Hola again from Spain!

With dodgy stomachs and chafed bottoms we were finally delivered by Ryanair back into familiar territory in Spain on the 28th. Unfortunately, whatever bug/bacteria/thing we picked up while traveling in Morocco decided to peak on our final night, which lead to a very disturbed night and very heavy eyelids for our flight to Madrid. The day was very long, being entirely spent traveling, as we took:

1. Taxi to Marrakech airport
2. Plane to Madrid airport
3. Bus to Madrid train station
4. High speed train to Valencia
5. Metro train to our hotel

We finally arrived at our hotel at about 10:30pm with just enough energy to check in and set our alarms for a 4:45am wake up call to catch the first train 30km west of Valencia to Bunol for La Tomatina!!

Even though we arrived at the train station more than 45 minutes before the first train which left at 6:30am, we still had to line up outside the station behind about 100 others who were there even earlier than us. After just making it through the queues and onto the first train, we arrived in Bunol at about 7:30 to one massive street party that had either started really early or still hadn't finished from the night before!

We followed the throng of people down through the outskirts and into the centre of town where the streets were already lined with tarps to protect houses and shops from the 150,000 tomatoes that were soon to be unleashed on the tiny town. After cementing a great viewpoint of the ham-pole (soon to be explained) right in the middle of the main square, we turned around 15 minutes later to find a solid wall maybe 1km behind us had formed of about 3,000 of the 40,000 people that attend the food fight. It looked like we were in for the long haul!

The next 3 hours were spent watching patiently as dare-devils attempted to climb a 15 foot wooden pole greased up with handfuls of fat to reach the giant ham at the top. Traditionally, the tomato fight starts when someone claims the ham (trucks loaded with tomatoes are waiting outside the town) but as with this year nobody managed to get the ham by the time 11am rolled around. Therefore, with a blast of a horn, the tomato fight began at 11am.

As we were right in the middle of town, we had to wait patiently as the trucks slowly edged their way through the crowds and into the centre, loosing tomatoes on people as they went. Eventually though the chaos began, as firstly handfuls of tomatoes made their way over to us, followed by rains of tomatoes from other people, and finally knee deep tomato soup! As the fight stepped up in pace, we became victims of our own great location, as mayhem broke out. Neither of us had ever been in a crowd more insane than this. The moshpit of people was swaying in the whole street as tomatoes rained down on our faces and giant high pressure hoses sprayed everyone in the face just to make sure you lost any visibility you might have otherwise had. Nat was one of the smallest people in a crowd that was mainly 6ft+ big drunk dudes and did amazing to keep her feet the whole fight, not lose her mind, and still nail a bunch of people square in the face with juicy tomatoes.

Unfortunately our attempts to waterproof our digital camera (not the expensive one) were unsuccessful as we found that tomato had made its way into basically every possible place it could have gone. So we lost all the photos and videos we had of the day, but we will always remember the carnage that was La Tomatina and that dude in a nurses uniform that fell halfway down a greased up pole trying to claim a giant ham so that people could start throwing tomatoes at each other!