How it began...

So, I hear you ask, why walk 2000kms to Santiago de Compostela all the way from the Netherlands? Good question! ... Perhaps the answer is not as easy as might first appear, and is folded into a confluence of events and circumstance, that led me to a moment of decision. In part to celebrate the very act of walking, after undergoing extensive surgery and learning how to walk again after a bad motorcycling accident left me incapacitated for several years. In part due to an increased need on behalf of those in less fortuitous circumstance to both have their plight recognized, and melliorated; and perhaps, in part, because after long struggle in London, producing artwork, books and poetry, it seemed right to move my body to action once again before these bones became too old to enjoy such a marvellous adventure. With these, and other more presessing concerns, rising as a tide in the nascent spring, I stored my goods at a friends house in the Netherlands, and with her endless patience and help, quickly formulated a plan to forge a path towards north western Spain.

I was rendered homeless in an instant, and cast myself upon the fates, as those who are wanderers of this world are want to do. I had packed 40kg of gear into a front and back pack, and just as quickly discarded 15kg, to bring it down to a managable load of some 25kgs. This is remarkably close to the load that many women in the developing world are forced to carry each and every day, gathering the familial water supply from source to home, as they traverse often great distances for such a basic human need. This has the effect of being both a physical and temporal load, as often it is a journey of many hours before reaching polluted water sources, only for them to then carry the same burden, often with children in tow, the same distance again. It seemed apt then that each day I would carry this load, some 20 odd kilometers, and to begin with at least in a heat wave of some 30 degrees Celcius.

The charity I had decided to champion, Charity:Water have over the past 11 years put some 28,000 bores, cisterns, and other access points to fresh potable water in developing nations and areas, freeing women to attend to other concerns, such as extra incomes, education, animal husbandry, and agriculture, as well as freeing communities from illness, and children from the burden and toil so they might attend schools, freefrom the concerns of gathering potable water, and keeping them out of the damning statistics of illness that plague the developing nations where 50% of hospitals and medical facilities are filled with under 12 year old children with dysentary, because they are forced to drink from the same polluted water sources their communities are using as sanitation.

Armed with these truths, I began my journey on Friday the 13th of April 2018, In the quiet little hamlet of the Philipines, in the south of the Netherlands. Joni Mitchell singing to me as I began my first tentative steps.



The road was easy to begin with, and thankfully flat, whilst I found my pace and walking legs. I cheerfully waved at all who passed me by, who all seemed equally keen to wave back, perhaps more in wonder and surprise. The lush green fields of the flatlands sang with the possibility of new growth, ripening with hope in the noonday sun. I made good time, through the townships of Boekhoerte and Bassvelde as I crossed into Belgium in the mid afternoon, and my stride lengthened as I began to bear the weight of the packs with greater confidence. Ridiculously overdoing both pace and ardour, somewhat foolishly over zealous on my part; but the journey was young, and I was innocent of the damage that can be done with too strident a beginning on such a long journey.

View of the forest of Lembeke 

I stopped that night in Lembeke, and found a spot in the forest to make a hasty camp as the light disappeared between the trees. The bird song echoing the last sweet notes on a cool early spring evening. Wrapped in my sleeping bag, on a yoga mat, that was to become one of the best and most essential items of kit which had been so generously donated for the voyage. I awoke early to a dawn chorus, and nothing from that moment to this has ever been the same since.

Stories from the first few weeks of the journey will appear sporadically through out the blog. I cannot thank those folk who helped me through those first arduous weeks enough. The kindness and generosity of spirit, and indeed material generosity, have made all subsequent weeks possible, and my faith in mankind as a whole, has been buoyed by the overwhelming goodness in the hearts of those fine people of Belgium, from Flanders to the hills of Wallonia.