The World is a Handkerchief.

A few years ago, visiting La Coruña for the first time, I was surprised to recognise some buses in the bus station there. They were the pink and purple buses of the Arriva company, one of the bus companies that you see around Greater Manchester. It’s a small world or, as they say in Spain, el mundo es un pañuelo.

And that certainly seems to be true of buses anyway for, lo and behold, there are Vitrasa buses in the Sahara according to an article in El País this morning. Vitrasa is the company that runs the bus services around Vigo and very efficiently they do it as well, as far as I can see.

Now, a few years agoVitrasa, like other companies and organisations, apparently made donations to Saharan refugee camps in Algeria. Vitrasa’s contribution was buses which carry medical supplies and food to refugee camps as well as taking refugee children to school.

This has featured in today's news because two journalists, Eduardo Rolland and Luis Montenegro have been making a documentary film called A liña do deserto about life in the camps and their link with Galicia and, in particular, Vigo. The film features a young girl called, Maimuna, born 19 years ago in one of the refugee camps but who knows Vigo because of a project called Vacaciones en Paz. As a little girl she spent holidays in Vigo living with foster families, all organised by Vacaciones en Paz. One of her ambitions is to come and work in Vigo.

Transport is also in the news for other reasons. This weekend being the last one in August many people all over Spain will be returning home from their holidays. As the vast majority of Spaniards still spend their holidays in Spain, the preferred means of transport is the family car, a vehicle aptly referred to as un turismo in the motor trade. Consequently some 575,000 journeys are expected to be made by car this weekend in Galicia alone, 10% of the total expected for the whole of Spain.

However, the Dirección General del Tráfico has prepared Operación fin de Agosto to deal with el retorno and so everything should go smoothly. (I will reserve judgement until Sunday evening's news reports with their gruesome statistics of road accidents.) The DGT advises people, though, not to travel between 17.00 and 23.00 on Sunday when they expect the greatest problems of queues to get into major cities. It’s all rather like Bank Holiday traffic problems in the UK.

If the weather continues as warm as today, I don’t envy them at all sitting in traffic jams. Maybe they should all leave their cars at home and use public transport instead!