to camino or not to camino, that's the question

   

                                    Montañana (1st day in Aragon)          Mont-Rebei (border Catalunya-Aragon)

The GR1 continues to be the loneliest trail we have ever walked. We see no-one  on the trail from one week to the next, in fact, given the remoteness and tumbledown nature of it in places, I wonder when the last person before us actually did walk it….maybe it was the guidebook author (John Hayes) a couple of years ago! Waymarking improved a lot though as we travelled west through the ranges of the Sierra de Guara, the GR1 coinciding for several days with the regional route ‘Camino Natural Hoya de Huesca’ and a branch of the Camino de Santiago. Being on part if an ‘official’ pilgrim Camino also meant that we enjoyed some additional benefits such as water fuentes and small benches by the trailside and recognition/understanding from locals in the villages. Interestingly, people seem to identify with the idea of walking as a pilgrim on a Camino to Santiago, whereas walking long distance on the GR1 elicits little response. I think this is a cultural thing, where walking a Camino as a pilgrim is understood because it is a tradition, but long distance hiking as a way to travel and experience is not.    
  
At the time, it was a big decision to interrupt our GR1 journey, because 7 continuous weeks of walking through remote landscapes and living simply had resulted in a progressive deepening of our experience that we did not want to loose. But we needn’t have worried. During the time we were away from the trail, our minds would always drift back there and in a strange way we stayed connected to it. The long and subtle GR1 has slowed us down and shifted our perspective in quite a profound way, creating a psychological distance between us and the so called ‘real world’ that we returned to for 2 weeks.

Rebecca&Barry   www.wildpilgrims.com