Acqui, acqui!

At twelve thirty on Thursday afternoon there is a train running from Sevilla to Jaen, cutting an arc on my map across northern Andalucia. It goes to Cordoba, and along the way it stops at the following stations: Lora del Rio, Peñaflor, Palma del Rio, Posadas. This train is called the Andalucia Express. I have to take it.

The terminus at Sevilla is entirely modern, the platforms roofed high by arching fibreglass. But it does not matter; when I find my coach and a seat by the window, it makes me think of the moment when the train will sail out of this modern platform, into Sevilla province and the afternoon. In my notebook I have written:

I am on the Andalucia Express! What a name for a train! This train stops at five or six towns or villages on its way to Cordoba, whose names on the platform I look forward to seeing, and flirt with the possibility of getting off at one that catches my fancy. Because buses are cheaper in these parts of the world this is my first train ride in months... how exciting it is to be on a train again!

Now I must look outside the window.

**

We pass villages -- just a few streets of houses -- painted white, the windows framed by paint the colour of sandalwood. In some houses, the windows have a brick inlay along their frames, in the now-familiar round arch formation. How simple these arches are! On some buildings, along the overhang of the roof, the same thick sandalwood colour.

In twenty minutes we are at our first station, stopping for less than a minute along the mostly-empty platform to pick up four or five passengers. The station is Lora del Rio. "Acqui, acqui!" ("Here, here!"), an elderly man shouts to someone up the platform, probably his wife, as he peeks into our compartment and sees empty seats. He waits for her to reach, then they both climb in with the satisfied smiles of being the first to spot the last empty seats in a coach.

There are more whitewashed houses now, entire villages of them, in rows and clusters one below the other on the side of a hill. The villages are always built along the side of a hill, so that in one view you can see all its houses, its lines of clothes hung out to dry in the bright sunshine, the spire of its church, the minarets. Inside the coach the old man who got on at the previous station is now standing at the centre. He seems to have made a statement or asked a question to no one in particular: in the beginning two or three people respond, then for a few seconds everyone on the coach is talking to each other. Now a young man in a sports jacket has joined him in the centre of the coach, and an audible conversation continues, maybe speaking in a language I don't understand, but each voice curious and different from the other.

The land is much more fertile here than the craggy, dry landscape on the coast. Just-cultivated strips of brown soil, goats grazing in enclosed pastures, the fencing old and worn thin. There are rows and rows of a dense bushy plant; and clusters of tiny yellow flowers on the ground along the tracks. There, a palm tree.

We stop briefly at our next station, Peñaflor. A signboard on the platform shows the time, 14:11, and the temperature, which has risen and risen outside the air-conditioned coach to 35 °C (at eight o clock this morning it was zero degrees). This section of the route roughly follows a river by its side, sometimes it is a hundred or a hundred and fifty metres from the train, sometimes we are right by it, the track following its course. It is not wide; its waters are a dark green and motionless in the heat. We reach a station and a settlement of maybe fifty houses: Palma del Rio. We have passed two or three stations called 'del Rio', identifying the village as being by the river; but the river itself is not identified by name, it is simply 'the river' for those who live near it.

While the Andalucia Express like the railway station in Sevilla is modern with nothing to distinguish it from elsewhere in these parts of the world, it is a Regional ("Ray-hee-o-naal"), which means it stops at small places along the way, in stations that haven't given way to modernity as much, and practices that seem anachronistic in Western Europe: at each station, the conductor, a young lady with short hair and a ready smile, still signals to the station-master by hand and shouts out to the driver that they are ready to depart, and uses a punching machine to validate your ticket before returning it to you.

Now we are at a station called Posadas: the station house's paint is peeling at places, brick showing through on the sides. There is a row of orange trees by the tracks. A number of young people, probably students, have got on. Along the way there are still tinier stations that we pass without so much as slowing down. Which train stops at these stations?

For perhaps the first time in my life, I wish I could paint. Then I would sketch these white houses, and the whitewashed buildings around them, in clusters on the hill, and the single palm tree, just the way I'm seeing them now, and it would mean more than any photograph I click on my camera.

A slightly tipsy man is talking to the ticket-lady as she goes about her work, following her up and down this coach full of people. She retorts to something he says, and the whole coach erupts into laughter. Not for the first time (or the last) on this trip, I wish I could follow Spanish.

A voice on the speakers announces the next stop: Proxima barada, Cordoba.