Landed in Madrid airport, happy to once again see the sun and feel properly warm in shorts. Got the metro across the city to the coach station and got onto the 4pm coach to Valencia. Finally got to our hotel (we had booked a year in advance for this and Oktoberfest accomodation as they were the 2 big dates for the trip and we wanted somewhere decent, plus it was nice a cheap due to advanced booking) about 9pm, checked in and found ourselves in a very swanky 4 star hotel, feeling somewhat like we didn´t deserve to be in such a nice place.
Starving, we found the first food place that we found and managed to stumble upon the best sandwich place any of us had every experienced. These were less sandwiches and more sexwiches. A side dish of good quality chips, and next to them... the sandwich. One piece of perfectly toasted bread, coated in a thin level of mayo and then a decent amount of quality shredded tuna. On top of this they had placed, artists that they are, another piece of ubertoast, and then on top of this bacon, thick and tasty, before a large and tender piece of pork. Yes, 3 types of amazing meat. Still not finished, they then added tomato and, the piece de resistance, egg, before a third piece of toast, also adorned with mayo. In hindsight, I´m upgrading them yet again to godwiches.
Then bed after long day of travel.
Wednesday the 31st of August, La Tomatina.
Up at 7 and changed into our crap, ruinable clothes, or at least I did, and jumped onto the metro to the train station in south Valencia where the trains to Bunol left from. Waited in line for 30 mins just to get into the station before crushing onto the train itself for the 40 minute trip to Bunol.
Bunol is a very nice little Spanish town on the side of a hill, lots of little streets winding around and very typical Spanish housing, lots of tree´s and a very nice feel to it, and La Tomatina happens right in the center of it. Got off the train and joined the scrum of people making their way down the hill. Stopped halfway down for breakfast, a cheese and salami baguette and half a litre of sangria.
The area that the actual tomato fight takes place in is based around one main-ish road and the little roads that come off it, and somehow we managed to end up right in the middle of the main road itself. The locals have probably a better time (at least in the morning before the cleanup) than the people in the fight, covering their houses in tarps then sitting on their rooves, drinking, bbqing and throwing bucketloads of water on the crowd below. The fight itself starts when someone manages to get a ham off the top of a telegraph pole sized pole. This is made harder by the water throwing locals and the fact the pole is viciously greased up, but solved by making a huge human pyramid around the pole and then having people scrabble up and try to make the last bit of distance, and the completion of this is marked by a gunshot, at which point a series of 8 trucks, at about 10 minute intervals, drive up the main road, forcing everyone to hug the walls, loaded to the brim with over-ripe tomatos and people in them throwing the tomatos out into the crowd. Each truck also occasionally stops to open its back and dump a giant pile of tomatos in the middle of the street. I ended up standing, or occasionally swimming, in what was essentially a mid-thigh depth sea of tomatos in various states of solidity. The fight itself lasts about an hour and a half and was an obscene amount of fun, although tomato juice stings the eyes more than I could possibly have realised. Macky, Lewis and I made a gentleman´s agreement not to go for one another, which only Lewis broke. He was subsequently, and thoroughly, punished.
After it ended we wandered through the back streets searching for the showers, stopping along the way when we came upon a group of people standing around 2 girls in bikinis sitting in the tomato sea. Macky managed to get a "fight, fight, fight" chant going, which the girls obeyed, before yelling "finish her!" and one jumping the other. Our work there done, we moved on.
Showered, discarded my socks and shirt, changed into clean clothes and got the equally crowded but now considerably stankier train back to Valencia.
After second, more thorough, showers and then spent hours washing our shoes, boardies and the others shirts in the bathtub with large amounts of detergent before leaving them to soak overnight and going for more godwiches. Macky had to take the tomato out of his as he couldn´t deal with anymore.
At 7pm I lay down to read and promptly fell asleep.
Slept in until 11. Apparently I was tired. Spent another couple of hours dealing with our tomato clothes before draping them to dry on all available surfaces and doing what we could to deal with the fact that we had accidentally turned the bathtub a nice shade of tomato red.
Went out and grabbed some miscellaneous pastries from the supermarket for lunch to eat in the park then went back to hotel room only to find 2 cleaners outside our room looking remarkably unhappy. Walked past and spent the majority of the afternoon in the lobby with Lewis working and Macky and I reading instead until they were gone. Oops.
In the evening we went out and found ourselves some horchata, a traditional Valencian drink made of sugar, water and ground tigernuts that tastes like a sedimenty coconut milk, but was good.
Had a steak, chips and spanish sauces dinner and another quiet evening.
Woke up, checked out and took the metro to the train station for our trip onwards to Barcelona.
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