Day 22: Marsolan to Condom
- Simon Pollack
- May 18, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 27
Moissac’s mud be damned, petty Castet, Miradoux
’Tis only reaching Condom where you’re turbid through and through
The athletes dressed in white as they pass th’ Olympic flame
Your cakèd legs show only that you’re playing a different game
18 May 2024, Saturday
Distance hiked 18.1km (11.3m) | Ascent 659m |
We heard the Olympic Flame was passing through Condom this afternoon. It’s not something I’d ever seen but was certainly worthy of being in time for, and was a fortunate piece of trip-timing. I heard later that each town or village could apply for it to take place and they had to pay (varyingly) 30k or 100k euros for the Gendarmes and the organisation for such a right. And sure enough, it turned out to have a huge police presence and a huge fanfare associated with it.
I left with Sybille and Marie-Claude and we walked basically the whole way together. Because of my knee I’d slowed a little bit from my stronger walking a few days earlier (Sybille had said how fast I walked!) and we ended up finding our pace was naturally in sync. First decision was whether to go up a muddy path and follow what looked like field tracks to La Romieu. This is a beautiful little village which had, the last time I visited, a troupe of artists easelling all over town to paint the main square’s facades. But because I’d seen it already I allowed PMAS (recall: Pilgrims’ Mud Avoidance Syndrome) to divert me and push me on a route on minor roads instead. This took us to Castelnau-sur-l’Auvignon, a sleepy but pretty village which had a lot of signs proclaiming its pride in resisting the Nazis during the war. But no café or restaurant for a break and a sit down.
Parenthetically, I had a moment here that I was perhaps immodestly proud of later. I chatted to a cyclist we saw, who was spattered with mud, making the comment that it seems the effects are the same whatever activity you’re doing (showing him my mud-caked shoes: little did I realise what was to come). As we were saying goodbye he said (in French), “do I detect a little Swiss or Belgian accent there?”. Not only did he think I spoke French fluently, but as a mother tongue just from a different country. This, as with the weight loss and muscle gain, seemed a nice effect of this time on the pilgrimage where I was speaking far more French than English - and I’d not spoken French at all for a year before the start.
Because we wanted to get to Condom in time for a late lunch, it being a shortish day and we having benefited from an 8am start, we made the decision to take the Chemin through some woods rather than a longer route along the roads, mistakenly thinking it would be quicker.
And thus came the single most challenging stretch of the Chemin in France this year. This was Muddsville, Arizona. It was Glorious Mud of Flanders and Swann. It was Muddy Waters playing the muddy blues to us. At one point a 1.2km stretch of 6-meter wide path was a mud bath of deep, slippery, and completely unavoidable proportions, affording no relief and requiring painstaking foot placement each step. No diversions were possible into the thick undergrowth alongside, and sometimes you backtracked or went utterly laterally to avoid sinking into the quagmire. You are using your pole to find a bit only 2 or 3 inches deep, or a piece of wood or a protruding stone (all covered in mud of course, and therefore largely invisible) on which you could place your foot and your weight. Often you’re stepping in someone’s previous footstep but this is no surety of avoiding the muddy water going over the top of your shoe and into your sock. At one point a stream went across the path, which meant a deeper, more liquid stretch that was exceptionally difficult to pass.
While it was challenging at the time (at least doing it together we could laugh at the very desperation of it), it seems to me there were at least four advantages of this stretch:
1. We were able to take photos that showed for posterity and to our friends and families that what we perhaps had been saying was difficult mud is really truly beyond what they could have ever imagined.
2. A shared experience that bonded us – and all other pilgrims who ever did this stretch.
3. This apotheosis of muddiness prepared us well for anything muddy that came later: on my very final day, there was a 50-meter muddy stretch and I fair guffawed at the newbies gingerly trying to avoid their new trainers getting dirty as I bounded past them like a hare through a wheatfield.
4. It represented the worst of this week of mud, that did continue a little hereafter but was never as bad.
The disadvantages, beyond the obvious slowness, were we might miss lunch (oh yes, as you might be able to tell, I do enjoy my nourishing), and more profoundly, deeply embedded PMAS. The PMAS later was something else: I get the impression that after this stretch many pilgrims simply walked the rest of the way on roads whenever possible. I succumbed the following day but snapped myself out of it later, thankfully.
We arrived in Condom ready for a late lunch, having politely left our shoes outside the restaurant (you can only imagine what we looked like) and it turned out to be the same place I’d booked for the evening with the Kiwis Neil and Tanya (“Ah! Simon and Garfunkel” said the proprietor, repeating the musical act oft-associated with the English pronunciation of my name). A splendid little pizza, some lubricating alcohol, and an hour of resting did wonders for our spirits and we were able to go outside after lunch to see the Olympic procession gathering force and passing right in front of this very restaurant. It was fun, though much more vibrant in the town centre by the cathedral, and something certainly to have seen: an actual Olympic flame being actually passed from one ex-athlete to another.
As a town Condom is one of the bigger ones on the Chemin, and a rather nice one too. My accommodation was another of those that isn’t on the pilgrim’s radar: Luxueuses Suites right in the centre. This is an old, magnificent property with a huge internal spiral staircase and dating back hundreds of years, bought a few years ago by an English couple Dale and Martin who renovated it in a unique style. I can’t describe the décor. It’s like tasteful and tasteless got married and had a dozen beautiful yet ugly children. Not a room, not a wall, was without adornment, and it was all extremely carefully planned. One wall had a series of traditional portraits of famous figures defaced like graffiti (think: David Hume with an eyepatch, Marilyn Monroe with a goatee). Another corner held a female mannequin with champagne bottles for arms and champagne bottle-tops for nipples. You get the picture. I didn’t meet Dale, who was visiting her family in the UK, but Martin, from Leeds, was a wonderful host and plied me with bubbly while I played the grand piano in the drawing room.
Dinner with Neil and Tanya was as fun as two nights ago, and I slept very soundly in a deeply comfortable bed, ready for a long walk the next day.
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