The Taste of Tomato

We made the 7 hour drive from Hendaye, France to Bunol, Spain on August 27th. I was very surprised that when we crossed from France to Spain there was no customs or passport control. We simply crossed a bridge and we were in Spain. It turns out that there are 26 European countries who have ratified the Schengen agreement which allows residents (and visitors) to freely pass from one country to the next with any sort of customs. Similar to how a resident of the United States freely passes from one state to another. Pretty cool. 

We drove through the Pyrenees to get to Bunol. No one ever told me the Pyrenees are freaking beautiful. 

With little difficulty we found our campsite and were a bit surprised that the campground was almost empty. There were a few tents, but at most it was only at 10% capacity. As the night went on it filled up more and more, but never reached more than 25% full. I suppose this was because they set up the campground in anticipation of a crowd as large as last years, which was 50,000 people. However for safety reasons the city of Bunol only sold 20,000 tickets, so there were far fewer people. After wandering around the city for sometime we headed back to our campsite to go to bed. 

Local residents protecting their homes from the upcoming onslaught. 

You'll notice 2nd story windows are covered with plastic and 1st story windows with wooden boards.

However, on our way to our tent we waved hello to a group of people that were sitting in a circle and having a few beers. Within a few minutes we had joined them with beers of our own and for several hours we chatted with folks from Venezuela, Canada, Ukraine, Netherlands, and of course Spain. It's also worth noting that it didn't matter when we wanted to go to sleep, it was impossible because less than 100 meters from our campsite there was a 24 hour dance party with techno music so loud it rattled your insides. The music played until 7:00 AM and then finally stopped. We looked about 10 times and not once did we see a single person at the dance party, it was there simply to prevent us from sleeping.

Our Tomatina friends.

Despite the dance party I think I got an hour or two of sleep before waking up at 8:00 A.M. to start adequately preparing for the festival, which was to kick of at 10:00. If you are wondering how a tomato festival with 20,000 people and 40 metric tons of tomatoes kicks off you have asked a fantastic question. At 10:00 a 15 to 20 foot pole that has been throughly greased is opened up to the public. Atop the pole is a ham. For the festival to truly begin someone must climb the pole and retrieve the ham. Watching scores of wildly intoxicated people attempt to scale a massive greased pole is quite entertaining. Whenever someone got near the top the crowd with roar with anticipation only to see them go tumbling to the ground. I can't imagine how difficult it was because even getting near the pole would've been a feat. The bottom of the pole was simply a pile of bodies with people trying to claw their way to the top. Despite two people getting their hands on the ham, no one got the ham off of the top of the pole, but after an hour the tomato trucks started to role through anyway. 

The ham pole. (Not my picture)

Truck after truck inched their way through the packed city streets with local residents atop them firing tomatoes at the crowd. After this the festival is essentially just an hour of picking tomatoes off of the ground and off of people and throwing them at whoever you can see. By the end you are caked in tomato and it's quite disgusting. It's worth noting that the day before the festival Frankie had wisely purchased a pair of goggles, which I endlessly made fun of him for, but it turns out this was quite wise and the norm. I got so much tomato juice in my eyes and had to be careful to avoid being pelted in the face to save ye' olde vision. 

The festival. Also not my picture but a solid representation of what took place. And this should provide an explanation as to why I didn't bring a camera in to take pictures of my own.

After the festival we made our back to our campsite to shower. Of course because everyone in the town was trying to shower at the same time there was no running water. So instead we dove in a highly suspicious lake just to try and get some of the juice off of us. We then made our way to a Chinese restaurant, the only thing that was open, and feasted. I say feasted because it was already 14:00 and the only thing we had consumed all day was beer and win. 

Frank took a brief nap in the Chinese restaurant. He'd obviously exerted too much energy in the tomato fight. 

We went to bed nice and early and awoke this morning to an eerily abandoned town. I guess everyone leaves right after the festival and we were some of the only tourists left in the town of Bunol, which save for the festival, is a pretty crappy town. We then made the 7 hour drive back to Biarritz where we found a campsite and pitched our handy dandy tent. We'll be in Biarritz for some time as we've decided to rent a flat and just play tournaments in the area for the next two weeks. Since it's almost September the country wide 'holiday' is over and flats our dirt cheap. We got something close to the beach for less than 30 euros a night. Can't beat that. We play our next tournament on the 3rd in a town called Pau, about 100 kilometers from here. Tomorrow we start training again to shake off some of the rust, and possibly sweat some more tomato juice out of the pours. 

Tomatina rules and regulations.

-Max