Notes from the trail
Setting out from Malpica along the coast.
Over the past two Saturdays, I’ve been sharing extracts from an ongoing writing project about my experiences on the Camiño dos Faros.
The camiño follows Galicia’s coast for 200km and is organised into eight stages. When I walked the path seven years ago, I travelled without a map, following simple green waymarking arrows. The narrow trail winds through an extraordinary array of landscapes, from pine-edged estuaries to gorse-strewn cliff edges. In some places, it is more of a scramble than a hike.
But the journey begins at the harbour of Malpica, a bustling fishing village on Galicia’s northern coast.
The harbour at Malpica
Malpica marks the northernmost tip of the Costa da Morte, Galicia’s fabled coast of death. It has been home to a fishing fleet for over eight hundred years. The harbour is busy, and the weekday market sells the latest catch: shining sardines and mackerel, red-eyed bream, brown octopus and countless crabs. Fishermen sail far from the shelter of the port into the deep waters of the Atlantic to bring in their haul.
The market is also famed for its percebes, or goose barnacles. There is an ancient myth that geese emerged fully formed from these mysterious and twisted shells. In truth, cracking open a cooked percebe reveals sweet flesh that fills my mouth with the taste of the sea.
Harvesting percebes demands dangerous intimacy with the crashing waves. Percebes grow from cracks in the ocean-soaked rocks like the fingers of alien hands, and percebeiros must be part climbers and part divers as they traverse the turbulent space between land and sea. Hanging from ropes and battered by the tides, they chisel the barnacles from the rocks, collecting them in mesh bags that hang from their waists. The high price of percebes is small compensation for the risk of gathering them.
Centuries ago, Malpica’s wealth grew as whalers from the Basque region sought a sheltered port closer to the pelagic depths. Though the whaling industry has long since left, its bloody history is memorialised in this town. Down by the harbour stands a bronze statue of a whale. Its wide open mouth is surrounded by sharp teeth, and its long curled tail stretched upwards, with a childlike monstrosity is alluring and terrifying.
There is a sense of space here. The sky stretches endlessly beyond the long sea wall that encloses the harbour. Atlantic waves fill the air with salt spray. The wind is oceanic, unbroken over thousands of miles as it gathers pace to meet the land. It pushes through the maze of Malpica’s streets, coats windows with a salt film and draws rust from concrete walls.
Setting out
Like the sea breeze, dawn pushes through the hotel room’s shutters and urges me to wake. It is time to walk, but with no prospect of another soft bed to fall into at the end of the day, my limbs are reluctant to move. Tonight, I will sleep wherever I stop, sheltered only by the stars. So, for now, I hide from the rising sun.
It is late morning before I blink in the soft light of an overcast day. I amble towards the sea to find the way out of Malpica. A green arrow stencilled on the edge of a stone bench confirms that I have found the footpath. I walk up the hill, glancing over my shoulder to see houses fading into the distance. The wide path gives way to a narrow, unmade trail that winds through the gorse, heather, grasses and wildflowers. The headland is robed in sunlight.
Barely a few kilometres in, a little bench invites me to sit. On its surface, two pairs of footprints with a love heart between them are painted in camiño green. This path encourages me to pause.
The smooth, hard cover of my journal balances on my knees as I breathe and take my pencil in my hand. I begin snatching thoughts from the wind, a jumble of words tumbling in the breeze. Half a page in, I find wave-like fluency as sentences emerge.
No recollection is quite like living. Others have told me that they can vividly imagine their personal history, using photographs, diaries and mental memorabilia as doorways to re-experience their past. But time travel has always been beyond my abilities. Precious as photographs are, they are exhibits behind museum glass, always out of reach and speaking only silent secrets. So many images capture moments I barely remember as I recall scant facts about the situations they depict. Sometimes, I stare at a face I know to be mine, but I see only the eyes of a stranger. Whose life is captured in these pictures if it is not my own?
But words have always offered a measure of certainty. Looking back at old diaries, I recognise my handwriting, even in those experimental pages where my letter forms changed to suit my latest teenage self-expression, pulling graphite over paper to scratch myself into curling, exotic shapes. Words are a continuous line from my past to my present. And while I cannot follow their thread directly into my memory, I can trust the hand that documents my life.
The empty page is a safe space to talk to myself across time. In the stories I tell, I create myself.
Finding my way
As I approach the beach at Praia de Seiruga, the path diverges. A fork continues inland among the rocks, but the green arrow on a metal pole points down and to the right, towards seaweed-covered rocks. The beach’s empty white sand stretches ahead of me, but reaching it means fording a fast-flowing stream. Clear fresh water carves a deep channel beneath the final rock but a stride further, and the sand seems to rise again towards the flowing surface. As I leap in, the cold water circles my ankles, and I feel a warmer current of salt water flowing with the incoming tide.
Waymarking would be washed away on the shifting edge between sand and sea, but keeping the sea at my right shoulder is an obvious choice. My sandals sink and slip in the sand, and the top-heavy weight of my backpack unsteadies me. Reaching a wooden boardwalk on the far side of the beach, green arrows and a firmer surface promise a more manageable path ahead.
But climbing up from the beach, the wind rips the breath from my lungs. On my right, a steep slope falls away towards jagged rocks and crashing waves. I lean into the security of the hillside. One tumble, and I might fall from the path into the surf. I struggle to stay upright against gusting blows. I instinctively reach out my left hand to balance myself, grazing it against the sharp spines of the gorse. Blood wells from scratches on my palm. My tired legs give way, and I slump sideways against a boulder, landing awkwardly in rough grass. I am shaking. The relentless north wind pulls hot tears from my eyes.
I scrunch my face in concentration, trying to remember the impulses that brought me to this point, but I see only the pattern of light as it illuminates the blood vessels in my eyelids.
I am scattered in the gale. I chase after the fragments, blown in every direction, desperately trying to piece myself together.
Becoming real
I survey the route that brought me here, seeing the winding coastline stretch back towards Malpica. In the distance, the offshore islands are blurry with salt spray against the slate grey sea. So many of the bays and inlets where I rested are invisible to me now, hidden deep in the jagged crevices between headlands. And ahead, I glimpse the next stage of my journey.
I stepped onto the camiño at Malpica, unsure of the path ahead, uncertain how I might let go. But now, my intentions for the remainder of the camiño are as clear as pools of water left stranded by the tide.
Too often, my life has felt like a haphazard collage of disconnected fragments, some so strange, fantastical and terrifying I doubt they could have happened. Scenes scribbled over, rewritten, erased, some written in another's hand, leaving me constantly sorting, editing, revising, and making sense of the silences. In the past, I worked diligently with the source material I had, becoming the story I told myself, even as I hid in the dark, uncertain of what was real.
But here, my story is as real as the rock that shelters me, the crashing waves, the north wind, the blood drying on my trembling hand.
The sun warms my body. I am finally on my way.
Postscript
It’s been seven years since I walked away from the end of the Camiño dos Faros.
In the years that led to my adventures in Galicia, I had often felt a deep yearning for home, and I had tried to create it in so many places. But on the camiño, I came to realise that my feeling of rootlessness came not from my circumstances but from my soul. I could only discover the truth of my restless life by walking.
In my last days on the camiño, I came to some conclusions about how I wanted to live: putting my family first, prioritising the quality of friendship over the quantity of acquaintances, and realising that work isn’t my purpose. I honour the intentions I carried with me, and the determination that brought me to the end of the earth.
This and the previous two Saturday articles I’ve published (read them here and here) are extracts from my ongoing writing project. Autobiographical writing is uncomfortable at times, as I continue to make sense of my experiences and find the story that is mine alone to tell. These pieces are very much a work in progress, and I’d value your reflections.
I’m just seven years into this new phase of life beyond the trail, and there is still a long way to go. But I’m grateful for every footstep along the way.
And I’m grateful for your company on the journey.
Felt like we were walking it with you Dru. As someone who doesn’t even do 1 full day of walking let alone multiples thank you for the vicarious adventure.
Thank you for sharing your story with us. Big love x