Add a dash of olive oil, a teaspoon of fresh basil, squeeze, and let fly. La Tomatina.
30/08/06
















What is La Tomatina?
It’s a festival held every year in Buñol, a town 45 minutes away from Valencia, and if you’ve ever loved tomatoes or hated your traveling buddy then it’s just your cup of juice. There is a lot of symbolism and tradition surrounding the fiesta, but it wasn’t satisfactorily explained to us.
Thus, we don’t know why people got dressed up in teams of fancy dress (eg. Pope with cardinals) and got drunk in the morning.














Nor why dozens of young men and women risked life and limb to clamber up a pole greased with pig fat (and over each other), to grab a smoked ham at the top.





















Nor why tens of thousands of Spaniards and Australians are drawn to this spot for the world’s biggest food fight.



















But it’s so, so good.

What better way to get rid of a few (150 000kgs) stray tomatoes than to give them to a huge crowd at high speed?

After a little bit of gentle persuasion, Karina joined us on the morning train, dressed in left-behind clothes from Karina’s youth hostel, and our favourite sandals, pondering the forthcoming slaughter. We’d heard enough about it to be worried, but not enough to be concerned.
So there we were, bright-eyed and preening, and clean.















We watched the greasy-pole-climb, noticing that we were in the very centre of an enormous, and still swelling, crowd squeezed into a 300-year old avenue.
There were thousands of Aussies there, but the character of the day was an Asian backpacker, who early on got one of the best (ie only) seats in the house. The crowd noticed him, and cheered, and he waved back, glowing in the spotlight. He pulled out his camera. He took lots of photos. He showed off his new g-string…














…and then when the ham was won, so signaling the start of the main event, he very promptly got covered in tomato pulp. Because like every good bloody mary, this one had a bit of kick.




























By the end, we were swimming in tomato juice, and picking peel out of our hair. It took forty minutes to make it through the other forty thousand people there, and at one point the press was so great we all lost our thongs (we weren’t the only ones, notice all the bare feet?). Then it took four days to get the tomato out of our hair.














That shirt’s never been the same since.

While it seems tradition to end the day shirtless and shoe-less, noone was allowed back on the train unless in a fit state, which sent everyone back to search through the tomato juice in the gutters for any mismatched pair of shoes. A few days later, in Barcelona, we were happy to see some people still sporting their Spanish souvenirs.

I’m not sure we’ll ever buy tomato puree again, but we’ve just starting eating fresh tomatoes. And I’ve had a great idea of what to do with all the excess grapes we’ve been growing in Australia…