We’ve made it safe and sound out of the USA and all the way to the land of Spain. For the sake of interest, the rain in Spain does not fall mainly on the plain. Or the plane. It´s just bloody hot and it does not rain! Man, it is hot, and we are sweating like piglets under the new-found weight of our backpacks. If only we had a 1990 Ford Econoline van to carry our stuff around in…

One of the better things about leaving the USA earlier than expected is that we have now managed to go to the World’s Biggest Tomato Fight in Bunol, a bit inland from Valencia.

Imagine 30,000 people in a town square. Imagine 6 truckloads of tomatoes. Imagine water cannons. Imagine putting them all together. That´s the La Tomatina festival and it is bloody fantastic fun!

Di decided that she was going to sit out of it and was way off in the distance, at a “safe” vantage point, but it turned out even she was not safe, being hit right between the eyes with a tomato and having buckets of water tipped on her by the local residents.

I decided that discretion was not the better part of valour and plunged straight into it full-on. We both wore clothes that we did not want to keep any more because they were wearing out, and man, was that a good idea!

About 15 seconds into my foray through the crowd, a chant went up next to me “TUG HIS SHIRT OFF! TUG HIS SHIRT OFF!” and an instant later, I was set upon by five or six screaming Spaniards who tore my shirt clean off my body. So long to my free Las Vegas Tropicana casino T-shirt…

Everyone then began losing their shirts, even the girls, who in many cases had no idea it was going to happen, and had to spend the rest of the event in a bra only. Many people had bought 800Pta ($8AUD) T-shirts with the La Tomatina logo on it as they got off the train and were suddenly denuded as well, so they wasted good money on an object to be thrown around in the crowd.

For the first hour, people were hurling wet T-shirts at one another and it got quite dangerous in a fun way. To get more distance, some people were tying knots in the shirts, and so when one of them copped you in the face unexpectedly, it really hurt. I now sport a slightly blackened left eye out of my rather sudden introduction to a double-knotted shirt at high velocity. Still, it was not hurled in malice, but in sheer joyful release so it´s just one of those things.

In the second hour, the cry of “TOMATE! TOMATE! TOMATE!” went up as the first of six trucks of tomatoes came through the crowd. Some sections of the crowd ended up not getting as many, and particularly, beside the water cannons was not so good because there was so much water, it diluted the tomatoes. However, a bit further down the street, the tomatoes quickly became a foot-deep sea of tomato paste and it was a free-for-all.

I was going to wear my thongs (”flip flops” for my friends in the USA), but decided at the last minute to wear my Blundstones. I figured that the good folk at the Blunny factory would have accounted for the possibility that a user of their product may want to slosh through salf-deep tomato paste for an hour or so, and therefore, the boots went in.

Glad I wore them too, since at the end, there were many broken sandals and thongs in the mess, and even many broken Nike/Reebok sneakers that just did not hold up to the fight. The tomatoes were actually quite nasty if they got in your eye, due to the tomato acid, and so a lot of people were wearing safety goggles, but there were also plenty of them left at the end of the fight with broken straps.

Definitely a must-do event, and a real pity there is no good chance to take a camera into it to capture the action. People had waterproof disposable cameras, but even then, there was so much tomato on the lens, whether or not their photos work is a dicey chance.

One of the worst parts of the fight was that since I am about a foot taller than the average Spanish male and about 1.5 feet taller than the females, a pasty white guy with red hair sticks out as a real obvious target, and since they are aiming just above the heads in many cases, and my head is in that zone, I was a bit of a thing to aim for. (Today, I met a Spaniard working in a bank who just saw me and when he found out where I was from, called his friend down on the walkie-talkie to come see the “gigante Australiano”. Mind you, the top of his head was at a height about 2″ below my nipples, so I was really towering over him.)

At the end of the fight, the locals come out and wash down the walls of the houses immediately, and remove the plastic coverings they placed on before La Tomatina began, while all the people who took place go to the showers. While waiting for the shower, I began to wipe some of the tomato off me, which was a mistake since I then got sunburned where the tomato was not. It´s a weird sunburn to see - little white splotches where there were hunks of tomato sticking to me, and pink bits in between.

Since I never go outside without my shirt on, (heck, I was the only person in long pants in the whole tomato fight!) and I was not expecting to lose it, I did not have sunscreen on my back. It would not have mattered anyway, since the first hour of water cannons would have removed it anyway. Very painful today. At the showers though, when I washed it all off me, a lot of the locals around me stared at my pasty white body and began to laugh and point, calling “blanco” (translation : “white”). I think even the Brits were stunned by how white the human body can be…*wry smile*

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001