sigh

The chair across from me was occupied by a man in his early 40s; short-cropped dark hair and a very old-fashioned suit were all I can really remember about him. A muscular, white cat sat in his lap and, though it did not seem to mind being petted, it did not purr, nor did its large eyes suggest any awareness of the man's affection.

"Don't mind Mitzekatze," the man said, "he's been funny in the head ever since he fell off the roof."

But that's a story for later on.

Mr Irving, as I was advised to call him, had lived in Granada for the past year, occupying a studio space in the picturesque Nazirid Palace section of the Alhambra. An American diplomat, Irving took leave from business in Madrid to travel through Andalucia. Something about Granada had captured his imagination, so it was here that he'd settled and where we were currently chatting.

"There's a shadow hanging over this city," he said, gesturing towards the white-toothed hills of the Alybacin.

"1492 was a very big year for Spain, you see. While Columbus was busy discovering the New World (though let's not remind anyone here that he was Italian), the Catholic kings were equally successful in driving the Moors out of Spain once and for all. The last sultan to have made his home here, Boabdil, left Alhambra and Granada in disgrace, but it is said that he turned back - at the final point, just before his beloved red fort vanished beneath the horizon - and let out an awful sigh as he watched the Christian cross be erected atop his beloved palace."

That moment entered legend as 'the moor's last sigh'.

Mitzekatze leapt off Irving's lap as the latter arose and gestured that I follow him to the window. From its arabic arch I could see the irregular lattice of tiny streets, woven and criss-crossing amongst teahouses, shishah dens and market stalls. Locals passed through the thronging touts with practised ease, but camera-laden tourists found themsevlves bogged down and press-ganged by skillful charlatans.

Most talented of all were the Gypsy women, who waved sprigs of rosemary at passers-by and, if ever anyone responded, would press the herb deep into their victim's palm.

"Oh, you will have a handsome husband, he will be rich, very rich, and oh so many children shall you have," the women cooed to their prey, then, "now, you give me twenty euros".

Irving shook his head, smiling at the gullibility of his fellow citizens.

"They are seduced by the legends, by the mystique of the Orient," he said, returning to his seat (Mitzekatze was busy pooing in a nearby pot plant), "but there are other, more modern tales to be found in this part of the world."

I'd arrived in Granada two days earlier, where the sun actually felt like something that heated billions of humans from millions of miles away. Unlike Barcelona, this city is small, and I found its streets cosy and filled with dog faeces. Thankfully, Bianca had phoned her local friends ahead of my arrival, so I was woken up by a cheery text message informing me of plans for the evening.

My bed at that point was a ledge above a toilet in the overbooked hostel I'd arranged a day earlier. With a mattress barely wider than my body, and an ancient pair of rotten socks nestled in a crack near my head (karma, perhaps?), I was struggling to find the deep, mid-afternoon siesta that my body craved, which meant that the buzzing of my phone didn't so much wake me up as it gave me an excuse to open my eyes.

Emily, Bianca's friend, was taking me out to tapas, followed by something called a "botellon". The first part of the night was fairly straight forward: Granada is renowned for its tapas because, unlike the rest of Spain, every bar serves you the tapas free with your drink. A lot of places actually insist upon your loyalty by staggering the quality of the tapas, so that the more you drink, the better your food. Locals will start their nights out at the bars with the more generous portions, before ending at the nicer, but stingier joints later on.

With a nice dollop of food in our bellies, our group multiplied when we arrived at a nearby park to meet some more locals. I was introduced to a Spaniard by the name of Alberto who told me that I'd have to pay one euro if I wanted to drink. Not quite sure what was happening, I gave him the money, and our entire party made off into the old quarter of the city, climbing up cobbled mountains until we arrived at an old Moorish monument.

This is where I learnt that 'botellon' means 'drinking on the street'.

It was only one of Granada's odd rituals however, as part-way through our session, we were interrupted by the arrival of yet another strange local custom: the midnight tour group.

A horde of Spanish students climbed up the mountain, led by their guide, and stopped right in front of us. Without batting an eyelid, the tour guide gabbled away to his followers, telling them all about the important historical value of the steps we were sitting on. People nodded, took notes in their books and then continued walking down the street.

Twenty minutes later some local kids started chucking rocks at us, so we decided to leave.

Unfortunately it was not too much later that I found myself sitting in a cafe having breakfast. I had three missions for the day ahead: change hostels, discover some examples of good graffiti and explore the Alybacin.

Mission one was taken care of fairly quickly. I'd already booked into the Oasis, a very cosy establishment right in the heart of the old quarter, so I was soon showered and presentable. Mission two was sorted out over breakfast - the women behind the bar of the cafe looked like the kind of person who knew all about graffiti. She did, and with the help of my new companion, Ida, told me where I could find some amazing examples. Mission three was also achieved with the help of Ida, who'd befriended a local boy last night and, in a bid to woo her, he'd agreed to give her a tour of the historical areas in the city.

If you're interested in street art, Granada is definitely a city to mark on your itinerary. It is impossible not find amazing artwork on the walls of this city; every corner will reveal a new plaster canvas. But, a must-see is definitely a section somewhere in the barrio of Realjo, just to the south-east of the Alybacin. Here I found, and photographed profusely, houses and walls covered in what looked like brush-stroked portraits.

The artist is known only as 'el niño de las pinturas' - the kid of the paintings (and his website is here: http://www.elninodelaspinturas.com/). Ask anyone, they'll be able to tell you where it is.

Exhausted after a long day of walking and photographs, I bid Ida and Isaac (the local boy) farewell, leaving them behind in a shishah bar. I thought that it was time to have an early night, but the Oasis would prove to have other plans in mind.

Skipping through a tapas pub crawl and a live-music club where even the band's line-up was improvised, I found myself in an ex-bordello somewhere in the city, sharing a bottle of wine with Jess, a German-American 'army brat' and Natalia, an exchange student from Melbourne. This was also where I met Mitzekatze.

"I don't think he even had a name before I got here," Natalia said, "but he's totally crazy. The love of his life lives outside of the building, but there's this little window that she goes up to, and the two of them will sit there for hours, looking at eachother.

"Once, years ago, she was allowed in here, but for some reason was banished outside. That was when Mitzekatze first tried to commit suicide. He leapt from the top floor of this building - a three-storey drop, but somehow he survived. Hasn't been the same since."

As if on cue, Mitzekatze's focus snapped onto something in the shadows behind me and he bounded away into the darkness.

"I think he can see ghosts," Jess said, giggling between purple-stained teeth.

It was getting late, so late in fact that Natalia's features occasionally blurred into those of a middle-aged man in an outfit far too old for our modern times.

"Make sure you see the Alcazar when you're next in Seville," Mr Irving said as I stood to leave, "the building isn't anywhere near as gorgeous as the Alhambra, but the gardens will strike you down."

I would remember this recommendation, days later, while walking through the gardens of the Alcazar with Phil and Sean. The two boys were traveling around Europe and trying to survive on twenty euros a day. That included transport, which meant that a lot of the time they'd sleep on park benches and face 24 hours without food. Despite all this, the tales of the gardens' beauty had led them to pay the eight euro entry fee without a question.

"Thank you, I'll definitely check them out," I said.

With a simple, civil nod, Mr Irving reached out and shook my hand. Our farewells concluded, I closed my book - Tales from the Alhambra by Washington Irving - and turned to look out the plane window where Andalucia, the Sierra Nevada, and even Galicia's verdure had long vanished, replaced with the lush patchwork of French farms. Ireland, Andrea and weeks of rest now lay only an hour away.

It's no surprise then that my final farewell to Spain came in the form of a relaxed sigh.

One Hundred Grams

The last time I saw Mary, she put her mouth right up to my ear and whispered: "Whatever you do, please sit next to him."

The him she was referring to was Brian, a 35 year old man from Louisiana. He had come up to me at the bus station in Santiago, looking for his bus, which, as luck would have it, happened to be the very same one that I was catching. Mary and I were in the middle of our goodbye, as she was leaving on a different bus bound to Granada - the result of a last minute coin toss decision.

Brian was a giant, but a stooped one due to a neck that thrusted out at a right angle from his shoulders. His arms could easily wrap around a tree trunk and break it in half with a flex - one arm at a time. However, any sense of danger or threat immediately melted away the moment you looked into his eyes. Eyelids hung at half-mast across summer grass orbs, giving the impression of a lamb staring docilely at that friendly metal rod flying towards its temple.

The bus ride from Santiago to Barcelona was 17 hours long. As the sun floated towards the horizon, a familiar landscape flashed past; a roll of film sucked through the spools of a projector at too great a speed, rewinding the scenery of my last five weeks. Nightfall hit over the meseta, burning the celluloid into darkness, and my camino was officially completed.

That left just Brian.

"I love ham, Jimmy, you know?" Brian said, taking a piece of chorizo out of his bag, "and the ham here is fantastic, just superb, you know. What you have to do is go into a supermercado, like El Corte Ingles, you know, and buy yourself a nice pack of ham. All you need is 100 grams. In fact, remember that Jimmy, 100 grams of anything will do you quite nicely over here."

Brian patted his not-too-shabby belly and grinned at me. His eyes still remained lamb-like.

"So, Jimmy, have you accepted Jesus into your life?"

In that instant a building shuddered and collapsed somewhere inside me, killing millions.

It was still 16 hours until Barcelona, and I was helpless as the grinning, ham-obsessed sheep spouted verse after verse of biblical scripture, telling me about the joys of being born again and that "you have to look to the nation of Israel, Jimmy, its fortunes are the clock that counts down to the end of days - think about every nation that has gone against God´s chosen people. Every empire has collapsed, but the Jews have carried on."

Brian´s sermon ended by about the ninth hour of the bus trip, when we were joined by two Nigerian born agains. One of them, Ojo, misheard me and introduced me to his friend as Jimmy the Christian from Sweden (I had earlier made up a story about coming to Jesus so as to get Brian to shut up). Having found the flock he´d never had, Brian and the Nigerians proceeded to chant "Praise God!" and "Hallelujiah" at every stop.

My first experience of Barcelona was a grid of empty streets, flooded with blinding sunlight, and a stumbling attempt to find my hostel, despite having not slept at all. When I finally found the place, I discovered a locked door that refused to open, no matter how many times I buzzed my way up. Luckily, a resident left it open long enough for me to sneak through.

The next challenge was to get into the hostel itself, as it was part of a larger building complex. No amount of knocking achieved anything, until the door opened of its own accord to reveal a startled girl doing her best to find a toilet. Unfortunately, the shock of seeing me appear on the doorstep was too much, and she had no choice but to vomit all over the floor.

Welcome to Barcelona.

A trick that I´ve learnt in hostels is, if you don´t know anyone, just go to bed during the day. Every time I´ve done this, I´ve been woken up about half an hour later by a very apologetic person. The apology is enough to start a conversation, during which point you discover common ground and make plans for the evening.

This is how I met Bianca.

Somehow we ended up at an "Australian" pub, called Hogan´s, in La Rambla, where the Swedish girl behind the bar didn´t understand what Coopers Red was, but swore that Fosters was enough to make it an Aussie establishment. I opted for a Newcastle Brown instead, and at this point was introduced to Jarred, a commerical diver from Adelaide, but more recently of Long Beach, California.

A funny thing I´ve learnt about travel stories is that the other person always tells the better tale. Bianca´s and my eyes goggled at tales of deep sea welding work in the middle of the Atlantic, and of near death experiences in Romania, and yet Jarred whooped with excitement when I told him about walking across Spain.

"Maaaate, I wish I´d had the chance to live your life," Jarred said, having just finished telling me about how he´d been traveling the world and getting paid silly amounts of money since he was 22.

It was an early night for me that day, mainly because somewhere between jumping over a pool of vomit and being woken by Bianca, I had decided to explore the city.

The map I´d been given at the hostel mentioned some place called the "Museum of Comics and Illuminations". This obviously was the most interesting place in the city, so I set off, navigating the grids and streets to find the museum. Another trick I´ve learnt, so as not to look completely like a tourist, is to make a note of the important streets I need to find, and do my best to memorise the general shape of the route ahead. This means that I don´t have to pull out a map on the street, and it works especially well on grids.

But not with maps that don´t list every street you´ll come across.

Having brutally murdered a few hours, I arrived at the non-descript, mirrored glass building that supposedly housed the comic musuem and found it to be empty. A security guard on his smoke break grabbed my map and pointed out Montjuic - the Mountain of the Jews, which is located on the opposite side of the city from where we were standing. It had moved.

I´ll look at comics tomorrow, I decided, thanked the man, and made my way back to the hostel. However, the clouds immediately burst into rain, causing my sleep-deprived mind to pull me aside and offer the most valid counsel ever:

Jimmy, the only option you have now is to go and drink in a bar until the rain stops, and then climb up to the top of La Sagrada Familia.

Trusting in the better judgement of my higher consciousness, I found the nearest cafe-bar, sat it out until the rain stopped (only a half hour later) and promptly skated my way across wet pavement towards Gaudi´s incomplete cathedral.

I don´t usually suffer from vertigo, and the climb up the tower was definitely lovely, awe-inspiring, and filled with all sorts of naturally-inspired architecture. But, when it came to climbing back down, especially down the madman´s bowel of a spiralling staircase, I found myself in the grip of white knuckled terror. Definitely enough to evaporate the warm glow of alcohol from my veins, yet without doing a thing about my sense of balance.

The experience must have driven any desire to see Gaudi´s further works from my mind, because the next day was spent exploring the works of Dali and Picasso instead.

Of the two musuems, Dali´s was by far my favourite exhibition. I didn´t know too much about his work, beyond his interest in drawing his wife nude, lots of surreal landscapes and his interest in cannibalism. However, it´s his work in pen and ink, around the mid 1960s, that I really admired. Ironically, it was his religious ilustrations that I loved the most.

The Picasso Musuem was also great, especially its temporary exhibition about how many artists have been fascinated with Velasquez´s Las Meninas. Also, being an art neanderthal, it was interesting to see Picasso´s earlier works, and to finally confirm that despite his famous work looking like something Ken Done could´ve painted, he actually had a lot of classical skill and talent behind him.

This was, for the most part, my experience of Barcelona. Despite my disappointment with the Camino´s tourist epidemic, I fully embraced Barcelona´s, having always known what to expect there. There was only one time that I had a truly local experience.

Catching the tram from the city centre, I made my way to the outer suburbs of the city, where I was greeted by Carlos, from the camino. He´d invited me over to dinner at his apartment, where he had prepared a Catalonian-style meal.

It turns out that I was the guest of honour here, as Carlos´two young daughters greeted me at the door.

"When they heard you were coming, they went straight into their rooms to put on their make-up and dresses. I think they like you." Carlos said, with a cheeky grin (his daughters were 9 and 11).

All throughout our walk together, Carlos had always told me that he cooked an amazing tortilla. He was not proven wrong - it was by far the best tortilla I´d tasted, with zucchini as an extra special ingredient.

Carlos´youngest daughter was overcome with excitment by my arrival, and ended up having a heated "discussion" with her dad in her bedroom. Shortly afterwards I heard her ask how to say "buenas noches" in English, before she sheepishly crept out to give me a kiss goodnight.

Before leaving that night, I asked Carlos if he had kept to his suggestion of spending each day as if he were walking the camino. He nodded and smiled, saying, "Jimmy, I can´t stop walking at all."

Neither could I, really. My last day in Barcelona saw me climbing Montjuic in an effort to finally see the comic book museum. Obviously it must´ve been a massive collection, to have been moved to such a prestigious location. Yet, it was strangely not listed on the map, and no-one in the tourist information had a clue what I was talking about. In the end, I was directed to the Military museum, where I was told that this castle held the comic collection.

I paid for my entry, navigated through the impressive fort, and came across my goal. There, sandwiched between some stones from an ancient Jewish graveyard, was a small collection of glass cabinets. Inside were some yellowing sheets of comics; pirates, cowboys, knights and soldiers from the 1950s. All in Spanish, and completely out of my grasp.

In an attempt to cheer myself up, I decided to check out the Miro Foundation in my last hours before the bus to Granada.

A large swarm of bright colours and sweet smells, bleating in American accents, surrounded me once I was inside. They leapt from room to room, walking up to paintings and sculptures, cracking jokes about how bad they looked, before grabbing a friend to take their picture next to "the painting that Miro obviously made for his fifth birthday".

I couldn´t help but think back to Brian´s rule about 100 grams. Just enough culture to say you´ve done something, but not enough to really get it. The Americans must have it written in their constitution.

Memories of Brian were hard to eject from my mind when it came to catching the bus to Granada. Though I knew he was safely back in Louisiana, my eyes kept avoiding contact with any potential anglophone.

Instead, I ended up catching the bus part of the way with a Catalonian called Jordi. He wore a "dreadlock mullet" - the trendy shaved head with dreadlocks spurting out from just above the neck. I couldn´t help but ask him what it all meant. In an effort to practise his English, Jordi told me that he was an "okupo", a Spanish squatter, and that rasta culture is a big part of that scene. Funnily enough, I´d actually passed his squat on my first day in Barcelona, when trying to find the Comic museum.

I showed him the picture I´d taken at the front of his building - a piece of grafitti saying "Tourist Terrorist".

Jordi nodded sadly, but then smiled and said, "If you like grafitti, you will love Granada. Just ask around."

I wished him well and we parted ways. In another 11 hours I would have the chance to see if he was right or not.

Beyond the End of the Earth, Back to the Field of Stars

There is an older path that lies beyond the terminus of the Camino de Santiago. Striking out west towards the Atlantic Ocean, the Camino Fisterra has its roots buried deep in pre-Christian culture.

At Fisterra, the End of the Earth, you can find a gateway to the underworld deep below the freezing waters. Here pagans came to celebrate the sun, watching as it fell to its death in the extinguishing ocean. Others, though, came to witness the procession of the dead -- loved ones who had departed in the previous year, marching along a dirt road and into the mysteries of the eternal deep.

Today it is a seaside resort crawling with tourists.

The road to Fisterra was a colder, harder road than the relatively pampered one I´d stumbled along to Santiago. Though only three days, the path takes you away from the catered, tourist-flooded areas and into a wilderness where you´ll be lucky to find one refuge within a day´s trekking.

Most of the time this would be fine, as historically the Fisterra walk is not as heavily trafficked as the major Camino Frances route. Unfortunately, Hape Kerkeling decided to write a book.

Apparently it was very popular, because this year saw an unprecedented peak in the number of Germans making the pilgrimage -- not only to Santiago, but also beyond it to the usually footnoted Fisterra. Albergues found themselves booked out within twenty minutes of opening for the day, even burning through their usually sufficient summer overflow options. While turning up late to an albergue pre-Santiago wasn´t a problem (most towns had several accommodation sources), the Fisterra was cruelly barren and forced stragglers to march out for anywhere between 12 and 20km for their next chance at a bed (which was probably occupied by a man called Rudolph).

To make things even more terrifying, I overheard rumours that Krekeling´s book is going to be made into a feature film sometime in the next year or so.

And it is here that I have to shake my head sadly. Not because I don´t want Germans making this pilgrimage, but because I don´t actually think that the Camino de Santiago is a true adventure anymore.

Millions of dollars have been pumped into the Camino Frances, making it one of the cushiest walking experiences, where you know that your chance of a bed at the end of the day is 100%, and that while a lot of locals won´t speak your language, at least you know that their menu is almost identical to the town you just departed.

Why then would anyone want to make a movie or write a book about what is now just a very long walk to the beach?

It may have something to do with the pagans, dancing naked on the beach as they cheered the sun onto its watery grave.

There is a lot of mystique and romance associated with the Camino, and I can definitely see why. You walk through a beautiful, everchanging landscape. You hear stories about interesting pilgrims (the two men who started at their front door in Holland, stopping every hour to drink wine and eat meat, or the man who carried a tuba all the way with him from Cambridge). You have heard the legends of St James, and of the knight Sir Roland, and it all sounds like an epic quest.

And then, there are the aphorisms that you hear along the way. Paul, a priest from South Africa told me, while massaging his swollen knee, that "you stort yor Caminoo wan you leave your front door." And Laurie, who I was later reunited with in a small restaurant 12kms short of Fisterra, smiled despite dripping with rainwater (reports suggest that this was the wettest May in the history of Spain´s weather records), saying, "it´s out here, while walking, that you see the true nature of God. It´s here, not in that Cathedral back there."

But, most memorable of all, are the words of Nora. She was the first pilgrim I met, many weeks ago, as I unpacked my bag in St Jean Pied du Port. A traveller from Belgium, she´d just arrived in St Jean that day, having not only walked from there to Santiago two years earlier, but also trekking from Le Puy in the south of France to close her personal moebius strip.

We shared dinner in a Basque restaurant, where she said to me, "Remember, no matter what happens, you were chosen to walk this Camino."

Those words stuck by me throughout my whole journey, especially when I was shivering in a wet tent, or losing my mind while stumbling that extra 12km.

For me, seeing the ocean was a lot more momentous than walking into the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. There is something electrifying about watching ancient trees peel back one by one, drawing the speck of blue slate water closer and closer towards you until, finally, it is the only colour in your vision and the sky and sea have melded into a singularity.

Despite the rain and my heavy backpack (once again plumped up to its 20kg bulk), I took off my boots and walked barefoot into the ocean, taking the last part of the pilgrimage feeling ice water and sharp sand scour my feet clean.

In contrast, the Cathedral at Santiago was a nest of tourists, clambering over eachother to take photos of golden statues. The density of money and a willingness to spend had drawn all manner of opportunists to the steps of the Cathedral, including a man dressed as a pilgrim selling lottery tickets.

Happily, though, none of them were Germans. In their defence, the Deutschlanders actually took the time to walk the entire length of the Camino. Santiago, on the other hand, seemed to have swallowed them up, leaving American pips in their place, crammed into every alley way and hotel room.

And this is why I would not recommend the Camino Frances to anyone. It has been gutted, hollowed out and transformed into a symbol for people to parade about in a series of photos and stamps. St James and his Field of Stars is top heavy with tourism, and the sense of achievement, growth and challenge that a pilgrimage should represent seems to have faded away.

Days earlier, while still walking towards Santiago, I had the pleasure of walking alongside Carlos from Barcelona. Always embodying the soul of the true pilgrimage, he said to me, "When I return home, I plan to live my life as if I was walking the camino. Everyday you wake up, prepare yourself, and then march on towards a destination. It is not like my old life, where somedays all I´d do is wake up, work, then go back to sleep. You need to keep your life´s purpose in mind, whatever it is, and walk towards it. Every day."

Santiago de Compostela, then, was not the end for me. Neither was Fisterra, despite its romantic, pagan connotations.

Or maybe I´m just grumpy and spaced out after the 17 hour bus ride from Barcelona -- but that´s a story for another day.