I am excited to be heading back to the Camino this year. Yeah! In September my feet and the rest of me will embrace the Camino Portugués.
It will be a first for me to Portugal. This route was not on my radar, but a Camino friend invited me to join her, and then it just seemed, indeed, the right thing to do and place to go. We will be hard-core and set out from Lisbon. Many start halfway along at Porto, but it is Lisbon for us.
Many talk in glowing terms of this Camino but I have not heard stories of problems with crowds of pilgrims and not getting a space in a hostel. There is a coastal route and an inland route, so this will spread us around.
Now, how about my preparations? Well, I am keeping up my walking. That is the easy part, though I will need to up the number of kilometres. And I have bought a guide – this is not quite ‘have the T-shirt, been there’, but a great first step. It is a compact – though not very light- book by Cicerone. It proclaims ‘From Lisbon and Porto to Santiago – Central, Coastal and Spiritual Caminos’.
And then there is the language. I was contemplating doing a deep dive into learning Portuguese. I love languages and take some pride in embracing the language of where I am to travel and feel it is a courtesy to manage at least a bit more than yes, no, my name and I am a Canadian. So full of good intentions I set out with Duolingo – you know, just to get in the mood. Then I found lovely Mia, a Portuguese woman with online courses. I followed her free course which included the first steps in pronunciation. Oh, my gracious me, how the linguistic-arrogant (that’s me) call fall! For me, the pronunciation is such a challenge and seems to resemble nothing else I know and sounds so strange to my ears. I speak French, some German, tourist Spanish, and even learnt a little bit of Turkish when we went there, but for me, Portuguese is in a category all by itself out there on the western fringe of Europe.
The ‘s’ in so many different ways, the ‘e’ strong, middling or completely extinguishing itself, all those other vowels and consonants with rules and variations, and whole syllables getting gobbled up and disappearing. After listening to a pep talk from dear teacher Mia about the further lessons she was proposing I am sorry to report there will be no deep Portuguese dive for me!
I will plough on with Duolingo and again from the beginning with Mango Languages and hope I have enough to get a bed for the night and something to eat. I hope I will not upset the locals as we work our way through rural and less touristy areas.
If I have extra time and energy, I will work on my Spanish – promise.
P.S. Just seen that BBC do free language lessons…that would be back to my roots with my first career employer…nostalgia.