Morning Train - Algeciras

The 6 hour train from Madrid through Andalusia down to the busy port of Algeciras where northern Africa becomes accessible via a 2 hour sail across the Strait of Gibraltar winds through mountainous gorges, and past Spanish olive, grape, and sheep farms that look as though they've been operating the same way for 100s of years, if not thousands. The colors of the landscape until one reaches the Mediterannean are ochre and brooding, olive green, and the mountain vistas are forbidding and hot, if one must pick only a couple adjectives.

But they're fascinating, the journey revealing small towns in the back of nowhere in the Spanish countryside that appeared as though they've only the train station and around 100 inhabitants, if that. Twenty times today I wished I could emerge from the train to photograph this or that sleepy, isolated village. The houses with their red-tiled roofs and whitewashed, open walls look exactly the way one would expect them to were they transplanted into Daggett, California for example. Overall, I had a day of astonishingly unfamiliar sensations, buses crowded full of people arguing in numerous languages--mostly Spanish--accented by Tom Jones' music played loud, and then an entire school of British Catholic young girls piling on, cramming the port bus so full, I doubt another person could fit on, the driver shouting at us as we reached our hotel, so we could get off, then climbing a steep road to reach it...bus stops where horses and chickens gathered around the waiting kiosks and views of granite hills spilling over with row after row after row of whitewashed boxes that look as though they are about to fall into the blue sea. Everyone is so brown and so astonishingly "cosmopolitan" to pick another term. Languages seem to be interchangeable and come easily to the tongue, nationalities unimportant, and mostly good natured attitudes abound. The UK passport control folks didn't even bother to examine the passports of most people I saw, but only boredly waved us on. J., who is shockingly proficient in Spanish, fits in amazingly well here, floating from language to language with an ease that is barely recognizable in the person I've known who I've never seen in these situations before. He also exhibits an amazing street sense, navigating odd situations with an ease and sophistication that is surprising.

As I type this, I realize how exhausted I am, from the heat, and from the crowds, and from the unfamiliar languages and from the adventures still ahead. But I'm having the most wonderful time--the time of my life. It's all wonderful and so unfamiliar. The picture here was taken earlier from our balcony, which is far from being the Madrid dive, now. This hotel is first rate. You can see the coast of Africa, so very close now.