SANITIAGO DE COMPOSTELA PART I
The flight from Madrid to Santiago was a short but drastic one. At only forty-five minutes, the plane stays at only about 11,000 feet instead of the 30,000 you would expect on a longer flight. It isn’t worth climbing up to those altitudes for such a short flight. This creates the great perquisite of short flights: getting a bird’s eye view of the landscape. You’re not going to see anything but clouds and horizon at 30,000 but at 11,000 you see for miles around. You can see plots of land, individual mountains and hills rise and fall. You can see the twists and turns that rivers ebb out of the ground. Entire towns and forests are available for your viewing pleasure. Now when you go from Madrid, in the heart of the Iberian Peninsula on a plateau, and fly northwest to Galicia the biggest thing you are going to notice is the transition from yellow to green. Imagine the Midwest and the northeast of the U.S. packed in to about 300 miles. Plains of various plotted rectangles and trapezoids of earth-toned hues gives way to ancient mountains, rounded at the top and green. Once
you see green, you’re in Galicia. It’s like seeing an atlas first hand.
I landed in Santiago de Compostela, a small airport with a single terminal. From what my parents tell me, my grandparents are from villages with twenty-minute drives from here but I have no idea where and they are no longer alive. So I filed out of the airplane, the people in a rush walking saliently faster than the rest of us. I would have guessed they had connecting flights but Santiago is a small city in a west, forgotten corner of Europe. It’s the usually the destination of a connecting flight not a link to another airport. Anyway with a couple of minutes I was in baggage claim. Like everyone else, I walked around the belt in a circumscribed queue, waiting patiently for my luggage. I looked around the belt for women to look at wile I waited. I like the way they dress here but I can’t quite describe it yet. My large green camping backpack emerged relatively soon, rotating conspicuously among Samsonites. So I leaned over and as it passed in front me of me I reached over and pulled it up with a strong yank, my feet perpendicular to the belt, I tried my best to pick it up as high as possible without hitting the people to my right and left. SO with pack raised as high as I could keep it, I took a step back in to empty space and lowered it on to my shoulder. Traveling when all you need in one bag is amazingly liberating. Strapped in I walked out of baggage claim in to a small crowd, caged behind a guard rail waiting for friends, relatives, and clients. Behind them I could see a damp cloudy day through the window as well as a queue of white taxi cabs with red stripes.
I walked outside and stepped in to the first one I saw. I climbed in to the back seat, throwing my pack in first and said “Buenos Dias.” The mischievous looking driver looked back at me through the rearview and responded with “Tramposo.” I asked how I was cheating and he told me “You are supposed to walk here not fly.” Knowing a bit about Santiago, I told him I wasn’t a pilgrim. Santiago is the finish line of a thousand-year-old pilgrimage route stretching back to France. Today many people still complete the trek by foot, bicycle, or even horse back although I suspect its more for a bit of adventure tourism than for devout piety or indulgences (basically points to get in to heaven). A lot of them carry the kind of backpack I had so that is where he got the impression. SO I told him in “Well I am pilgrim but Santiago is not where I am ending but where I am starting.” “Como Quieras.” Or “whatever you want” he responded. Finally he asked me where I was going and I said to take me to the center of town. “Al casco historico?” The historic core of town sounded perfect to me so off we went.
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