Valencia and La Tomatina with Festivals All Around - 24-27 August

We arrived at our hostel at around 6ish and chilled out until our La Tomatina introduction meeting at 7.30. Here we discovered our itinerary for the next few days and discovered that it started immediately! After quickly changing we jumped onto the buses and headed into the old town. Here all 200 of us jammed into a tapas restaurant for dinner and drinks to start the night. As you can imagine attempting to order food was crazy and took a while, especially as each person would order multiple pieces of tapas. This also meant getting your order when it was cooked was a mission as well. The food wasn't the greatest but it was filling and cheap so you can't complain and it was impressive that they managed to serve pretty much all of us. From here we did a pub crawl through the old city, although they were more like clubs than pubs. No one was complaining though, except for the fact that the drinks were quite expensive. After a couple of pubs, some more drinks and some dancing we all piled back on the bus again to head to the official pre party. By this point it must have been about midnight and we ended up in a really nice bar right by the harbour. The girls were all pretty tired by this point as they had had a long trip to get there the night before so we were just about to leave. However as we were about to leave the foam began and the dance floor began to be covered with thick foam. It was nearly up to our waists in places and was a heap of fun, although it was hard to keep track of my slippery jandels but I also didn't know what was hiding under the foam. After a while I started to get itchy so we headed to the bathroom to clean ourselves up and jumped in a taxi home.

The next morning we got up and had our free breakfast before getting ready to head back into town for the walking tour. This walking tour took us around all the sights of Valencia's old city, and while it was interesting it was also a bit much for a group of mostly hung over young people. Our guide was very knowledgeable about the history but she didn't have the charisma and funny stories that our free tour guides had had, especially our ones from Barcelona. After the tour we had some free time in the city which we used to grab ourselves our first Valencian Paella as it was here that it was invented. We also passed by a shop where I bought some cheap shoes for La Tomatina as well as some food for the bus. That night the tour that never stops continued as we headed down to the beach for a sangria party. We just lay in the sun on the sand and refilled our glasses from the barrels of sangria. We also went for a great swim and I learnt a few new beach drinking games involving a rugby ball thus bringing together two of my favourite things, sport and drinking. It wasn't too late when we all decided to call it a night since we had an early start the next day and wanted to be on our game!

The day had arrived! We had to be up at the break of dawn to head into town and meet the other group of people who were only doing the La Tomatina festival rather than the full tour before heading on to Bunol. Bunol is a small industrial village around half an hour from Valencia and turned out to be a really random setting for a tomato throwing festival. In fact the whole idea of the festival in the first place is ridiculous so I'm not sure what I was expecting it it's basically just a small run down looking town in Spain where they close off the Main Street for a day and drop 150 tonnes of tomatoes along it. We arrived there at about 8 in the morning and as we walked into town we were bombarded with people selling goggles. We decided that for €2 each it was worth trying them out so we got a pair, although when Jess opened hers she discovered they were already broken. We then started off the morning with more than 2000 litres of Sangria to get through between about 1500 of us or so. This started off relatively tamely before eventually turning into a bit of a sangria fight, it's interesting what can happen when everyone has already accepted that their clothes are not going to survive the day. It was soon time to head down to the site of the festival itself. As we preceded down the main street we were soon engulfed in a sea of people. We managed to push our way through to a square where we could get a higher vantage point and watch the people attempting to climb the greased pole. The tradition of the festival is that it doesn't start until someone has managed to get a ham down from the top of a greased pole. This might sound hard and it is, especially when there were a few people who weren't interested in teamwork and would climb over others in their attempt to get it themselves. This made for a few hours of light comedy until at 11 the festival began anyway and the first trucks came past. There were 6 trucks in total that drove along the road and dropped the tomatoes at 6 or 7 main drop points. There were also people on the back of the trucks firing them out at people as well. What followed was an hour of absolute carnage as tomatoes flew in every direction. First as solid, full tomatoes and later as slushy messes. Our heads were also the largest targets as they stuck out from the crowd while your body was relatively protected by the people around you. We lost Jess and Lauren quite early on as we attempted to make our way towards the centre. We eventually began heading back towards the entrance and by this point the whole road was just a sea of tomatoes. It was up to our knees at some points and we were absolutely covered in it. Despite all the fun we were having it was soon midday and the siren sounded for the end of the fight. Some of the locals were almost immediately out there cleaning their houses, and admonishing any people who didn't heed the sirens. We headed off the main street and back towards the buses where we found a dj and dance floor with a man with a hose standing over it. For the next half hour or so we danced and cleaned ourselves of as much of the tomatoe as we could by getting him to spray us. Once we were clean we quickly searched for some food before jumping back onto the bus home. As we looked back on the day we agreed that it was one of the craziest experiences you could ever have and we realised we were no closer to explaining how and why this festival had begun. All we knew was that it was a heap of fun and was extremely messy!

The afternoon was spent showering, beaching, eating and just chilling out before it was time to say goodbye to Jess and Lauren. We had had an awesome time together but now they had to leave as they had an early flight home. Once we had said goodbye we jumped onto the tram into town to head to the after party however when we got there we realised we had been given the wrong information about where to meet the bus to get there. Also I had been warned that the year before many phones had died in the pool so it was the first time that I didnt have my phone on me the whole trip. We asked at a hotel and searched it up using there internet but unfortunately still didn't manage to find it. Eventually we decided to give up and caught a taxi home which was a bit of a disappointment, especially when we discovered we had ended up about 100m from where we needed to be. Despite the unfortunate end to our night the day had still been a great success and while the tour was over it had been a lot of fun and we had met a lot of people.

Our last day in Valencia started very slowly. We didn't check out until 12 and by the time we had reached our new place in town it was almost 1. We spent the day just wandering round the old town including going into the ceramics museum which was set in an old palace. That night we were planning to get some dinner and then head for a flamenco show before we left Spain the next morning. We walked up to where all the restaurants were and eventually found one where the paella looked amazing. We were correct as it was the best paella we had had in Spain and it was a good last meal in Valencia. We also discovered that there was a free international dance festival on that night in the main square and we decided to go to that instead of the flamenco. This festival included Taiwanese dancers, Brazilian capoeira dancers, Mexican music and dancing, and finally Italian and Spanish dancing. The last act was the Spanish dancing and one was quite close to flamenco proving we had made the right decision coming to the square.

With that our time in Spain had come to an end as we had to leave our hotel at 4am the next morning to fly to Milan. We had managed to fit a lot into only a week and had both loved Spain but we were also excited to see what Italy had to show. We had been slightly disappointed by the food in Spain and were hoping that Italy would make up for it!