POKEMON CAMINO

There is a tradition on the Camino of collecting ink stamp impressions into your credencial (pilgrim passport) from hostels, churches and other places of interest. A completed credencial presented at Santiago de Compostela is rewarded with a Certificate of Completion for walking the Camino. For most pilgrims this collecting of stamps is embraced as a simple part of the daily routine of walking the Camino. However for a minority, and a vocal minority at that, the collection of Camino stamps has become a highly competitive process reminiscent to me of the hiatus of the early days of the Pokemon craze.

Now almost every day on the Camino I would berate myself to be less judgemental about a whole host of completely unimportant issues but sometimes being judgemental just feels right.

So on the day in question I was walking from Los Arcos to Logrono and was looking forward to visiting the Iglesia de Santo, a 12th Century Knights Templar octagonal church based on the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The tiny church was in Torres del Rio, a small hill side village perched above the Rio Linares. Much of the Camino crosses through the rural terrain of northern Spain – a land which, through mechanisation and general urban drift, shows all the signs of communities in decline. Sa Vende signs abound everywhere, boarded up and collapsed buildings are commonplace. So the Camino has become a significant revenue stream for these small towns like Torres del Rio, as some quarter of a million pilgrims journey through every year. So we can surely be sympathetic and understanding of  just a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit? So as with many of the churches on the Camino there was an attendant in place at the Inglesia de Santo to provide security for the church and to give the ink stamps for those who wanted their credencials marked. Perfectly reasonably there was a 1 euro charge to enter the church.

I had only been inside the church a few moments when I became aware of some sort of disturbance at the entrance and could see that the young attendant was becoming quite flustered. I thought I might be able to help – how naïve was that? There was a physically intimidating man of some undetermined heritage towering over the attendant who was sitting at a small table at the entrance. It was obvious that he wanted her to stamp his pilgrim passport but he clearly hadn’t understood that there was an entrance fee of the 1 euro which included the pilgrim stamp. I thought that there was a break down in communication which perhaps could be sorted out by deferring to the global language of diplomacy and negotiation - English. So I carefully and calmly interjected by explaining the process by which the payment of 1 euro granted entrance to the church and the access to the credencial stamp. It became apparent very quickly that there had been no breakdown in communication as the belligerent travellershouted at me that he understood exactly what the deal was but that he wasn’t interested in the deal on offer. He wasn’t interested in going into the church – he just wanted the stamp in his credencial. I explained that to get the stamp he had to go into the church which would cost him all of 1 euro to contribute to the upkeep of the church. At this point the young attendant finally lost her rag, picked up the credencial, unstamped, and effectively marched the man out of the church.

I went and sat on a wall outside of the church and let my disbelief and frustration ebb away. After five or ten minutes I went back into the church. I apologised to the attendant for the crass behaviour of my so-called fellow pilgrim and sat and reflected in the cool and the calm of the austere medieval church. But this was one day when I didn’t berate myself for being judgmental – that man had been an arsehole in any language.