Discoveries along the 400km journey: Walking the Camino de Santiago with my Inuit friends

Donkey, Camino de Santiago

This winter was the hardest and darkest of my life. At a time when I felt like I had nothing left to lose, I decided with my Greenlandic friends, mother (M.) and son (A.), that it was time to take our two-week walk that we had been planning since 2019.

The initial plan was to undertake the much-desired GR20 in Corsica, but after some research, I discovered that in the chosen period, at the end of April, the refuges, normally supplied with food and water by helicopter, were closed. ‘We need to change plans,’ I wrote to M. and A. ‘What’s the problem if the refuges aren’t open?’ they replied ‘ We can carry food for two weeks in our backpacks, drink from the rivers, sleep outdoors, and hunt if necessary. We’ve done it plenty of times in Greenland.’

I felt utterly inferior, marked by the devolution from comfort and sedentariness, comparable to the disgusting fat useless people in Pixar’s Wall-e cartoon. Moreover, in the summer of 2023, I returned to Greenland and one day I witnessed the following scene: I saw a family walking near a shallow ditch, with a one-and-a-half-year-old son toddling behind them. At one point, the child fell into the ditch and started crying. The family quickly turned to look, then turned back and continued walking, leaving the child where he was. The tiny child immediately stopped crying, then he began to climb up using all his strength on the moss and lichens. He got out of the ditch, and with a little run caught up with his family. Learning to fend for oneself (only in Greenland during winter?) can make the difference between life and death.

I imagined myself in the middle of nowhere falling into a ditch, knowing that I would not have the strength of that tiny child to get up. Especially in the dark period I was in, with my morale completely down. With my fervent pessimist imagination, I saw my skeleton beside the skulls of the Corsican wild boars lying on the GR20.

Thus, I admitted to being a Westernized, devolved, and weak creature, although in shape by Western standards. So, I looked for alternatives online and found the famous Camino de Santiago in Spain, one of the three most famous pilgrimages in Europe since the Middle Ages, which I had always despised because it seemed too touristy to me. But by taking the northern route, which goes through the mountains, and with the right company, maybe it would no longer be so trivial. So, I wrote to my friends, ‘Shall we do the Camino de Santiago in Spain? Is walking 400km through the mountains in two weeks too much?’ ‘Of course not, let’s book the tickets.’

Having never walked more than 32 km a day in my life, we booked flights from Italy and Greenland to northern Spain. I calculated that we would walk 28km a day, but my friends, the journey, and myself, in two weeks taught me how to have endless energy, how not to give up, how to keep spirits high, and how to trust myself. In the end, we arrived two days ahead of schedule, averaging 33.33km a day, with peaks of walking 42km up and down the mountains. Often under torrential rain, walking through mud and with a cruel wind that tore our raincoats.

A. and M.

My friends never abandoned me but always walked at a steady pace slightly ahead, waiting for me if necessary so as not to lose sight of me. This allowed us to spend almost all our walking days in silence with our thoughts, then discussing them in the evening when we rested in the pilgrims’ hostels. For several days, I listened together with the bleating of the sheep, the lowing of the cows, the chirping of robins, and the rushing of the rain, to the album ‘Seven Days Walking’ by Ludovico Einaudi.

While at the beginning of the journey I sometimes cried from fatigue and exasperation because my friends seemed never to stop, after a few days, a radiant joy took over me: it was one of the most intense and enriching experiences of my life.

If you are in the darkest period of your life, don’t think twice: take a backpack, throw a couple of things inside and go on the Camino de Santiago. You will come out transformed.

Scallop shell marker, used to guide pilgrims on the Camino

With a heart full of gratitude, I would like to share what I learned from the journey, from myself, and from my extraordinary friends M. and A.:

1. When I have a mission, my spirit is strong, enthusiastic, and invincible.
2. Strength isn’t gone when you’re tired; it’s only gone when you die, and your heart stops beating. Until then, keep pushing.
3. People who have been by my side in my life have only done their best to help me, and they only made mistakes by unintentionally not putting themselves in my shoes.
4. I have also done harm because I have never truly seen and understood the diversity of people and their needs.
5. My need to seduce and make fall in love is driven by a very childish need to be seen and accepted.
6. I am not as bad as I always believed, but I am miraculous and full of light, like a moss-covered eucalyptus shining in perfection under the dew.
7. I am not immature or selfish for doing what makes me happy, even if others don’t understand it.
8. I can express my needs and my identity without fear of not being accepted.
9. Only by being happy and loving myself can I be a good presence in the lives of others.
10. Everyone has their own path about which we know nothing, and perhaps the one who limps at the end does not limp because they are the weakest, but limps only because at the beginning they carried the weight of another to help them.
11. I am neither better nor worse than anyone. We are all pilgrims with blisters who crawl under the rain in the mud, illuminated at times by powerful beams of light.
12. I don’t know what others need, and I can’t help anyone without first asking what is needed.
13. I must never take anything for granted.
14. Pain can be experienced by observing it from above. Not necessarily by becoming pain.
15. Pain can become a meditation.
16. To accomplish any mission, it must be divided into very small stages, sleeping, eating, listening, and making small adjustments along the way.
17. To continue to walk/live when you are in pain, you must continue to walk/live differently, relying on different muscles/forces.
18. If I do something every day in one direction, sooner or later I will reach the goal, whether positive or negative.
19. Protecting, defending, and raising my son has been my only priority and goal since I was 21 years old and will continue to be so until he is a mature and happy adult.
20. I had never noticed my direction in the previous point because I had believed in the exclusivity of consumerist/capitalist dreams and goals among which motherhood is not contemplated.
21. I can make it even if no man is with me to love me, help me, and support me because I have already done it for 15 years.
22. I had never noticed the previous point because I have never seen examples of women who make it on their own around me, and I had forgotten to consider myself.
23. The volunteer missions I do to transport organs for transplantation around the world are hugely important in giving me meaning and making me happy.
24. I had never fully realized the previous point because in our society if a job is not paid economically, it is considered valueless.
25. Reading, listening to books, or external pieces of advice amounts to lowering my inner voice until it is silenced. I need walks with myself, silence, or writing to listen to myself and understand what I want and need as a unique and irreplaceable being.
26. No bird fears that the branch on which it is perched will break because it trusts its own wings. This phrase was written on a wall along the Way.
27. I don’t need to accomplish anything to be happy with myself. I am happy now, with my heart beating, my breath quickening as I climb the mountain, and I don’t need anything else.
28. I would like the meaning of my life to be to try to make wars obsolete and to ridicule the value of patriotic heroism.
29. Reaching the goal is like reaching an end, not a milestone. On the last day of the journey, when I wrote these points, I felt that when I die, it will be like the end of the journey, like arriving at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Instead of feeling relief, I will review all the pain and difficulties overcome with pride and nostalgia, and I will be sorry that the adventures have ended.

‘Heaven is a place on earth’

‘Wanderer, it is your footprints

winding down, and nothing more;

wanderer, no roads lie waiting,

roads you make as you explore.

Step by step your road is charted,

and behind your turning head

lies the path that you have trodden,

not again for you to tread.’

Caminante — Antonio Machado