La Tomatina

I love nude beaches. For the first time in my life, NO ONE is looking at MY boobs. I just had to start with that. So here I sit on one of Valencia´s lovely beaches completely covered and enjoying it thoroughly.

So the tomatina, as it turns out, is a HUGE deal. We parked our bus about a mile and a half below Bunol behind all the other thousands of cars and hiked to the top. ALong the way locals lined the streets with buckets and hoses and cheered us on. Once you reach the top of the town, you hike down into an inner barrio with high walls and narrow streets. Thousands of people, men in shorts and no shirts, women in anything from bikinis to a wedding dress (true story) everyone drinking beer from plastic cups and carrying nothing of value.

Gun shot goes off and the crowd goes wild, the tomatoes have no yet arrived and it´s already worse than any mosh pit I´ve been in. Windows in high up flats fly open and buckets of water pour down on our heads and suddenly we hear the roar of the trucks and down below we see them. Huge dump trucks full of tomatoes are inching their way through the crowd one after another stopping only to dump out piles of tomatoes or when one of the truck´s large security men stop it to prevent some silly tourist from being squished.

"Ground Zero" as they call it is not for the weak at heart. My shortlived time on the inside was rough enough for me to understand why I saw few other girls there. My shoes were long gone, my shirt had been ripped off, and I was thigh high in tomatoes. I could see nothing but red and the smell, a hot sticky sour scent, was seeping into my pores. It took all the strength I could muster and alittle help from some concerned large Irish guys to get me out of the thick of things. I loved it!!!

I found a few other shoeless and shirtless members of our group and we headed back out of the barrio. All the way back to the bus we were showered and hosed off by the locals, some paying a little more personal attention than others...ahem...and by the time we reached our destination we were worn out and still covered in smelly tomatoes.

It was a ridiculous amount of fun! Next stop...nude beaches...