In 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson went to the south of France, bought a canvas sleeping bag and set about finding himself a holiday runabout. “What I required was something cheap and small and hardy,” he wrote on the first page of his subsequent travelogue, “and all these prerequisites pointed to a donkey.”
In my mind, of course, they pointed to a Fiat Panda, but a résumé of Stevenson’s adventures with Modestine provided heady inspiration for the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela I’d been planning. Determined to avoid the crippling physical and aesthetic burdens of carrying a rucksack, I’d been considering a many-panniered bicycle. But here was more authentic transportation, one blessed with a gratifyingly appropriate biblical heritage. (Though I was only after a porter, not a mount: as St Francis of Assisi has no doubt since informed his Saviour with a nervous smile, an adult’s weight comfortably exceeds the maximum humane payload for a donkey.)
Stevenson acquired Modestine for 65 francs and a glass of brandy; after much Google-based tomfoolery of the sort to be expected when you’re looking for a cheap and willing ass, I agreed to buy Shinto from an eccentric Pyrenean farmer for €800. Neither this figure, nor those associated with Shinto’s top speed or service intervals, will cause sleepless nights at Europcar HQ, but having travelled 500 miles across Spain en route to a triumphant arrival in Santiago, I’m nonetheless happy to recommend grass-powered transport as a more involving and ultimately more rewarding continental alternative.
The whole point of a holiday hire car is to thrash it mercilessly, in the knowledge that the damage won’t become obvious until long after you’ve gone home. That shouldn’t be the case with a holiday donkey, but I cannot pretend there won’t be times when you’re tempted. “You will find again the, uh, ancient rhythms of life,” promised my Pyrenean farmer as we wrestled Shinto out of his horsebox at Val- carlos, just inside the Spanish border — a showroom claim that not even Swiss Toni would dare utter. The ancient rhythms of life, you should not be surprised to discover, range from steady to static. Nine, small and tawny, Shinto was also all the things one traditionally associates with donkeys. After less than an hour alone in his company, I understood, in stark and vivid detail, why the common ass has acquired his unfortunate reputation: an impenetrable, illogical inertia that for two thousand years and more has been propelling decent men to the edge of reason, and then off it.
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My palms were striped with livid, angry rope burns: the sloth I’d been prepared for, but not a phobic response to water that incited our mismatched tug-of-war either side of a modest wooden bridge. During the resultant three-hour detour, we encountered sundry additional discouragements. Some — shadows across the path, slatted drain covers, stairs — simply shut Shinto down to a gormless standby mode. More distressing were the half-heard, half-seen flicks and swishes in his peripheral vision and hearing: if a gust of hot wind lifted the drinking bowl from his pack saddle, or a lorry approached from behind with its side tarpaulins flapping, some big red switch in his brain went down and he was off at a wayward gallop, the rope rasping through my ravaged hands, baggage flying into the dusty hedgerows with Buckaroo! abandon.
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“I MUST reach the lake before sundown, and to have even a hope of this must instantly maltreat this uncomplaining animal. The sound of my own blows sickened me.” So wrote Stevenson on page 2, neatly encapsulating the British owner-drover’s dilemma. I’m not certain why we should nurture such a long-standing reluctance to discipline what is after all a beast of burden, but it is a reluctance so entrenched that 2,500 donkeys — three-quarters of the entire UK population — now idly browse the Donkey Sanctuary’s sun- dappled Devonian pastures. Yet this is an animal that evolved in Africa, an animal designed to cover vast distances in search of meagre sustenance. “The busy donkay is the happy donkay,” stressed my farmer. If I hadn’t helped Shinto learn this within three days, he’d emphasised, I would never be his master. I didn’t, and so never was. Reluctant to embrace the farmer’s stick-based educational programme, I spared the rod and spoilt the donk. Only once, messily unhinged by sunstroke and the crapulent aftermath of a complimentary pilgrim wine fountain, was I briefly possessed by the frond-toting demon that set Basil Fawlty to work against his similarly inefficient Austin 1300.
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Yet, once accustomed to life in the slow lane, you can begin to master the new skills necessary to appreciate it. To secure your donkey while you sleep, dine, sightsee or shop, you’ll need to demonstrate proficiency with the chair or bowline knot. As my farmer explained, its incorporated loops and twists can be remembered quite simply: “The snake, he goes around the tree, and then down the, ah, hole.” Somehow, my snake invariably turned up with a mate, and they fought up the tree, and the tree fell down the hole. Only after a fortnight will you consistently get it right, and by then your donkey will regularly find himself knot-loose and fancy-free. When this happens, and even when it doesn’t, there’ll be a lot of nocturnal decibels to put up with. No worse by day than the lusty priming of a neglected hand pump, at night the donkey’s bray assumes the apocalyptic aural agony of hell’s rusted gates being effortfully forced ajar. Once you discover earplugs and Veterano brandy it won’t be your problem, but it’s worth bearing in mind that many south Europeans can call upon a long heritage of imaginative animal-directed retribution. Team furiously bleary continental rustics with an asinine reveille, and before sunrise there’ll be silence and a big red mess at the foot of the church tower.
Still, better the bestial dawn chorus than an oversensitive car alarm — just one of many departments where ass trumps motor. With nostalgic farmers generally happy to put their pastures and stables at Shinto’s disposal, running costs were limited to the morning mouthful of rock salt, and I was always discovering new functions that elevated his utility well above that of mere load-bearer. Whenever we stopped, he would rotate his anus to face the prevailing wind: the weather-vane feature. If my laundry hadn’t dried and the sun was out, with a string round the panniers and a couple of pegs he was a clothes horse as literal as any you’ll find. And within a fortnight or so, I was dispensing wine, water, olives and even a range of bap-enlivening condiments to needy passing pilgrims from two sacks on Shinto’s back, conspicuous additions to his burden that certainly warranted the honorary title of mobile canteen.
Crucially, not even the sleekest convertible can hope to match the winsome appeal of the scabbiest donkey. Hands were fondly clasped to dusty, black-clad bosoms in every village we passed through, and our incongruous appearance between schoolgirls and housewives on a Pamplona zebra crossing incited scenes of unbridled Shintomania. If a donkey makes an unlikely babe magnet, then as a male owner-drover, you’ll certainly attract some unlikely babes. Shinto would never drop his steaming khaki briquettes in a quiet hedgerow if there was a churchyard to desecrate or a children’s sandpit to befoul, yet as I bent wearily towards that stack of hell pebbles, a walnut-faced farmer’s wife or portly Dutch pilgrimess would invariably dive in from nowhere, collecting this grim harvest with hands wreathed in polythene and faces in dreamy smiles.
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Yet, however irresistible, a donkey won’t tempt criminals as a vehicle of similar appeal surely would. You might have to put up with earnest chorizo-based retellings of that old myth about the Holiday Home for Pets Pie Company, but you’ll never find yourself beseeching a bored guardia civil to investigate a case of taking and riding away.
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ON THE other hand, a car generally manages to get you from A to B without trying to have sex with other cars. With a male donkey, you’ll find that the limelight of public adoration is never more than a hoof-step away from the shadows of pornographic shame. Neutered he may have been, but if Shinto was firing blanks, he was firing them from a fearsome howitzer. With one clap of the gelding bricks, his hierarchy of needs had been narrowed to an obsessive quest for food: it was his only love, his passion, and, grazing lasciviously during the requisite two-hour lunch break, he expressed it in the only way he knew.
“Burro!” a tricycling tot would squeak, pedalling up eagerly, but that forearm of dark muscle had already parted its sheath and was craning smoothly out and down, and down, and down. Here was no winkle or wiener. This was the very schlong of Kong. Childish joy faltered into shock and awe, and, as the unleashed appendage began to firm up, a parent would stride over and drag bike and infant brusquely away, fixing me with a glare of furious disgust.
It never helped to see bluebottles congregating hungrily round the blunt, splayed tip, something my farmer had told me to watch out for: “If you have too many fly here, you must apply this crème.” This was without question the very worst thing I had ever been asked even to think about. No matter how many flies there were, it was never quite too many.
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Trading off concern for the donkey’s long-term welfare against my own queasy revulsion fostered neglect of other recommended daily checks — snip wax crust off the inside of a donkey’s ear, or smell his breath on the first morning, and on the second you’ll find yourself somehow forgetting to. Most maintenance, though, is non-negotiable. You’ll need to scrape out his hooves twice a day, and not with that tool on a Swiss army knife if you’re fond of your fingertips. Every three weeks a donkey must be sprayed for ticks, a treatment that he won’t like, and may even be violently allergic to, as I discovered when Shinto collapsed, flanks afoam, on a supermarket forecourt.
Cradling his great, wheezing head in my lap outside that Super Spar, I knew that if he pulled through, I wouldn’t have the heart to tackle his post-pilgrimage fate in any of the ways concocted during our many difficult moments. No drunken auction, no matador target practice, no beach barbecue. The next time my tears moistened his mane, on the steps of Santiago cathedral, it had already been arranged. Today, Shinto is back in his Pyrenean field. He’s happy, and with the €1,200 I paid him to drive his horsebox to Santiago and back, so is the farmer. But then, as every holiday hirer knows, you always get stung on a one-way rental.