The bus leaves Almería at seven in the morning with nine passengers and a smell of diesel and oranges. For the first hour the landscape is all greenhouse plastic, then the road turns inland and the desert takes over — flat, enormous, the color of a paper bag. The driver stops twice, once for coffee and once for nothing, and the passengers get out both times. In the middle of nowhere there is a bar with a television and a dog, and we all behave as if it were a cathedral. Slow travel is not a style, it is a schedule. The desert bus runs because people need it, not because anyone markets it, and that is exactly why it still exists.