Getting to the Camino

We hope to begin our 2016 Camino in the quaint French mountain village of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, a name that more or less means “Saint John at the Foot of the Pass”.

Getting to Saint-Jean is always a bit of an adventure, particularly if you are, like us, flying into Madrid rather than Paris.

You may remember that we purchased bus tickets from Madrid to Pamplona. Well, the bus gets us into town a wee bit too late to successfully make the next bit of the trek. So today, we changed our bus tickets out for train tickets.

This, my friends, was a surreal experience.

Renfe, the national train service in Spain, maintains a web site that others have described as “a bit Alice in Wonderland”. That really doesn’t do it justice. It took us nearly an hour just to book two train tickets.

The first point to note is that, according to Renfe itself, the web site only works using Internet Explorer, and it’s optimized for Windows XP. So that should be your first warning sign.

They claim you can use the site in English, and indeed, the first page is in perfect English. On the next page, however, the text quickly become Spanglish. And then, the translator apparently just threw up his arms and gave up, because even though the header on the pages continue to claim “English”, the entire rest of the site is in Spanish.

You really might as well just not bother and go with the main Spanish site instead.

The ticket purchase page allows you to choose seat options that don’t exist. They will never actually tell you that they don’t exist – that would apparently be impolite. The transaction simply errors out at the very end.

So there’s a bit of trial and error there.

If you attempt to pay with a non-European credit card, the site will cheerfully accept it… until final checkout, where it will blank out most of the page and throw up an error saying (four times in a row) “El documento de la tarifa es necesario”.

For the record, Google confirms that nowhere else on the entire web site mentions this at all.

If you purchase using PayPal, however, it works just fine. Apparently they take care of that pesky documento de la tarifa for you.

So now that we (finally) have train tickets electronically in hand, we are good as far as Pamplona.

From Pamplona, we will be picked up by Istvan, the proprietor of Pensión Corazón Puro. We’ll have some supper and spend the night of March 28th there.

In the morning, Istvan will drive us to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. We plan on spending the day of March 29th there, with dinner and a bed already reserved at Beilari, a place of uncommon renown on the Camino.

Then, shortly after dawn on the 30th, we begin walking.

Huzzah!