I had offered to host Lobna from Algeria.. And while looking at stuff to do, I found a Tomatina event on couchsurfing.. I told her about it.. she said, she absolutely wants to go,.. and because it seemed rather hard to get there on time by train, I booked a bus tour.
So we took the bus at about 5:30 from Madrid,.. We got a totally new bus (funny choice, going to SUCH an event!), they showed us a very loud video about the history of Tomatina, first in English and then again in Spanish.. Then our tour guide started walking through the bus, handing out tshirts, and selling locker, food and drink vouchers to everybody.. Then she just kept talking to random people, still very loudly.. And then we stopped at a restaurant for half an hour.. It reminded me why I don’t like such tours 🙂
Obviously, we arrived much later than I had expected.. The bus parked and we walked to our ‘fun zone’, put our belongings into the lockers (a fenced off area with empty, open plastic boxes where only the people working had access) and then walked down to the center on our own – we didn’t find our dear guide anymore 🙂
We quite accidentally ended up right in the middle, and realized only when we saw the famous pole with the ham 🙂 We had a bar right next to us.. I managed to get a drink.. and then the whole thing started! We were perfectly prepared with a waterproof bag for the phone, old clothes, a shower cap and diving goggles 🙂 And we were standing at the side of the road, so we were only getting pushed into one direction.
The tomato fight took exactly an hour – it passed really fast 🙂 Then we got to take some photos sitting in there.. and then people already started to clean their city again!
We took a shower, walked back up to the fun zone, changed, got some paella (that was now a lot more expensive than in the morning) and then went back to the bus 😉