A Review from South Africa

Camino Letters - A Review

The ‘Camino’ is the common name for a network of medieval pilgrimage routes through Europe leading to the tomb of the apostle St James the Greater which is housed in a cathedral in the city named after him - Santiago de Compostela – in north western Spain.

After deciding to spring clean her busy life and close down her legal practice so that she can spend a month in her garden, forty year-old Canadian Julie Kirkpatrick decides instead, practically on a whim, to walk six hundred kilometres of the Camino de Santiago pilgrims’ path in Spain with her seventeen year old daughter.  

She knows little about the thousand year-old pilgrimage trail and does no physical training for the gruelling hike that starts in the Pyrenees Mountains, crosses three mountain ranges and ends at Finsisterre on the Atlantic coast.  

Before leaving home, she asks twenty-six friends to set her a task for each day that she will be walking.  Many of the tasks are imaginative and surprisingly thought provoking.  Besides being asked to recite mantras and prayers, to think about the millions who have gone before her, to listen to the wind or to other people, she is asked to determine what events transpired in her life to lead her to Spain and what she hopes to gain from the experience. One friend prophetically asks her to write the first chapter of a book in her head as she walks.  As she steadfastly completes each new task they become a rite of passage, sometimes painful and angst ridden, sometimes joyful, filled with music and light, and sometimes esoteric (her day and night at the Templar shelter in Manjarin - page 147).

This beautifully written, heartfelt book is not a travelogue about walking the Camino in Spain.  The pilgrimage trail is the landscape through which the writer passes, a transient backdrop to her daily tasks which evolve into a fascinating patchwork of self discoveries, miscellaneous emotions, thoughts, memories and life changing decisions, woven into twenty-six exquisitely honest letters written to her friends when she returns from Spain 
[correction:  the letters were written as I walked].  

“I have decided to throw off the cynical and pessimistic world that I have created around myself and love my life, as the true spark of light that it is.  Paso por paso. Step by step. I have my proof.”

This book will appeal to all, but especially to women, mothers, daughters, and mothers of daughters.