Not all those who wander are lost: La Tomatina, tapas y el toros

When planning our long trip, we had little to go by except for a handful of events scattered throughout the year. At the top of our list was La Tomatina - the annual tomato throwing festival held near Valencia in Spain. We landed in Madrid, and while our main focus was on getting to Valencia the following day, we spent enough time wandering through the streets to decide that Madrid was pretty nice for a capital city - loads of little streets (which become deserted between 2 and 5pm - the siesta hours), pretty plazas and squares, and some really nice gardens near the Royal Palace. We spent the night bar hopping, sampling beers and tapas as we went, and trying to pass off a mish-mash of lisped Portuguese as Spanish.

It was a bit of a shock wandering through Valencia, and hearing proper Australian English as the main language spoken. The city centre, while a bit upmarket and tourist oriented, was super clean and dotted with beautiful old buildings and historical landmarks. We walked along the old Turia river bed, which has been converted into a beautiful park strip complete with sporting fields and bike paths, most of the way to the coast to check out the beaches (wide and sandy but still packed).

For us La Tomatina started at some ungodly dark hour of the morning, as we - along with hundreds of other festival goers dressed in white - crammed on the train to the small town of Bunol. Because we got there early we found a good spot to watch the hilarious antics of 'Ham up a greasy pole' - basically a leg of cured ham is tied at the top of a pole smeared with lard, and people try and climb up to get it. The locals were either busy covering the front of their homes with tarps and plastic sheets, or were enjoying the festivities with little bbqs and tables set up in the side streets.

At 11am, the festival started with a bang, and as truck after truck rolled in throwing tomatoes at us, the red missiles started to fly through the crowded streets! At this point of the fight, targets were relatively carefully considered....however not too long after this, one of the trucks stopped and tipped out its entire contents right in front of us...you can imagine what that meant...absolute mayhem! From that point on it was a free-for-all. No-one anywhere was safe and you would have had less tomato on you if you were swimming in tomato soup. By the end of the hour we were standing more than ankle deep in a mix of tomato pulp, plastic cups and lost shoes and t-shirts, painted tomato red from head to toe. It was awesome!