The Amateur Traveler talks to Ben Dixon about biking the route of the Camino di Santiago in northern Spain. The Camino di Santiago is a an ancient pilgrim trail that runs across northern Spain from the border with France to Santiago di Compostella. The cathedral in Santiago di Compostella reputedly holds the remains of St. James. Modern day pilgrims are sometimes drawn by faith and sometimes just drawn by the journey itself to trek for a month across the varied landscapes of northern Spain. As an American, Ben did not have a month of vacation but rather than be one of those pilgrims who only traverses the very end of the trail he chose to take on the pilgrim route on a bicycle. Along the way he stayed in the hostels that house the many pilgrims where he met people who had been walking from far beyond the border with France. Through countryside, cities and picturesque towns he rode in both sunshine and driving rain, but the highlight of the trip might not be what you think.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices (https://megaphone.fm/adchoices)
amateur traveler is in its 20th year now but can you imagine if I had people on the show who had never been to the destination but had just read about it or seen a movie about it that wouldn’t make any sense at all and you wouldn’t listen we all know how important it is to receive advice from people who know a destination to get the most authentic local experience and a great option for experiencing this is explore worldwide and they authentic small group Adventures led by local tour leaders perfect for solo Travelers who want to meet like-minded people with a desire for adventure I’m often an independent traveler but two of my last three trips were with small group tours because they organize everything and it’s a lot easier if you want to recreate the tour I did to Malta they have a Malta and Gozo Discovery tour I’m intrigued by one of their tours called A Taste of Sicily the company again is explore worldwide wi and visit exploreworld wide.com to learn more and thanks to explore worldwide for sponsoring this episode of amateur traveler the nights are long the days are short and the weather is chilly to downright cold depending on where you are it’s a good time to slip into a quint iconic Mongolian cashmere sweaters which started only $50 you can treat yourself to Everyday luxury at an affordable price with Quint if you really want to die D in luxury you can check out their leather handbags washable silk shirts and European linen sheet sets whatever you’re looking for at Quint all the prices are 50 to 80% less than similar Brands and they do that by partnering directly with top factories and cutting out the middleman they only work with factories that use safe ethical and responsible manufacturing processes and of course they use premium fabrics and finishes for that luxury feel in every piece but you’ve already heard me rave about my Quint travel pants treat yourself this winter without the luxury price tag go to quince. comom trer for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order that’s qu nc.com trer to get free shipping and 365 day returns quinn.com treler and thanks to Quin for sponsoring this episode of amateur traveler I got my bags pack on a roll I’m heading out there and I’m ready to look good inp amateur traveler episode 260 today the amateur traveler talks about pilgrims and Pathways and bicycles as we visit the Kamina de Santiago in Northern [Music] Spain welcome to the amateur traveler I’m your host Chris Christensen before we get into this week’s interview I do have two news stories for you the first one is still playing out in the news and that is a hornets nest that American Airlines kicked when it decided to pull its fairs off of orbits now there’s going to be a lot written about this story but basically American Airlines is just fighting for a greater share of the $5 ticketing fee and you can understand why it’s a tough day to be an airline but one of the things that has already happened because of this is Expedia announced that they were not taking the American fairs off of their site but making them just a little harder to find and then even saber that was originally started by American which is a ticketing agency has apparently made it harder for their employees to book American Airlines so stay tuned this story is a bit of a showdown and we’ll be hearing more about it and then speaking of showdowns a pilot in San Francisco had his Deputy status removed and his federally issue firearm confiscated because he took pictures of the San Francisco Airport all in public areas just showing that the security that the grounds crew go through is not as serious as the security that the pilots go through the TSA didn’t like that for links to both these stories check out the show notes at amateur traveler.com I’d like to welcome the show Ben Dixon from Atlanta who has come to talk to us about the Cino de Santiago Ben welcome to the show thanks Chris I’m just glad to be here now this is an interesting thing when Ben pitched this to me I don’t know if everybody is familiar with the old Pilgrim way across Northern Spain the community of Santiago I’ve always thought this would be a great trip but who has the time to walk it in a month and you didn’t but you still did the Cino Santiago tell us your secret here that’s right the communo to Santiago is actually a collection of routes to Santiago de compostella so in general people will start just past the French border come into Spain and then walk for about 30 days to get to Santiago de compostella I didn’t have that much time because you know I have an office job and uh only get about two weeks of vacation or so so I rode a bicycle across it according to the church you can uh get there in various ways so you can hike which is the traditional way or you can ride a horse you could take a donkey or you can do like I did and take the bicycle tell you had mentioned that to me I don’t know that I had heard anybody who had done that way I know people who’ve hiked it like Craig and Linda the Indie travel podcast friends who are the show right but is that something that’s common and I just missed it or is that still fairly uncommon out of the number of pilgrims that do the Camino each year I’d say it’s maybe 5% of the pilg that I came across were on bicycles another thing about that though is that I also stayed on the pilgrimage route I didn’t take the uh Road Route there four bicycles that you can take so some people will take their road bikes for example and just ride a separate route from the actual Trail to get to Santiago there’s different ways like there’s the Camino Frances there’s Cino dorte there’s different paths you can take but there’s not a required route that you must take to get to Santiago so most bicyclist I imagine would take the road cuz it’s a lot lot easier and when you say a required route there’s no particular way you have to go so that when you get to the Santiago decostello you get the four square badge for the pilgrim rench route yeah the way you get from town to town is not defined they don’t check that there’s no way they would know really that you went one way or the other I guess we should talk about the uh credential for people that don’t know about the Camino you have a sort of pilgrim passport that you use to verify that you are a pilgrim on a Camino as you travel through each of these small towns along the way and on that passport when you arrive at a hostel or in some restaurants you can get a stamp that proves that you were in that town uh you use those stamps when you arrive in Santiago de compostella to kind of prove that you’ve done the required distances to achieve the compostella which is a kind of form that says you’ve completed the communo I know that historically this is a religious pilgrimage and it was typically done by people who were catholic I’m interested in doing it and I’m not Catholic what led you to choose this as a vacation option well uh several years ago I read a book by uh believe his name is Tim Moore it’s called travels with my donkey he went on the Camino with a donkey which is even more unusual than taking a bicycle I read the book and I put it back on the shelf and I kind of had this idea floating around in the back of my head for a while and when it came time to start planning vacation it just sort of came to mind and I like I said I didn’t have enough time to do the hike which I would have preferred to do but I did have a bicycle in two weeks so I did what I could would that some Logistics you brought your own bike yes there are a number of different options for getting a bike in Spain and riding the Camino you can ship your own bike over you can check your bike on the plane or you can rent bikes they have uh one-way rental services in towns like Pamplona which is where I started uh after evaluating all those options the shipping was very expensive that’s all determined by the size of the box and I used a regularized bike box that you might get from a cycling shop or you know your bike might arrive in if you ordered it and people I’ve read of people cutting the size of the box down to make it a little bit cheaper to ship but ultimately I decided I would take my own bike because the price of renting somebody else’s bike which I I don’t know what the quality of that bike might be versus checking my bike as luggage on the plane was comparable interesting yeah it also depends on which carrier uh you fly on as far as cost I was flying Delta because I had theet it kind of before I decided that I would take my own bike some carriers will charge a lot more than others for bikes specifically they’re interested to know that it is a bike and not just a box that you’re checking so you want to check with your carrier you know as far as their fees and um rules regarding bicycles and then in terms of the bike rental since there aren’t that many people riding the Camino it sounds like bike rental is just an option in general for somebody who wants to go over do some bike riding even if this isn’t the route they wanted to do oh sure you can rent bicycles for whatever purpose in Spain but there are some that cater to the Camino okay I’m not sure if they encourage you know I don’t know if it’s road bikes or mountain bikes but you could probably get either and you were using a mountain bike how in shape do you have to be to bike that route hiking I’ve never got the impression it’s a terribly strenuous route except that it’s a month long well my bike isn’t exactly a mountain bike I have a hybrid got it so I don’t have front suspension on the bicycle it’s just a solid Fork as far as the amount of effort involved in biking it versus hiking I would say it’s a lot easier to bike it than it is to hike it I am not an avid cyclist by any means like at home I don’t ride every day or anything like that I enjoy it but I don’t do it as much as someone else might a serious cyclist would I guess for me I’m curious of how biger the Hills if I uh want to try and talk my wife into this so yeah there are a lot of Hills I started in Pamplona ended in Santiago so it starts off hilly then it becomes more and more flat as you get to the plains in central Northern Spain and then it becomes hilly again I would say for level of Fitness though anybody could do this what you might vary is the distance that you go per day so if you only have two weeks you’ll want to calculate out how much time you need if you enjoy being outside and riding your bike I don’t think it would be very hard to do and then is that how long you took two weeks uh it took me about 10 days okay and that’s about how many miles per day well I did about 60 kilometers a day okay so 36 miles or so uh yeah you know if you’re a cyclist on the road you can do way more than that but the thing about the Camino itself is that it’s not paved for the most part like only a small percentage of it is rural backward roads and things like that uh most of it is unpaved uh gravel it may be single track so you know very thin Trail that’s very Rocky it may be red clay so you get slowed down a lot depending on the weather and the terrain there were plenty of points where that’s was going up a really Rocky Hill and I just I had to get off and just push it but that said doing it and I don’t necessarily recommend that you try to hurry through the Camino because part of it is not about being at the end in Santiago it’s all about doing the Camino itself and being out there with other pilgrims and meeting people in the small towns and enjoying your time getting to Santiago not necessarily arriving there well that’s a good transition away from the logistics into the experience what surprised you first of all about the trip well the trail the way itself is a lot more diverse than I imagined it would be when I was planning the trip you see a lot of pictures if you go online and you do research on what you’re going to be seeing there you always see like the huge plane with the winding dirt path on it and a couple of pilgrims just walking along leisurely but it really transitions from a lot of different types of terrain and culture and that’s one of the things that I love about Spain is uh there’s so many different little pockets of culture and there’s so many different things to see as you travel across it but you know you’re always kind of surprised at what you might run into for example for example going through the wine region of Spain you know you come come down from the hills and then all of a sudden for as far as you can see there are Vineyards and you’re just on this little red clay road riding through them or you know at the end of a long day of going up and down Hills you finally see that church on the horizon there stuff like that it’s just very interesting to kind of be out there in rural Spain and then you bump into these little pockets of culture okay and then just kind of bounding the experience the best day and then maybe the day you thought who who thought this was a good idea I’ll start with uh who thought this was a good idea day that was probably day one U my first day out because I left from U Pamplona or really just a little suburb right outside of Pamplona and uh it was kind of raining and foggy and the very first climb is Alto de prone which as I said I had imagined you know there’s going to be these huge Plains and like this nice Winding Road well I mean you know it’s not Mount Everest but um climbing Al pron in the rain on the bicycle on single track it’s so foggy that you can barely make out the huge windmills like just up the edge of the hill and you can’t see anything of the city you know it was so muddy that the wheels on the bike would no longer stun so standing there cleaning mud out of the brakes on the bike I kind of thought you know what have I gotten myself into here and as far as the best day H that one’s tougher and there’s so many every day is so nice out there I was lucky to have really good weather the whole time that I was told that the weather could be very uh variable and you can get storms and then sunlight in the afternoon things like that but I love your attitude that you described pushing a bike uphill the fog and the mud and then say that you had good weather every day but uh yeah I should say that that one day the first day was the only day and it had been raining in advance of my arrival all over Northern Spain but that day was the only day that wasn’t perfect every other day it was it was always a little bit chilly but uh it was just clear skies and just beautiful every single day after that well it might be difficult for people who’ve only been to for instance andal and seen the sort of the hot warm sunny parts of Spain to picture Northern Spain but I picture something that is a lot Greener so therefore a lot more rain right I’ve been down to Sevilla and other parts of Spain on previous trips and the north is my favorite part it’s just so Lush and green it’s a market difference from southern Spain where it’s more like I guess you know the spaghetti western Texas kind of look to it if people are planning on going to Spain I would say you know definely go see the north Barcelona bilb that area none of those cities are on the communo friend space but it should definitely be visited as you go to Spain okay who was the most interesting person you met along the way my impression is that that is part of the experience is your fellow Travelers that is definitely part of the experience I felt a little unusual being the only person that I saw most days on a bicycle but at night when you stop at the hospitals you meet all the other people who’ have been you know hiking all day and I would say the most interesting person that I met was this Austrian man who had walked from his front door to um where we were along the Cino uh Barefoot so uh but he isn’t really that unusual so traditionally if you were going to do the Camino you know in the Middle Ages you would start at your front door because you’re not going to you know hop on the plane or whatever right and you would go all the to Santiago I met people uh who had walked from their homes in Italy to you know wherever we were that time on the Camino so there’s a lot of crazy stories out there people do it for all different kinds of reasons I would say the Barefoot guys is definitely the most interesting of the people that I met that there’s a long list what stands out from the trip what are some of the highlights uh well there’s a u there’s a church in Santa Domingo which is one of the cities along the way way uh that has a chicken cpop inside of it with two chickens in it that was kind of a novelty highlight for me I think I really wanted to see that the reason those chickens are there has to do with Legend because I guess there was a inkeeper and a daughter they were visited by I think it was a theater troop or something of which there was a son the daughter of the inkeeper fell in love with the visiting boy he didn’t return her affection yet and so she took some silver like a silver cup or something from her father’s collection put it in his luggage they discover it she said he was stealing from them and U the boy was to be put to death because at that time that was the um punishment for theft so they hung the boy and but basically the mayor of the Town who had hung the boy was eating chicken he said you know the boy As Dead As these chickens on my plate and at that moment the chickens on his plate came alive and started squawking and running around so ever since then they’ve kept chickens in the church in the church and off the menu it sounds like yes yes in the city there they have all kinds of little uh chicken related svanir and food and cookies and things like that so all in the shape of chicken Chens so that was one highlight you you also have the traditional highlights like in the big cities uh Burgos Leon they have really nice uh Cathedrals that you can visit so I always enjoy seeing those along the way so yeah the fellow Travelers they accepted you even though you’re a bit of a slacker you weren’t going Barefoot from Austria right yeah people do the communo for all their various reasons most of them are really friendly and really outgoing I didn’t have anybody really frown on using a bicycle for uh the communo didn’t have anybody slap their head and say I had never thought about using a bicycle no I I think they are probably India so when you kind of you know fly by going downhill because everybody struggles up the hills but only the hikers struggle going down them so no I think in general the people along the way the pilgrims along the way are just amazingly friendly you can stop and there were a couple of times where I just didn’t didn’t even ride the bike I just hiked along with people that I met along the way and uh you know you talk about where you’re from and what they do and why they’re here and you know have a conversation for a good long ways and that’s really what the kamino is about I think it’s about the that sort of interaction along the way with other people because I met people from all over the world from uh Korea from Australia Canada According to some of the information I I saw in one of the churches there only 2% of the people who do the commo are Americans so you don’t run into many Americans there no we probably just don’t have the time mostly yeah that’s probably true I think the majority of the people who do the communo are uh Spaniards inter for that section of the way but yeah I also met uh like I met a father and daughter team from South Africa I think they’ve done the Cino four times a couple of different routes so I guess there’s a little bit of a fever that you get once you do it the one time and when you finish I mean obviously the purpose of this originally was to get to Santiago de compell and see where the relics of St James were kept and there were big celebration as you went into town what’s it like now is it a let down as you finally get there exaltation as you approach Santiago de compostella you come up on this last Hill and uh from there you can see the city and and at that point I was pretty excited about it because um you do meet a lot of pilgrims and you do have a lot of conversations with people especially later in the evening but for most of the day it’s very solitary you’re by yourself I went by myself and I was on the bicycle so it may be more solitary to ride than if you walk but I was glad to to kind of see it and like know that I had done this but then as I got into the city you realized well this is just another city really you come down and to kind of the uh suburbs and you make your way through town and then you come to this beautiful cathedral but as part of that uh and as part of it being uh holy year there were just like buses and just tons and tons and tons of tourists everywhere so yeah I would say it’s a let down but it wasn’t the reason for the trip so it wasn’t bad you stayed along the way at the various pilgrimage stops the hostiles or whatever along the way how rustic or how modern are that uh it varies there are some that have been renovated in just the last couple of years they may have you know heat and good showers and things like that but uh the majority of them are definitely older some of them very very old and they will not have heat and they may have only one or two showers for 30 or 40 people the experience of being in the hosel you know whether it’s old or new is kind of interesting too because they range in size you may have a dozen people in a small town hostel they also call them alberes or you may have a hundred people in a huge room uh all sleeping together so the quality of the accommodation uh isn’t really that important to you after you’ve been riding or walking like the entire day you’re just glad to see a bed but if you’re particular about those sorts of things there are usually multiple hostels in a town and you’ll probably want to visit a couple of them and then make your determination because there can be really kind of bad ones and really great ones just around the corner from each other and they’ll be essentially you know the same price it’s like some of them are donation based some of them are like €7 a night they’re really cheap but both the good ones and the bad ones are cheap so if you want to look around and do you meet many Travelers coming the other way do people generally go from east to west no I met one guy who was doing it backwards H and I think he was just kind of walking through life you know so he’d gone one way and he was coming back the other way interesting but no for the most part everybody that’s going along there is going towards Santiago and then there’s once they arrive they’re hopping on the plane or getting a rental car taking the train or whatever to get out of there so it’s not like the old days one thing that you saw along the route that just made you laugh and say only on the communo to Santiago there’s a lot of weird artwork on the communo and I would classify it I guess as a sort of grafiti almost there’s one place where there’s this like scarecrow type statue that has been erected I have no idea why but people hang things off of him so he’s got like this wind blown umbrella and and all these like shoes and like whatever the detrius of their Camino was I think people lose a lot of things along the way from packing too much but he’s just sort of standing out in the middle of nowhere just greeting all of the different pilgrims who come along that was probably one of the more unusual things I saw there’s also a uh like a lemonade stand just out in the middle of nowhere where these uh hippies I think the lead guys name was David he’s kind of popular on the Camino he’s just out there in the middle of nowhere living in a barn selling teas and and drinks and things from the stand right outside it seems a little weird when you come from your from your regular day-to-day life but out there it’s party it’s fellowship and having fun so it’s kind of cool to come up on that stuff you talked about packing one thing you should know and one thing you should pack before you go on the trip and maybe one thing you should not pack well I would say definitely want to pack as little as possible I had two changes of bicycle gear and my regular clothes just a hair to so you don’t want to pack you know your hair dryer you don’t want to pack anything that you can’t just you know get easily in the city the hosels aren’t going to provide you with anything but you don’t need that much to do the Camino you need some soap and a shower every day or two and that’s about it it really depends though because I saw people who traveled extremely lightly uh with very little things and then you see people who just have these huge backpacks so I would say attack the minimum required because it’s not like a hiking trip where you’re going to be camping or anything like that you don’t need a tent for example because you’re always going to have a roof over your head it’s not like a traditional like outing in the sense that that you need a lot of I guess survival gear anything like that you don’t need you probably don’t need your makeup and all that kind of stuff because people along the way are looking pretty rough especially the further along you get it’s kind of strange too because as you go towards Santi go the hikers you know they get more and more ragged looking you can tell this that wherever they’re coming from it’s been a tough Journey but you reach a certain point around I think it’s 60 kilomet or so where all of a sudden you start seeing these fresh fresh clean looking people with like day packs they’re the majority of the pilgrims I think per year they’re doing uh you know minimum distance I don’t remember if it’s 60 km or 100 kmet but uh it’s kind of strange to see those two groups kind of start to overlap as you get closer to Santiago I guess that’s another option you know if people want to experience the Camino but they don’t want to ride a bike or can’t ride a bike or whatever they also have these kind of bus tours that travel along the camuno they drop you off you go and you hike maybe four miles through some small town or city of significance and then you get back on the bus and you go down to the next point so you don’t have to do the whole thing thing huh I think the kind of Hardcore pilgrims frown on that but that is an option if you want to do it I mean I would encourage anybody to just go and like be out there for whatever time you have available because it’s worthwhile as we go to wind this down anything else that we should know before we try and repeat your journey I don’t think so I mean it’s a pretty simple experience if you just start at the beginning and keep going till you get there all right then the last two questions and you probably know which ones are coming here finish this sentence you really know you’re on the communo de Santiago When what when you can’t get any sleep because the guy from Italy three feet from you is snoring all night long I would say is you definitely feel like you’re on the Camino then there’s a lot of Brotherhood in that I guess and then if you had to summarize the trip in three words what three words would you use I would say uh Adventure Solitude and um fellowship with the other pilgrims and interesting combination Ben thanks so much for coming on the show and for sharing with us your trip of biking the community Santiago thank you Chris I I really enjoy the show I’m glad to be a part of it I actually have an internet resource for you I haven’t done that many of those on this show because we’ve been doing a lot more of those on this weekend travel every week you can check out that podcast if you’re interested in much more detailed conversation about the travel industry and travel news but the resource is sneak away and this is a new site from Trip Advisor where I do work and what it is is deep discount hotel deals on specific hotels but often the discounts are something like 50% off so it’s worth looking at basically you get on a newsletter and they send you out the new deals they’re all over the world and they maybe some in an area that you’re interested in and if you see something you like you take advantage of the deal and save a lot of money so check that out if you go to the link amateur traveler.com sneaka away then if you sign up and use it then I also get a bonus so amateur traveler.com sneaka away in news from the community Wes left a comment on the episode to travel to Canan China says I visited c as part of an Intrepid traveler trip back roads to kuming Intrepid does low to the Earth Tour trains locally owned accommodations and local guides Cen is part of many packaged tours the Terracotta Warriors are a must our group also visited a dinner show for tourists where food featured dumplings I enjoyed bike riding along the top of the city walls the most took an hour if you move along quickly but it’s very cheap visited the wild goose pagota on my last morning touring takes less than an hour a climb to the top of the pagota requires an additional admission one note about C that I don’t believe was mentioned and probably belongs with many China destination podcast the pollution was quite oppressive in the spring don’t underestimate just how bad it can get I found it manageable but I did get a cold not soon after arrival and I’m sure the pollution contributed yeah it’s a very good point Wes certainly if you’re going to Beijing I think people have heard and seen after the Olympics there how bad the pollution can get but that’s true in many of the industrialized cities and Shen is no longer just a little town out there in the west but is a major city as well and Sam’s comment was love SI also your journey sounds similar to mine but I’d like to add one feature of the area that is incredible highly recommend Sid trip Haan you can hire a Day Tour there from San I stayed in a youth hostel at the Bell Tour that offered this service and this holy tost Monastery with a gondola ride up to the almost Summit is incredibly beautiful spiritual awesome natural landscapes views phenomenally different from the China that you see and other parts of the tourism circuit and then Sam actually put a link in there for his pictures from there and then lastly we also heard from Gabriel who had a longer comment so I’m going to only pick out a few things he commented that the only wall city in China which is perfectly preserved walls is a city called ping Yao which is in shansi and so that might be worth checking out regarding Chinese trains hard sleepers aren’t quite like the couch hats that I was used to in Europe as many of them don’t locate the bunks in cabins so people walking by in the corridor can see your feet and people even spit on train floors that said they beat hard seats which I unfortunately suffered through one night and his secret to crossing the street in China is to go boldly and the traffic will accommodate you to read all of his comments check out the link in the show notes to the Shan episode with that we’re going to bring this episode of The Amateur Traver to a close it is Christmas Eve and I haven’t wrapped any presents yet so I need to get to that if you have any questions feel free to send an email to host amateur traveler.com or better yet do what Sam Vin Wes and Gabriel did and leave a comment on this episode at amateur traveler.com you can also follow me on Twitter at Chris 2x as always thanks so much for listening see Oneal I got to sit in one more Cafe I know that I should be heading home but maybe not maybe not today