Travels with My Donkey: One Man and His Ass on a Pilgrimage to Santiago by Tim Moore

Travels with My Donkey: One Man and His Ass on a Pilgrimage to Santiago Reviews

• 
  Kelly

  Hello traveling by ass. This book is so hilarious that while reading it (and laughing out loud until I cried), a woman came up to me in the coffee shop and demanded to know what the title was so she could get it. The writer, Tim Moore, out of mid-life crisis whatever, decides to walk el camino de Santiago, a famous pilgrimage in Spain, but he'll be arsed if he's going to carry his gear himself. Enter Shinto, a little burro who fears all things water, bolts at the slightest provocation, and makes a mockery of all donkey training (or mistraining, as the case may be) that comes with him. It's a travelogue by a prissy Brit, with a semi-uncontrollable animal to boot. Wonderful stuff.
• 
  Robert Bovington

  A Long Hard Slog
  Spanish Steps – Travels With My Donkey by Tim Moore
  A Review by Robert Bovington
  
  I found this book annoying, often tedious, occasionally interesting and very occasionally funny. So why did I find the book annoying? Well to start with, various critics have described the author as humorous – inside the book cover, ‘Image’ described Tim as “Without a doubt, the funniest travel writer in the world”; the ‘Irish Times’ even hailed him as the new Bill Bryson. What rubbish! I find Bill Bryson so interesting and amusing that I have read all his travel books two or three times and even his other, more serious, works like “Mother Tongue” and “Shakespeare” are funnier and better written than Tim Moore’s book about his long expedition with a donkey. Like his journey, I found the book a long hard slog.
  I found his writing style extremely verbose, sometimes undecipherable and often plain irritating – okay, the word ‘click’ may be military slang for a kilometre but I found the copious use of the word irksome. I found his humour often grated – too many puns and too adolescent. I certainly didn’t ‘laugh out loud’ but, to be fair, I did chuckle to myself on a couple of occasions. I didn’t mind, either, some of his ‘toilet’ humour, though there were too many references to donkey poo for my liking.
  So what were the good points? Well, Tim Moore follows the travel writer’s ‘well worn path’ by describing many of the places he visits and supplementing this with quite a bit of history. He does this quite well. He also manages to get across to the reader the sheer scale of the journey – the good bits and the bad. Blistered, sometimes sun-scorched, occasionally rain-soaked, the author does a credible job of describing his 750-kilometre trek across northern Spain accompanied by a donkey.
  I can applaud Tim Moore for completing the ‘Compostela de Santiago’ even if his ulterior motive was to provide material for a book. However, in my view, it is nowhere near the best travel book I have read. He may have walked the path of St. James but he is not yet fit to be mentioned in the same company as Washington Irving, Gerald Brenan, Ernest Hemingway or Chris Stewart – nor Bill Bryson.
  
• 
  Sarah Fisher

  I got so bored reading this book and it was hard to finish. His writing stuck me as scattered and his writing style extremely wordy.
  
  And the humor...hmm...I definitely wasn't laughing out loud like everyone else. Sometimes the jokes were just...out there...somewhere.
  
  And the donkey? As much as he jokes about animal abuse I couldn't help but think...yep...that's pretty much animal abuse. I mean, really, who just buys a donkey to take a 500 mile hike while basically refusing to learn how to care for a donkey!!!
  
  Also, I don't feel like I got a good sense of the landscape the people of northern Spain. I read this in conjunction with "Off the Road," another guy doing the same hike and I'd recommend that instead. Better pace and better blend of history/humor/awkward encounters. Maybe because that author actually hiked the whole route without having family visit, staying in hotels, etc etc.
• 
  erin

  I'm happy to report I've found the antidote to the poison that was reading Bill Bryson's
  A Walk in the Woods: Tim Moore's Travels With My Donkey. He's a lot like Bryson, but without the snark, attitude, superiority, whining and misanthropy, and with an actual sense of humour. Which is to say, he's not like Bryson at all. I found myself running the laugh gamut from smiles to chortles to out and out giggles. Along the camino he experiences not only fatigue and frustration, but also good company and the kindness of many, many strangers. There is no big epiphany for Moore on his trek, but he does learn how to take things in stride - a million strides, as it were, straight across the North of Spain, with his intermittently trusty steed, Shinto, at his side. I haven't had this much fun with a book in a while.
• 
  Fiona

  I took this book with me when I walked the Camino in 2007. I wish I hadn't because it took up valuable space in my luggage. Although some of his anecdotes rang true, on the whole I found it lacking in any kind of detail about the experience, the country, the food, the people and it just wasn't funny - with the exception of his comment about FLAN (you'd have to read the book unfortunately).
• 
  Anne

  I can't tell you how many times I laughed out loud while reading this! The author's British self-deprecating wit and clever language were just my cup of tea. Beyond his fine writing though, Moore is a keen observer of people and his surroundings and I appreciated the fascinating historical tidbits he included about the Camino which has been one of the world's great pilgrimages since the Middle Ages.
  
  My only reservation about the book was his conceit to travel with a donkey when he knew so very little about the care of them. His frustration with his donkey ultimately resolved and it could be that he embellished his description of their relationship for humor, but there were many times while reading this when I felt that poor animal deserved better.
• 
  John

  I've decided Tim knows just when to keep from going over-the-top. That doesn't mean he doesn't actually do it every so often, but he's talented enough to get away with it when he does.
  Unlike his previous escapades, he is forced to socialize a great deal (more) on this trip. And -- with a companion! He and Shinto are perfect together; the dread of separation is palpable in the final pages.
  Readers of previous books (yours truly included) have commented that his references have been highly Brit-specific; Our Author seems to have taken heed as this time they are far more balanced.
• 
  Michael Grant

  Bored me to bits. Can't believe this is from the same author as French Revolutions.
• 
  J.K. George

  An interesting story that kept teetering (for me) between super-funny British humor and more somewhat daily slogs as Moore and Shinto encountered some rather dreadful accommodations and daily travails through seemingly endless towns and hamlets. This was not a super-fast down-the-page quick read, and Moore's writing style required me to re-read some paragraphs several times to finally grok his meaning. I liked the little mini-maps that headed each chapter, and certainly learned both more about this section of Spain in addition to the unique pilgrims who take on this challenge. The technique of using a "donk" as the conveyance method for Moore's "stuff" was effective, however one wonders who in the world but an English writer would be so courageous/foolhardy to take it on.
  
  His writing was really funny and descriptive at times, which made the story both interesting and brilliantly described at his high points. Moore's vocabulary is really extensive! The relatively large number of different traveling companions was hard to keep clear. For me, the effort to read the book was a slog at times as well, like his journey. All in all, a worthwhile read, but one where I was glad to see him reach Santiago, the cathedral, and the end of an unusual story.
• 
  mehg-hen

  I'd like to now take a walk on the camino.
  
  This is a very funny account of his walk from France to Santiago. The best part are all things dealing with the donkey, which seems both romantic, and a very strong case for the invention of cars.
  
  Honest and funny and a lot of vocabulary words I had to look up that turned out to be used in their archaic meaning and good google fodder.
  
  There has to be a very long bible story about Jesus with his donkey that was cut because it was too frustrating. Or that it made Jesus look either too good or too bad. You never think of all of the epic urinations and defecations that must have happened while a donkey is around, but this book includes them all.
  
  
• 
  Conrad

  Entertaining, though not a lot happens. it's a long journey that's pretty much the same all the way: he meets various cohorts on the pilgrimage, he describes the variety of his sleeping quarters, he has the same problems with balky donkey, he questions why he's doing it. He has a breezy style that's often funny—depending on your taste—but the humor sometimes relies a bit too much on metaphorical references to current entertainers, etc., and that's lost on me. Quick laughs, quickly dated. He stays firmly in the camp of "comic travel writing," and I really don't see clearly what his pilgrimage achieves except to write another travel book. His self-deprecating style is engaging up to a point, but eventually, for me, it wears thin. I do recommend it as light, entertaining reading.
• 
  Pam

  This is one of those rare books that actually lives up to the reviews on the front of it. It is laugh-out-loud in many parts, utterly endearing and enjoyable from beginning to end. It really did make me want to do the Santiago de Compostela...with a donkey!
• 
  Jen

  I should have taken heed of the notes in the book jacket that compare Tim Moore to Bill Bryson. Because I really can't stand Bill Bryson. And as it turns out, Tim Moore is even more unreadable. The writing style is a big part of my review, but travel writing should do a couple of things-- it should make you want to visit a place, and it should give you funny, endearing stories about the writer that makes you wish you could travel there with that person. By the end of this book I really just couldn't stand Tim Moore. The book is based on his decision to travel the Camino de Santiago in Spain, a pilgrimage across the country that people have been making since biblical times. However, Tim doesn't want to walk all that way. So he decides to take a donkey. He knows nothing about donkeys or how to care for them. He makes a half-assed (no pun intended) attempt to learn some of that, but throughout the book his donkey Shinto has to go without food, gets pushed far beyond his limits, and is basically lucky he made it to the end of this trip alive. So there's that. There's also Moore's clumsy, wandering, adjective-filled writing style to help lose your interest. There were times my eyes would glaze over on the page as he rambled on in clunky, over-descriptive prose. There are also plenty of obscure references. If your eyes light up with recognition at the phrase "Cesare was the Blofeld's Blofeld" than maybe you would find this book more captivating than I did.
• 
  Suzanne

  Did not like the writing style at all. While others have described the book as hilarious, I found the humor to be forced - as if the author was trying to convince us how funny he is. Even when he wasn’t trying to be funny, his writing was often hard to follow. On several occasions I reread a paragraph to try and understand what he was trying to say or describe, only to just give up and move on.
  
  I’m still unclear as to the purpose of the author’s trek, and don’t feel like I learned much about traversing the trail.
• 
  Adam

  Tim Moore likes big words and arcane references, but he's funny enough to make it worth the effort. I would also say that the book works at a larger level, too. It's not just a travelogue; it's something of a spiritual journey as well. There's a symmetry to the relationship between the author and his donkey that somehow frames the pilgrimage in terms that both a skeptic and a believer will understand.
• 
  K.

  I read this just before leaving for my own pilgrimage through Portugal and Spain, and I laughed till I cried. Really hilarious. It's not great literature, but it offers great laughs and looks with a slant eye at the whole subject of pilgrimage.
• 
  Erica Hudson

  I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
  
  http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13001424
  
  I like pretty much any book which features travel with a donkey, horse or mule. I also find Tim Moore very funny. Win win for me.
• 
  Nathan Albright

  If you are familiar with the author and his work--this is the third book of his I have read [1], you know where this is going.  This is the sort of book that is advertised with comparisons to such classics of the man against nature travel book as 'A Walk In The Woods [2].'  And for the most part these comparisons are just.  This is a comedy book about the author's travels in Europe, where his being a clueless and monolingual English tourist is part of the larger metajoke that is poking fun of the cluelessness and linguistic ineptitude of his target audience.  This is the sort of book where when you are tempted to laugh at the novel for being totally unable to take care of a fairly lovable donkey along the trip across northern Spain along the Camino Real you need to remind yourself that to laugh at the author is to laugh at oneself.  Would one do a better job taking care of a donkey?  Probably not.  Ultimately, the donkey himself, nicknamed Shinto, becomes a particularly sympathetic figure with his sufferings from ergot poisoning and his need for Sabbath rest that the author casually and cruelly disregards.
  
  If you have read a book by this author, you know the drill by now.  The book begins with a discussion of what inspired the author's crazy idea to travel along the Camino Real to Santiago with a donkey because he doesn't want to carry the weight himself.  Most of the book consists of the author's discussion of the various stages of the trip.  We read the author's mock complaining about the cheating that people do along the journey to serve as faux pilgrims, the infrastructure of housing and feeding people on such extended trips, the history of the route going back to pagan times, the care and maintenance of donkeys, a task at which the author is sadly ill-equipped, and so on.  The author talks about the visit of his family and how his young daughter apparently was able to get along well with her donkey, far more so than the author, probably because she realized how easy it is to like donkeys [3].  The author also spends a lot of time talking about the desolation and remoteness of northern Spain and its essential economic hopelessness apart from religious tourism.  Although a book of humor, there is a poignant note about human suffering and the burdens of history to be found here for those readers who are attuned to the melancholy.
  
  So, what does one ultimately get from a book like this?  Much depends on what you expect.  Those who come looking for more zany fun from the author, who presents himself with a level of clueless English ineptitude that calls to mind Mr. Bean, will find much to laugh about here.  Those who are looking for some thoughtful commentary on the social and economic history of rural northern Spain and the long-term repercussions of Spanish isolation under Franco as well as centuries of economic malaise will find much here of interest as well.  Those who are looking for a future film adaptation of travels if they can remove the animal abuse parts to get the PETA recommendation will find much to appreciate here as well.  There is one thing, though, that one will not find, and that is the author seriously reflecting on the issue of faith. The author's lack of faith, and his gleeful focus on the fraudulent nature of many holy relics, is in clear relief here.  On the trip, though, the author does not seem to find many people of faith and he seems to have the same opinion of those he does meet as M. Scott Peck did in his pilgrimage trip [4], which is to say a bad one.  This book therefore is a missed opportunity for the author to add more layers to his commentary, such as one that can address matters of supreme and serious importance without a reflexive reliance on humor and irony.
  
  [1] See, for example:
  
  
  http://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/...
  
  
  http://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/...
  
  [2] See, for example:
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...
  
  [3] See, for example:
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...
  
  [4] 
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...
• 
  Susan Moore

  Having walked 400+km of the French Camino, I was so looking forward to reading this book and reliving the journey. But I struggled with reading it and became increasingly annoyed with the author. The two stars I've awarded are merely for the historical information that he imparts. Any humour was diluted by verbosity and vulgarity. Tim Moore seems to have walked the Camino with a donkey for no other reason than to write a book that he thought would be funny. As a reader, I failed to reach an emotional attachment with any of the people he met along the way as he would mention them and completely abandon them. Having walked with 'Petronella' one day, he books himself into a refugio. My concentration having waned, I had to leaf back a few pages to see if he had mentioned parting ways that evening, but he hadn't. Petronella just vanishes into thin air to resurface later along the way. There were no descriptions of the beautiful scenery or sights along the various stages - the parts of the journey that the average pilgrim delights in. The book proceeds from refugio to refugio with a lot of repetition in between. He makes a joke out of everything he sees. That's when he's not judging others. 'Taxi or bus' he smugly asks a man one day as he relates to us his thoughts on people who 'cheat' on the Camino. (Their Camino, their Way, Tim!) Yet Tim gets a poor donkey to carry his load, and fills a half litre bottle of wine, as well as downing two glasses from the 'free' wine fountain at the Monastery of Irache outside Estella, which is against the very spirit (excuse the pun) of the offering. A sign at the fountain specifically requests Pilgrims to pay for the wine if they wish to take it away. Tim also is joined by his family in the final stages and lives it up in a hotel for a while. And that's where I finished reading. I didn't care at that stage if Tim ever finished his travels. Who hasn't walked the Camino and not been inspired or touched by the stories of others who are walking? Who hasn't returned home and felt that any problems they may have had paled in significance to those of others? It is the whole essence of the Camino. But, then again, that's not why the author was walking it.
• 
  Gavin Felgate

  Millions of people take the 500 mile pilgramage along the Camino de Santiago, which runs between St. Jean Pied-de-Port in France to Santiago de Compostela on the western coast of Spain, all to see the remains of St. James, also the patron saint of Spain.
  
  I've read books about this before, and this is Tim Moore's account of his own journey. I'd previously read his book, "Do Not Pass Go", so I was familiar with his often self-deprecating humour, which has been compared to Bill Bryson. I had wanted to read this for a while, and was lucky enough to pick it up secondhand while on holiday.
  
  Moore undertook the whole journey with a donkey called Shinto, and much of the book is about their relationship, starting with his admission that he's scared of donkeys. A lot of the stories involve Shinto's attempts to get his end away with other donkeys, waking others up in the night, and being mistakenly called a "monkey" by German hikers.
  
  I found the text in this book a little too dense at times, and I did have to read a few bits again, particularly the comprehensive background to the Camino de Santiago and its origins in the first chapter, but overall I really enjoyed this. As well as reading about how Moore related to Shinto throughout, I loved reading about the places he visited, and even more so about the people he met, who were often described in vivid detail, and also the places where he stayed. A lot of the stories are about squalid living conditions, with Moore often staying in a room with several other pilgrims.
  
  I'm not sure if I'd want to do the Camino de Santiago myself, but I enjoy reading books about it. I am also thinking of reading one of his other books, "French Revolutions", which I hadn't heard of.
• 
  Dawn

  The book provided an armchair walk across northern Spain, including the moments of elation (few) and the hours of grime and inconvenience (many), with the ending prize being an appreciation for comrades be they two-footed or four-hoofed. The writer, Tim Moore, normally cycles his journeys; but for this pilgrimage, he decided a donkey would be more appropriate. He assumed the many extra duties of grooming, feeding, watering, and finding a safe patch of grass in exchange for the donkey (Shinto) carting the travel bags.
  Moore attempts to give a history of El Camino, but his sarcasm in that chapter was over done and left me wondering why he would attempt something he seemed to view as so ridiculous. However, as the tale unfolded, his attitude seemed to soften, at least in respect to the handful of fellow pilgrims who seemed to proceed with more reverence (if his writing is accurate, the reasons and modes are different for everyone; and observed along this route are the worst and best human behavior.)
  My favorite part was his family joining him for a few days and the word pictures he created of his children interacting with Shinto and the path their father maintained. The restaurant scene was so well written that I felt I was sitting at the next table trying not to spit out my ice water as he snubbed the very people who had just paid the Moore family tab.
• 
  Emily Smiley

  I expected a funny book about a spiritual journey. I got a book filled with references I didn’t understand, vocabulary that required a dictionary, and a very long walk. The best moments were when he described the donkey or trying to get it to move. Some of those stories were funny. Otherwise the language was annoyingly obtuse and I just didn’t get the jokes. I’m clearly not the target audience.
  We discussed this for our family book club. We felt that he had a lot of missed opportunities for depth that could have made it a more interesting read. He never really disclosed what he’s looking for on his “pilgrimage” and mocks everything spiritual. At the beginning he wonders about the difference between a pilgrimage and a long walk and, while he doesn’t circle back, it’s clear this was a long walk for him.