The best voyage I've ever made came from the worst moment of my life. In 1998 I was working for the youth development charity Raleigh International in Central America. Among the staff was a girl called Anna, a countryside warden from Oldham. Within days we became friends. Within a week she'd come to mean even more to me, but I didn't tell her so. I decided to wait until after the expedition.
After two weeks' preparation, we were allocated to our project sites, 50 miles apart. Six weeks later she disappeared. Three days after that, a search team found her body. She had been robbed and murdered.
I returned home in crisis. I couldn't shake off the thought that I'd never told her how I felt, and until I'd exorcised that feeling I couldn't move on. Then Raleigh set up a memorial fund in her name, to provide the school she built with teaching materials. To raise money for it, and to pay tribute to her memory, I began a sponsored walk from Canterbury to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
Crossing the Channel from Dover to Ostend, I travelled through Belgium, Luxembourg and France, and thence in a long series of zigzags down to the Pyrenees and onto the Santiago pilgrim trail. A jazz musician since 13, I took my trombone with me.
If I'd thought for months, I couldn't have found a better way to restore my faith in human nature. The last troubadours may have died out with Richard the Lionheart, but a tradition of welcoming wandering minstrels still survives in Europe. Everywhere I went, doors opened. Regardless of language, race, creed and political persuasion, those I met made me welcome.
A Spanish fascist priest, a French New Age traveller and a British booze-smuggler bought me drinks. I was given shelter by a factory worker with a Braveheart fetish, a neo-Nazi, an alcoholic farmer, a vigneron and a Buddhist monk. A friendly smile was my strongest weapon, my address book my greatest treasure.
Within two weeks, I lost my belief that Europe was dead to adventure. On a cold, grey spring morning, I was walking along the canal between Bruges and Ghent. Something in the water caught my eye. For a second I thought it was a shopping dummy. Then I saw white hairs waving in the current, hooked it with my walking stick and pulled. It was the body of a 70-year-old woman. With the help of a local barman, I called the emergency services. They took a statement, held a whip-round to raise money for Anna's fund, and left me.
Nine days later the sun broke through, and I found myself dehydrating in the afternoon heat just south of Leuven. I stopped at an isolated house to ask for water, and the householder invited me in. He was a mountaineer and armchair philosopher: an hour after sunset we were still talking. I pitched my tent in the back garden, then his wife walked in - nine months and two weeks pregnant. An hour and a half later she went into labour. They hurried off to hospital, leaving me in charge of the house. The husband returned at two the next morning, shaking with nerves; I kept him company until dawn, then he raced off again and I walked on. That afternoon I called him. 'She's the most beautiful baby in the world, you can be godfather_'
A week later I was invited to play in a village near the Luxembourg border, narrowly escaping my first bar-room brawl. In France I was made an honorary member of a professional free-jazz trio, jamming the night away in the smokiest dive I've ever seen. Later I formed a one-man trombone section in a municipal band during a Franco-Bel gian friendship festival, then joined a handful of musical anarchists to steal the show. Invitations followed me across France and into Spain, and in the grand finale to end all grand finales I joined six stoned Portuguese bongo-drummers in Santiago for the Millennium party, jamming the new year in while they danced in the streets. Santiago had the best Y2K party on the planet.
I had crossed the plains of Flanders and the wooded ridge of the Ardennes to reach the fields of Lorraine. Then I turned east and south to follow the broad mountain meadows of the Vosges down to the Swiss border. Injured in a bizarre accident involving a strand of 1917-vintage barbed wire, I left the mountains and followed the valley of the River Doubs out onto the white, sun-baked plain of Burgundy. At midsummer I crossed the Cte d'Or, making for the volcanoes of the Auvergne, wound my way through the heather-covered Cévennes, crossed the vineyards of the southern French plain and climbed into the Pyrenees past the fortresses of Carcassonne and Montségur. From there it was mountains all the way to Pamplona and the pilgrim road: the red fields of Navarra, the bleak uplands of the meseta , December snows in the Galician hills. Fields and forests, hills and plains, cathedrals and castles and hidden villages, I saw them all.
It wasn't an easy journey. There were days when it took all my stubbornness to heave my rucksack and trombone up one more slope. Nor was the barbed-wire accident my only injury: in Belgium a local lad set his dog on me, in the Pyrenees a blister turned gangrenous and almost crippled me. At other times the stress was emotional: loneliness, fatigue, boredom, grief. I missed Anna. I wished she could have been walking with me. But the memory of her kept me going. I'd said I'd walk to Santiago in her honour. It took nine months, but I did it. I reached journey's end on 30 December. No wonder the New Year's Eve party was so good.
It took a long time for the emotional wounds to heal. From leaving Canterbury to reaching Spain, the memory of Belize was a recurring nightmare. But gradually it faded, lost its sting. By the time I crossed the Pyrenees the worst was over, and in the end I fell in love again. I met a girl in a pilgrim hostel in Rioja. Before I knew what was happening, I was hooked, and the story of what followed made the best of all endings to the journey.
The Pilgrim Road was the ideal place to finish off. For seven months I'd been walking across Europe; for the last two, Europe walked with me. Pilgrims from Holland, Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Poland, Italy, all followed the call of Santiago. Groups of walkers met and formed and parted in a social whirl 500 miles long. Some raced on, blisters and all. A handful of us crawled towards our goal.
Gradually we formed a fellowship. Word spread of our coming. People began to look out for us: a British trombonist, a German nurse, an Italian businessman, an American student. By the time we reached Santiago we were famous, the pilgrims with huge rucksacks, the ones who were the slowest of all. There was only one possible nickname for us. They called us the Pilgrim Snails.
Trail to Santiago de Compostela
The Confraternity of Saint James (020 7403 4500) produces a series of guides for pilgrims.
Links: www.xacobeo.es.
Lonely Planet 's Walking in Spain (2nd edition, £11.99) has a chapter on the route.
• Ben Nimmo's 'Pilgrim Snail' is published tomorrow by HarperCollins at £7.99. A percentage of the cover price will be donated to the Anna Lightfoot Memorial Fund, which is administered by Raleigh International.
