What do you do with a surplus of tomatoes?

La Tomatina started for me with a god-awful crush – the result of 40,000 people making a mad rush into a town which has a sitting population of about 8000 and no tourist industry apart from the few hours of La Tomatina. The main street of the tomato fight was at capacity and as more people entered from the front the side streets acted as an overflow, so the crowd was naturally pushing down. Now like in a river, if one relaxes and goes with the flow they will end up where the river peters out, a little further away from where they wanted to be but nevertheless safe. This was the plan of most of the crowd bar a few muscular young lads of Southern European persuasion who decided that this was the perfect stage upon which to display their machismo. If they weren’t ripping at girls’ tops they were pushing against the natural flow of the pushing crowd, creating a situation where smaller people were being crushed and suffocated and everyone was under threat of losing their feet and being trampled. At one stage I had to push my way through these muscle bound freaks with a young Japanese girl who had lost something in the translation of what the event entailed and had brought along her one year old son, who was in real danger of having his young oriental life cut short.

I was almost ready to give up, write La Tomatina off as a hoax and head back to the car but made one of my characteristic changes of heart and took a couple of back streets with the intention of finding another portal into the tomato based madness of Tomatina. We found one entry street that pitched above 45 degrees in parts and was ankle to knee deep in fast flowing pureed tomato and water mix. I struggled up to about three quarters of the ay up when I was hit with my first tomato, though judging by the consistency of it I’m sure I wasn’t the first guy she danced with that night. Soon after that there was a god awful push and I knew that if I could just swim through the crowd to a wall and find a hold I’d be able to weather the storm and slide up to the top once the crowd had passed. I made my way across and grabbed ineffectually at people and smooth walls until I found a little ledge, enough for the first two knuckles of my hand to wrap around and I was literally lifted off my feet but managed to hold on and made my way up the street of Neapolitan to the running street fight.

After the squash of before it was an absolute pleasure to make it up into the tomato battle but at first all I could was scrape at the soup and pull up little bits of pulp and skin where possible and fling them ineffectually. Other people by this stage were lying in the pulp and getting soup kicked on them while others were filling buckets with pulp and launching it over unsuspecting coupons. Nevertheless it was still fun and I dumped many a handful of pulp over a coupon my fine self. A three piece Spanish guitar band started blasting their song over the streets while they walked around and mimed being filmed for, presumably, a film clip. After doing the puree stomp for a while I made my way further into the crowd and went towards the wall, which was covered in plastic tarpaulin to protect the shopfronts, and I noticed that massed up around them were whole tomatoes, not many, but they were there – little red (and sometimes green, shhh) missiles. That was when the fun really began and I reckon I had a good half and hour of chucking tomatoes, retailing at 2 dollars eighty a kilo in Australia, at other humans. There were three ways that I would operate, either indiscriminately lobbing them into the crowd, picking a head and pitching a screamer at it or close range revenge demolishing someone who had gotten me earlier. Then the cannon blew which signals the end of the fight and I made my way through some back streets where some of the nicest old ladies in the world hosed me down and offered me their towels and a plastic bag to store my gear and one even gave me a bag of grapes, it was like the wanted to reward me for destroying their town by wasting their food. Nevertheless when every orifice resembles a lettuce light garden salad it all of their hospitality was welcomed with open ketchup sauce arms.

We walked the fifteen minutes back to the car with a few large beers and two cute as a button Mexican girls. At the van we were met with an arrangement of tearful forlorn faces and it was instantly apparent that all was not as it should be. It didn’t take long to work out that we had been robbed and all of our gear was now in the hands of some rascallian Spanish thiever. As this was sinking in, as I was formulating my plans for a European trip sans passport, laptop, cards and identification I noticed one of the rollers talking to two middle aged Spanish guys. I went over and it was made apparent to me that they were claiming to be undercover police and that they had our gear but we had to follow them to collect it. Now when you’ve been ripped off, robbed or just generally burnt your scepticism level skyrockets, so in the absence of seeing these ‘policemen’s badges I was insanely suspicious. It was as I was off to grab a real policeman that the lead guy popped his boot and displayed all of our bags, in all of their glory, sitting in his boot.

”Give them back”

But it wasn’t possible; they wanted us, in our big slow diesel van, to follow them in their little zippy racing cars. Now you can’t blame me for disbelieving these two ‘policemen’ so I jumped in the zippy little blue convertible – known quasi-affectionately as the Barbie Car – and followed them around the backstreets of Bunol while they zipped around in and out of traffic and my paranoid mind of minds I was convinced that they were trying to shake me. After a few narrow back streets at breakneck speeds, a la The Italian Job, they pulled into their robber’s headquarters with me in hot pursuit and right into the car park of the Bunol chapter of the Guardia Civil. Yes that’s right ladies and gentlemen, these desperados were actually real life policemen, and they happened upon the actual desperados while they were rifling through our stuff, apprehended them and appropriated their get-away vehicle. That was why they had our stuff in the back of their car, which was why we had to go to the police station to get it back – it was all evidence. So the end result for all the formerly happy but now jittery and freaking rolling circus members, was that we could collectively sigh a sigh of cliché and relief. Where to now? Well rollers back to Camp Squat for a swim and a quick soap up underneath the beach showers (and a sneaky look at some Spanish breasties) and off into the centre of Valencia because boyos and girlos we have to put on Valencia’s finest La Tomatina Ketchup Party. I’ll let you know how it panned out sports fans.

Valencia, Fagnatics and Camp Shanty.

The circus that is SiroWak 2008 rolled into Valencia after traversing the vast sparce aridity that is central Spain. On our approach we passed the town of Buno, the future site of La Tomatina, and upon inspection declared it to be a cross between a spaghetti western ghost town and a Siberian Gulag, and it required a yogic stretch of the imagination to envisage the words biggest Guzpacho being created there in three days time by 40 000 sangria’d up human catapults. It was about a 20 minute drive into Valencia, and despite our intention to avoid Spain’s third biggest city it sucked us in, forcing us to admire the square blocks of commerce and habitation that prompted me to remark that if La Tomatina wasn’t on I would have spun around and headed back to Madird with all her feminine wonders, but we had three days and there were tomatoes to be thrown so we made a beeline south to the national park and long beaches of El Saler.

Down the beach we peeled our eyes off the many assembled bare bosoms to take advantage of a small wind swell that had been whipped up for our body surfing pleasure, and I even grabbed my board and paddled into a few before the salty bath that is the Med this time of year ripped two stitches from my feet and caused a premature shred stick retirement. An inspection of the local campsite found it to be bizarrely consecutively shithouse and expensive and it wasn’t until a few pensive roses prompted an adventurous pisser to go bush that we found the site of the future Camp Shanty, our home for the next few nights. Once we erected the tents the sound of thumping techno came alluringly wafting on the breeze and with a renewed spring in our step we skipped our way to the town square, intent on cutting some shapes. There we found an open air foam party with an age range of 8 – 14 and 50 – 87, a melangerie of smooth hairless skin and saggy hairless skin, which disappointed us to such a degree that we made our retreat but not until Ring-a-ding and Lunatic made a shirtless foray only to be taunted henceforth with allegations of prepubescent groping, I still believe they at least had that intention.

We day tripped the next couple of days into Valencia proper and after the East German reception we received on the way in it was refreshing to discover an absolutely stunning city centre. Valencia proper is what used to be the old wall city, and within its now arbitrary walls remains many delightful curches and official buildings, dating from some time ago, the actual details of which I have no intention of discovering being my contentness with the place just looking nice and the buildings being big and aesthetically pleasing. Get off my back. What remains of the old wall are two giant gates and just on the outside of them is the long diverted river which is now green space for the cities inhabitants and a museum district where different museums compete for architectural bizzareness, star wars helmets and conch shells in white and containing various curios from all around the world.

Have you ever seen the film Dawn of the Dead? Or Night of the Living Dead? Where your hero protagonist finds him or herself in a seemingly deserted city when they come across some human looking but obviously inhumane monster who tries to abduct them, a situation which is avoided but then repeated en-masse the further the hero protagonist gets into the city until they find themselves being accosted on all sides by an absolute sea of monsters, dribbling, slurring, decaying beasts who want to latch onto the hero and either eat their brain or at least just chew their ear….? Well I lived that nightmare in Valencia the night before La Tomatina in the old town. On our approach I noticed a couple of people sporting a yellow shirt, the tell tale marking of a Fanatic. The Fanatics are a tour operator that specialises in sending packs of Australian youths into foreign cities in spectacularly large groups, the rationale being that Australians should only ever mingle with other Australians and that a cultural experience while overseas is a threatening thing and measures must be put into place to avoid interaction with foreigners. On this night in Valencia 1400 Aussies drank, spewed and fought their way to alienating any antipodeans from the locals, and for that Fanatics I say thanks.

Wake me up before you Madrid a go go.

We rolled into Madrid and somehow found a park right in the middle of town. This is miraculous as it's Spain's biggest and most formidable city. That underground carpark was to become the base camp for the SiroWak crew for one memorable but totally forgetten evening. All our intentions to get to know the real Madrid went out the door when we joined a tapas tour and discovered that beers cost one euro twenty. Yep one single euro and twenty cents. Faaaaantastic. So the majority of the crew deposited themselves in a beautiful little tapas bar just off Plaza de sol and drank for about eight hours. Once we resurfaced the day had escaped us so we decided the best plan of attack would be to look for a party. I think we went to about seventeen different bars, sat ourselves infront of an updraphting grate and watched girls skirts get blown up and just generally created mayhem. The level of female beauty in Madrid is second to nowhere i have seen in the world.

We ended the night sleeping in our underground palace and im pretty sure the temperature didn't get below fifty degrees. But we did it.

Next stop Valencia.

The Day After the Night Before.

I can't tell you too much about the first leg of SiroWak as after two months at the Smashed Surfcamp and one hell of an opening party I was absolutely dead to the world for the first six hours, curled up on the middle seat with Amanda the Panda. I was assured upon my awakening that the drive was stunning, mountainous all the way through the petering out of the Basque country and beyond. Spain is really surprising like that, I always thought it to be flat but it's not at all, for the most part its either mountainous or tablelands. We pulled off the highway in the pursuit of somewhere tranquil to pass the night and lick our wounds and stumbled across the delicious little town of Arrand and after wandering through the narrow streets and marvelling at Spain's 4567th amazing cathedral we found a cafe for a quick beer and a river by which we slammed our tents and cashed in the hours of sleep we were all owed. I must say that my night was one of tossing and turning, partly because I slept all day and also because Peños is a man of the snore. Nevertheless I woke up full of beans because I was in Spain and we were headed that day to Madrid....

SiroWak Succumbs to San Sebastian Silliness.

So having strapped our helmets on and lowering ourselves into our respective cannons the SiroWak crew, plus Indie the Indian guitar player, blasted off into deepest darkest Basque country with a resounding boom. The destination? San Sebastian for the opening party of the SiroWak 2008 Rolling Circus. We heald it at ZM's discoteque on the beach and after lining our stomaches with an all you can eat buffet about 200 SiroWakians joined us in draining the place dry during the hour of free drinking. Now your humble scribe's memory after that is hazy at best but I distinctly remember dancing of the dorky and dirty varieties, tequila shots, nudity and an abnormal number of male/female pairings mysteriously disappearing only to reappear soon after nicely crumb chickened with sand. The SiroWak crew set up shop and did a roaring trade in the sale of rocks, fortunes told and even gave away free Surfaris with Smashed Travel. Before we knew it it was six in the morning and the hour of our Madrid departure was nigh, so a melangerie of arms and legs, a veritable pants on orgy, went down in the infamous House on the Hill, as everyone tried to find some available space for a few moments of much needed sleep before it was time for us to push off in the direction of Spain's heart.

Preamble, Preface to Madness and the Hair on Our Palms.

SiroWak, The Rolling Circus, is a movement which is bigger than its constituent parts. A group of talentless backpackers whose greatest attribute to any other circus would be the freak show or maybe, maybe, manning the fairy floss stand, decided one fine French morning to put together a circus and roll around Europe throwing parties for no greater sake than the fact that it would be a wicked time. The crew? Well there is Toby the Magnificent, Freddy Fabuloso, Pelos the Peños, Gravy the Great, Tiny Tim the Wing-A-Ding-Ding and the Amazing Nickuloso, a bunch of miscreants the likes of which are rarely seen together. So at the time of my writing this the vans are packed with the worldly posessions of six friends and we are off to San Sebastian for the opening party. After that we'll be visiting Madrid, Valencia (for La Tomatina), Barcelona, Paris, Bruges, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Munich (for Oktoberfest), Budapest and Ljubjana. It's going to be a mad month or so on the road, partying and experiencing, sleeping by rivers in the countryside and in some of Europe's biggest and wildest cities. So how do you get involved? Well we have a seat or two available in our Wicked Campervan so jump in with us and split the costs, follow us around in your own car or van or just meet us in the cities for the parties - with the SiroWak Rolling Circus 2008 Europe is your big top.