Wednesday 29th was the big day! La Tomatina takes place in Buñol, a town of about 9,000 some 40kms west of Valencia. We caught the first train of the morning out of Valencia to get the best vantage point for all the action!

We arrived in Buñol at 8am while the locals were barricading and covering their homes hehe. Surely they must get sick of this!

The big event before the main event is the fight to get the leg of ham from the top of the heavily greased pole hahaha - awesome! They grease this thing up with some sort of detergent mix that has the consistency of rice pudding. The ham gets nailed to the end, the pole goes up...

...and the battle is on! Check out the guy in the cow costume hahaha! There was a banana costume in there somewhere too.

Over the course of the morning some 30,000 people swarm into town while it's every man for himself to get that ham. After almost two hours, the ham was finally touched by a fingertip. It was about this point I decided to get up there myself, but right then...

...the first of five trucks was making its way up the street in the distance - LET'S GET IT ON!

The trucks inch along the street one-by-one over the course of an hour and dump their ammunition in heaps as they go. Then it's on - it's on like Donkey Kong!

Strangers become friends and friends become enemies as the shit flies in every direction! I discovered the hard way it is actually a disadvantage to be tall here; "The tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut by the lawnmower", and barely two minutes after the first truck dumped its load in front of us I got smacked a beaut in the side of the eye - ouch! T-shirts don't stay on very long before they get ripped off and start flying as well.

It is utter chaos for an hour, and some people appear to enjoy it a little too much ;)

Only an hour later, what sounds like a canon shot signals the end and all that is left is gross tomatoey filth (which I decided to roll around in hahaha ;) The buildings are all covered in shit, 30,000 people are covered in shit (and bruises), and all thoughts turn to the nearest possible source of water to get clean!

Oh, and everything smells! Jen and I stuck around for the clean up - massive fire hoses being aimed at everything while several people sweep all the t-shirts and drink bottles and so forth into piles,whiles tonnes of squished tomatoes get swept down the drains!

Many of the locals are kind enough to get their hoses out and rinse down passersby which I think is pretty nice of them considering what we just did to their town hehe.

Several people stick around and drink the rest of the day away while the rest of us pile back into the trains and long desperately for a shower!

This was the result of that tomato smacking me just two minutes after kick off. As I write this a week later, it's still there!

When we got back to Valencia from Tomatina it was a sweltering 42 degrees - nice! No wonder the tomatoes took no time at all to dry onto us, and the shower that followed was probably the longest I've ever had!

Valencia would get my vote over Madrid, but I was expecting even better things from Barcelona!