A 5,500 km Hike - or Everyone Has Their Own Camino

This time the story will not be about a journey, but a story about a story about a journey. Last Thursday evening we went to the restaurant Annas Dārzs for a meeting with two young people - Zaiga Lazdiņa and Mārtiņš Kalnbērziņš - who, over the course of 8 months, completed a roughly 5,500 km hike from the Polish city of Ustka to Lisbon in Portugal.

The gathering was well attended. Arriving half an hour early, we found all the seats in the restaurant already taken. A member of staff brought in a few chairs from the terrace so that people could sit, but even so a group of interested visitors remained standing and crowded near the entrance. I do not know whether the information had appeared elsewhere, but if everyone came via a Facebook Event, then social networks do have power!

The long-distance walkers showed videos and photographs taken in Poland, then Germany, and thereafter the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Portugal (also viewable on their blog hikinginlatvia.mozello.lv). The account consisted mainly of answers to questions from those present, which were mostly practical - about the weather, money, distances, professions, motivation - yet the presenters themselves seemed to lean more towards feelings and the purely spiritual gains. Mārtiņš stated that after this journey he had simply become a better person (whatever that might mean), while Zaiga said she had become stronger, with a greater ability to stand up for herself.

I first became interested in the Camino de Santiago four years ago after watching the film "The Way" (2010). And the feeling has not left me (even after that evening meeting with the Latvian travellers) that the Camino de Santiago - or any long path requiring both great physical and psychological effort - is chosen by a person when they are grappling with an unresolved internal problem. Most often it is a restlessness with oneself, an inability to forgive oneself, or to come to terms with the reality that life presents.

Certainly, when we speak of such a hike - sleeping in tents, sore feet, the constant inaccessibility of drinking water, and similar discomforts - we are also speaking about each person's comfort threshold, which they are willing or not willing to lower sufficiently. Perhaps an evening of storytelling like this reinforces one person's conviction that it is definitely not for them, while for another their eyes light up and they begin looking for a way to make something like it happen.

In any case, this kind of format - first-hand experience storytelling - is something I very much enjoy, and I am glad that more and more we are sharing something genuine, "commercially unpackaged" information.