Before the museum, before the viewpoint, I find the bus timetable. It tells you what a place considers important: which villages get four services a day and which get one, when the working day starts, where people go on a Sunday.

Guidebooks describe the town the visitors want. The timetable describes the town that exists.

I used to travel with a bag that could survive a siege. Now I travel with one that can survive a long walk, which turns out to be the thing that actually happens.

What earns its place

• One jacket that is warm when dry and useless when wet, plus one that is the opposite
• A notebook, because the phone is a terrible place to think
• Two of exactly one thing: socks

What I stopped bringing

• The second camera body I have used precisely twice
• Books I intend to read rather than books I am reading
• Anything justified by the sentence "just in case"

The rule underneath all of it: if I cannot carry it up a hill at the end of a long day, it is not coming.

There is nothing to photograph on a salt flat, which is precisely why it is the best place to photograph. No foreground, no landmark, no help. Just you, a horizon that goes all the way round, and the decision about where to put the line.

We left when the light went and the temperature followed it down. Tomás got one frame he liked. That is a good day.

A flight makes two countries adjacent and identical: the same corridor, the same queue, a different stamp. Cross by land and the change arrives in instalments — the road surface, the shape of the roofs, the price of coffee, the second language on the signs before the first one gives way.

It takes nine hours instead of ninety minutes. Those nine hours are the only part I remember a year later.

The signal went at the second checkpoint and did not come back for three days. I had planned for this the way you plan for weather — vaguely, and with the wrong equipment.

By the second evening the phone was a camera. By the third it was a paperweight with a torch. What replaced it was not enlightenment — it was just attention, which had been there the whole time, waiting for a gap in the traffic.

There is a specific melancholy to the last ferry before the timetable thins for winter. The summer people are gone. The café has a hand-written note in the window. The island is handed back to the forty souls who actually live there, and to whoever was foolish or lucky enough to still be visiting.

That is my favourite week of the year to travel. Everything is closing, and everything is finally quiet.

Twelve frames, because that is what was left on the roll. A grey, flat, unpromising morning — the kind you almost stay in bed for. I went out anyway, walked one kilometre of shoreline, and came back with a set I still like more than most of my sunny ones.

Bad weather is good weather, if what you are after is mood.

Getting lost is a skill we have mostly deleted. The blue dot always knows. But the blue dot has never once shown me anything worth stopping for — that is always down the road it did not recommend.

So: turn it face-down. Take the smaller road. Trust that you will end up somewhere, because you always do, and it is usually more interesting than where you meant to be.

There is always a last metre of asphalt. Then gravel, then two ruts in the grass, then nothing but the suggestion that people once went this way. I am oddly drawn to that transition — the place where the infrastructure gives up and the landscape takes over.

It is usually the best view of the day, and always the worst place to turn a car around.

The night train is the only form of travel that is also a building you live in for twelve hours. You get a small room, a narrow bed, a window that becomes a television playing the whole country in the dark.

Nobody sleeps well. Everybody says they love it. Both things are true, and that contradiction is more or less the entire appeal.

Blue hour is a lie, technically. It is not an hour. On a good evening in a north-facing harbour you get maybe twenty minutes — the window after the sun is gone but before the sky admits it — when the water and the air are the same deep, saturated blue and every light in the port reads warm against it.

You cannot rush it and you cannot extend it. You set up early, you wait, and you shoot everything you can while it lasts. Then it is over, and you are just a person standing on a wet quay in the dark, packing a tripod, very happy.

The map said three hours. The map was optimistic. It always is, on roads like this — single-lane, hedged in on both sides, the kind that make you slow down whether you meant to or not.

Leaving the motorway

You feel the change the moment you turn off. The signage thins out. The radio loses the city stations one by one. By the second village the only traffic is a tractor and a dog that clearly owns the road.

The wrong turn

Somewhere past Ortigueira I missed a junction and spent forty minutes on a track that ended at a gate and a field of astonished cows. It was the best wrong turn of the trip. The light was doing something to the hills I have been trying to describe ever since.

Where Spain runs out

Cabo Ortegal is not the westernmost point of anything. It is not the most famous cape on this coast. But stand at the rail with the wind coming straight off the Atlantic and you understand why people drive two days for it. The cliffs fall three hundred metres to the water. The horizon is a single clean line. There is nothing between you and Newfoundland.

I stayed until the light went. Then I drove back the slow way, on purpose.