Valencia – It all about the Tomatoes

My arrival in Valencia was less than spectacular as Ryan, Nic and I dragged ourselves from the Valencia airport to Nic’s hotel in Palameta. We were all completely shattered after three crazy nights in Ibiza and were just looking for somewhere dark and cool to chill for a bit. We spent a few hours coming down from our cloud in Nic’s room before Ryan headed off to find his own hotel and Nic and I went out to get some food. The whole area stunk of rotten food. I originally thought it was the dumpster bins that were near the entrance to the hotel, but we walked around the whole block to get to the supermarket, and the whole area smelled rank. Not a good start from Valencia, but Nic and I were in a bit of a daze anyway and all we wanted to do was have a bite to eat and get some kip.

A few hours later, Nic’s roommate rocked up and then went out again. And later Nic’s friend, Trish, who had organized Nic to go on the Fanatics La Tomatina tour, arrived from San Sebastian. They were pleased to see each other for the first time in ages, and Nic then made some plans to go out for drinks that night. I didn’t pay a lot of attention I was still wrecked. We got some more sleep and then at about 8pm, we headed out into the city of Valencia to get some food and have a few drinks. We were all too tired to make a deciscion, so we ate at Burger King, before finding the Irish pub, Finnegans, where most of the Fanatics were supposed to be. I didn’t even have a beer, but I did watch in great disappointment as Liverpoool got comprehensively pumped by Aston Villa. We all then left the pub and went back to Nic’s hotel, where I was crashing because I had no accommodation that night.

Tuesday morning I woke up feeling slightly better, although still a little scattered and packed up my stuff and left Nic’s hotel to go check into my own. Hotel Venecia was right in the centre of town, and I expected big things from it as my La Tomatina package with Busabout was way more expensive than Nic’s fanatics package, and her package included an extra nights accommodation. The hotel wasn’t bad, and after check in, I went out and grabbed some Paella from down the road, before coming back and falling promptly to sleep.

A few hours later I woke up with a great pain in my stomach. The stupid Paella had given me food poisoning. I guess that serves me right for going to the cheapest corner store I could find. After a bit of time in the WC, I felt a bit better and went back to sleep for a few more hours before going out with Ryan and his friends Mary and Bron for some sangria and some food and a random little Italian place that was decorated with a lot of fake antique furniture and gold paint.
About halfway through dinner I received a call from Paula. She had hitch hiked from Barcelona to Valencia and was wondering what I was up to. She made it very clear that she didn’t spend ten hours hitch hiking to solely to see me, but I chose to ignore those comments, choosing instead to believe that I have that kind of power over women. So awesome that I make them risk their life and use up their whole day to see me. Surely that’s believable? I finished dinner and then met Paula back at my hotel, where neither of us got much sleep, due to my roommate being quite a loud snorer and the street being very noisy below.

The next morning was the last Wednesday in August, and hence, the day of The Red War. La Tomatina is the world’s biggest food fight and apparently dates back to 1945 when children started throwing tomatoes during a festival. I was up and out of bed by 6:40am for the rather shitty breakfast that was put on by the hotel. I needed a bit more than stale bread and some cheeses and meats to get me going, but as is the way as through European hostels, that’s all you are getting. At about 8am I said goodbye to Paula and went downstairs to get my free Busabout La Tomatina T-shirt and headed onto the bus and off to Bunol, about 40kms away from Valencia. The bus trip itself took close to 45min making it about 9:30am at arrival. The actual tomato throwing doesn’t start till 11am, so we had plenty of time to walk through the crowd, buying some sangria along the way for me and Matt. We drank about half of it while it was still in its delicious sangria form, before emptying half of Matt’s bottle of vodka into each cup. It now tasted like wine coloured metho, and was no fun to drink at all. As we walked down the hill and through the town, we ran into Kate, Erin and their crew, and also a few other people we knew, all making their way into the centre of the small industrial town in preparation of the mayhem. By the time we got into the middle of town, the crush was on big time. All you could do was push through and keep going, just like the bigger moshpits of Big Day Out or any other large concert. We got to an area where we were reasonable happy, and waited, getting pushed, crushed, shoved, but all in all, having a great time yelling out for to the Bunol residents for water to be tipped on us from their balconies by screaming “AGUA!” to them. At around 11am (I don’t know for sure, I didn’t wear a watch) the first cannon went off and the crowd roared. The pushing hyped up into overdrive as the crowd prepare for the oncoming barrage of tomatoes, however the barrage didn’t come. Instead we just got pushed further and further down a side street and as much as we tried to get back into the action, there was no way back. We could see tomatoes being thrown on the main street and screamed for some to be thrown down to us. I caught one in my left hand and fired it back, but that was it. For that first fifteen minutes I thought that would be the extent of my La Tomatina tomato experience. We decided to drop further back, walk along a side street and make our way up to the main street a little closer to where the trucks come from. This plan worked brilliantly as we were soon back on the main street, right in the thick of it as the truck came down and dumped off their tomatoey missiles. There was more tomatoes than I could throw as I concentrated on getting the reasonably complete ones that I could fire off with a little more accuracy at people in the distance, when they ran out of would pick up handfuls of mush in my hands and dump it into the faces, pants and tops of those around me. After probably 30 minutes of red mayhem, the second cannon fired and the war was over. We all celebrated with another roar and looked around at our handiwork. The tomato mush ran ankle deep in the streets, covered the walls of nearby building and caked on centimeter thick onto the hair, skin and clothes of those nearby. We began the long walk back up the hill, stopping at the houses of locals who were out the front with their houses to rinse us off. Most of these hoses were operated by men, and as such, they would generally show more affection (and water) to the ladies who were prepared to show them a little cleavage. Hence, for most of the way up the hill I was still pretty messy until we finally got somewhere which wasn’t all that busy and could get a decent rinse. We got back to the bus and I changed into my other clothes, and then promptly fell asleep on the bus, waking up outside my hotel in Valencia.

I then had a short nap in my hotel before going out to find Paula, who had wandered off around Valencia without a map and was now unable to find her way back. She then committed the cardinal sin of being lost, which was giving me her location and then moving, but after a bit of pissing around, we eventually found each other, and then decided to go to the beach. The Valencia beach is heaps nicer than Barcelona. Actually, while we’re on it, Valencia as a city is much nicer than Barcelona. It may not quite have the nightlife, soul or vibrancy of Barcelona, but it’s much cleaner, prettier and safer. The Valencia beach is a wide strip of powder sand (yes, sand) between a tree lined boardwalk and the warm ocean, which even has a few small, rolling waves to play on. Paula and I stayed at the beach until sundown and then made our way back to my hotel to get changed and go out for a few drinks with some of the crew. We met Ryan out, but Nic had decided to go home and get some sleep. We all walked through the wide pretty street and plazas of Valencia until we found Kate and her crew. After a bit of faffing about we decided on a bar and stopped in there for a few drinks. We shared all our crazy stories of the wonderful ball of silliness that is La Tomatina, before realizing how late it was and deciding to say my goodbyes to Kate, as I would not see her until London in late October, and Ryan who I wouldn’t see until our planned Krakow trip in mid October.

Paula and I got back to the hotel and tidied up our stuff. I was off on the bus to Madrid then next morning, and she would be on a train back to Barcelona at 6:30am, the beginning of a long day of travel which will eventually have her back in Hamburg by 10pm that evening. I was once again sad to see her go, but we had planned for me to come see her in October in Berlin, so that once another trip to look forward to in what is rapidly becoming a very booked out September and October.