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.