"La Tomatina"

Alternative title: "How I waited five hours for a black eye."

So here we are, headed to Spain. It's the height of summer (at least, it feels that way) and we've been asked again and again... "You're going to be in Spain right about the time of the tomato-festival... are you going?" We were unsure, the traveller's demon of cost vs. budget made it look like we'd be unable to participate. Indeed, for two members of our group, it was simply not an option. But two of us looked into our wallets and decided that we could spare a little more cash for an absolutely unique experience.

And thus we found ourselves on a train, headed to Valencia.

La Tomatina is just one of the hundreds of festivals that occur all around Spain. We've been told that there's a festival for every day of the year, that every village has their day of celebration. It just happens that the town of Bunol celebrates in a rather unique way. The origins of the festival

are a little unclear, with any number of urban legends claiming to be the true meaning for the day. Yet the reasons have clearly been lost in the sheer frivolity of the event:

Let's all get together in the streets, and hurl tomatoes at one another.

Indeed, La Tomatina is just one massive food fight, and this seems to draw an absurd number of foreigners to the town. Once you have a certain number of people throwing food, the very scale of the event attracts more people. This self-perpetuating phenomenon brings thousands apon thousands of people to the town, all intent on hurling some fruit (to be technical). And of course, most of them are Australian.

What is it about our national character that causes the youth of Australia to flock to a food fight in Spain? I can't explain it, but we make up the vast majority of the crowd. And this is some crowd. Upwards of 50,000 people come to the town, who's base population is something around nine thousand. The result is an absolute invasion.

The procedure for taking part in this event is very simple. There's no fee, the only costs involved are the train fare to get you to Bunol, which is just loose change. You get up nice and early, and catch the regional train to the town, along with thousands of other excited young people, mostly clad in white. Why white? Alas, there's no cultural motivation. White simply shows up tomato splatter more effectively. My companion for the trip, Klaus, took this to absolute extremes, purchasing a white suit and Panama hat, making him possibly the best dressed food fighter that has ever graced Bunol.

We got to the town, and joined the horde of participants, and waited for signal to begin. Having started our journey at 6am, the kickoff was not until 11, so we had five ours of transit and waiting before the first tomato was hurled. As soon as this happened... I can't really use words to describe it. Pictures are vital. I shall simply explain the environment: Thousands of excited people packed into narrow streets, eager to throw things at one another. A cannon fires, and then they drive trucks laden with tomatos through the crowd. It sounds crazy, and that's because it is utterly crazy.

Oh, and why the alternative title? About seven minutes into the fight I caught a tomato... with my face. All I can say was that it was unexpectedly painful, but that it ensures I will never forget my La Tomatina experience.

continental shift

Update: Well what do you know, the interwebs HAS made it to Morocco. I never should have doubted

Shortly we will be departing for the exotic lands of North Africa, where the air is blisteringly hot during the day and carries sweet spicy fragrances in the cool evenings. I'm mainly just dropping a line to let you know that we may be slightly difficult to reach over the next week or so and not to panic over the continued blog drought.

So if you will all excuse me... I have a plane to catch.

loving it

Read this as an answer to David’s post, or perhaps a compliment, I'm still deciding what I'm thinking and feeling as I write. Pretty much I love travel, I love all these places I see and I love all the people I get to meet. Even the shoddy locations like Modena and Hamburg have something to offer. It drives home a fundamental lesson of life. There will always be ups and downs. You have to face it, not every experience you have can be the best, and that’s just fine with me.

Having said this though, I am sick of living in a 65 litre bag. It really does get trying after a while. As David said, you really start to despise your wardrobe. Personally I see my backpack as the root of all my woes. Indeed, all of mankind’s misery. I even named him. Spite. Forever getting heavier, hiding socks from me and catching this one particular grey shirt of mine in his zips. And I mean proper stuck... it’s a two man job to extract the damn thing.

Six months is ambitious for this sort of undertaking. Logistically it is both too long and nowhere near enough time. I think we didn’t realise this until we got over here and saw how much we were missing in lots of place and how many places we have been told are fantastic but had to bypass for fiscal or time constraints. Conversely there have been weeks just wasted in a couple of locations. So here I am, over four months in and I wouldn’t be upset to discover I had miss booked my ticket for two weeks hence, just enough time to hit up my last three countries. I have to collect the set you understand...

It’s fantastic having all this knowledge and experience now about how to plan a trip, how much money you should budget, how much time and so on. But that specific information on Backpacking in Europe isn’t much use to me anymore because I don’t think I’ll be doing this trip again. Instead I’ll have to learn a whole new set of information for whatever destination I'm headed because lets faces it, there isn’t anywhere else on earth like Europe.

And I guess that brings me to the final point. There really isn’t any place where I can see so much art, history, culture, landscape or diversity of people as I can in Europe. I am mentally tired, ready to go home, I want my bed and solitude, I have a bag that is evil incarnate... but I'm loving it.

Paris, Take 3

And so we're back in Paris. Well, half of us are back, the other half are here for the first time. It says something about the city that personally, I've been keen to come back not just once, but twice.

So here I am, four and a half months away from home, and I must say, it's taxing. On a paper, six months doesn't seem such a long time. You look at your itinerary, and wonder how on earth you'll see all you want to, you fear that three days here, a week there, it just won't be enough. And in many ways it isn't enough, and there is so much more you want to see. But at the same time, there's only so much you can absorb, and all the while the desire to come back home grows.

I can only speak for myself, of course. I've met people for whom travel is a lifestyle, people who see 'home' as a docking port between expeditions, somewhere that can only be tolerated for a few weeks at a time. I might even be traveling with some such people. But if I've discovered anything, it's that I'm not built for that.

There's something incredibly wearying about being on the move, all the time. I've come to dread the days where we pack up our bags and shift towns. There's always the excitement of what the next destination will offer, but there's an awful routine to it as well.

I've left a trail of my belongings scattered across Europe. Thankfully most of it has been deliberate. As early as the second week, I was discarding bits and pieces that were weighing me down. The process has continued, yet of course my load seems heavier than ever. As predicted in one of my first posts, I've come to utterly resent the wardrobe that I brought along with me. It's impossible not to, when you've been stuck wearing the same pair of shorts for months, when the weather doesn't permit you to mix it up by putting on your only pair of pants.

How dare I complain though? I'm on the trip of a lifetime, blissfully unhindered by work or any other such responsibilities. I must be seeing half the countries in Europe. There are probably people who would sell their souls for such an opportunity. Yet the grass is always greener, isn't it? Day to day, I'm having a fantastic time. Yet in the scheme of things, I can't wait to come home. To friends and family. To my own bedroom, where the only person allowed to snore is me. To a shower that I don't need to wear thongs in.

it's what you make of it

And so we're back in France, this time with a larger travel party. The first stop for the majority of us was the city of Lyon, which came highly recommended. As our train pulled in, the sky was that interesting shade of purple that precedes a storm. Of course, we had a substantial walk ahead of us to our accommodation, and of course, the rain came down.

No matter what someone else's experience of a place is, you can often arrive to find that it's drab, lifeless, an altogether unattractive place. I won't say this was our experience of Lyon, though we certainly didn't feel any magic as we shuffled our way through the rain to our 'budget hotel', in a district riddled with kebab shops and stores specialising in cheap bollywood-inspired fashion.

Yet in the days to come, Lyon would remind us of a vital point: travel is entirely what you make of it. When we actually ventured forth from our hotel room, crossed the river, and hunted out a restraunt to have lunch, we discovered a side to the city that we might never have, had we simply taken our first impression of the city and withdrawn from it.

Of course the best made plans often fall in a colossal heap, as they did with our lunch: we arrived in the restaurant district about twenty minutes after every restaurant stopped serving lunch. At two o'clock! What nonsense, there are places back home still serving breakfast at this hour! In any case, we were directed to one of the few places which might still feed us, 100 metres up the road. After a few more additional hundred metres, we found it, and enjoyed an enormous luncheon. Incapable of going far, we dragged ourselves to a nearby park and reclined on the grass, as Lyon opened up around us.

The weather had a lot to do with it, we were blessed with glorious sunshine. And we'd stumbled on quite a location. As the afternoon wore on, the park and paved plaza attracted all manner of youth with wheeled devices - bikes, skateboards, unicycles... the sort of riff-raff that often get such a bad rap for their disrespect of civic property.

Yet there was no sign of vandalism here. There was one statue with a sloping base that they often did ride up and down, yet it seemed to be enduring without any sign of wear. All in all it was quite a spectacle. Groups of people came and went, and Klaus went and got taught the fundamentals of doing backflips. Later, we'd walk home along the river, where it seemed the entire city had flocked to enjoy the afternoon.

We might not have seen this side of the city, and that would have been a real shame. So we'll have to remember that it's really up to us to seek out the good bits wherever we go.

Big (possibly gay) Al

In a dizzying contrast to Branco, Allan is a man of slight stature, reserved nature and a taste for the finer things in life. He is of an undeterminable age, German by birth but grew up in England and now works back in the fatherland. In his spare time he is a wine snob and this is how I met him. On the first night here in Strasbourg, Allan and I shared lodgings , and since I seemed to be his only company he decided to talk at me for a while until I was actually forced to engage. Now on this trip we have met a few odd balls, and Allan here was setting himself up to be a real doosey, but after a few false starts I managed to steer him in the direction of his purpose in the area. This is when I discovered he was a wine buff.

For those who don’t know me that well, I too dabble in the world of wine so this suddenly got my attention. He was telling me all about the soils in this particular area and how it differs greatly from the hill side vinyards and I had done my reading so I was able to hold my own in this conversation. All of a sudden I was invited for lunch with Allan to a winstub in town. Apparently one of the best in the region. On the end of my positive experience at the last local establishment I was keen for a second go and this time I would have a translator rather than my usual practice of likening French and German words to the closest sounding English then hoping for the best. After this Allan proclaimed that he had to “pretty” himself before bed. Maybe his grasp of English isn’t so comprehensive. Then the sound of “Dancing Queen” came softly from the shower. Maybe his tastes weren’t so impeccable.

The next day I was roused at 8 am by Allan and his immaculately trimmed goatee for breakfast. I begged off and he said he would come and get me for lunch around 12. I wandered around until I found coffee and cake, then went back and read, waiting for my guide. At 11:58 Allan minced into the room and told me he had made reservations. We hurried on down to the winstub and tucked into a 4 course meal, each with a wine picked out for me. This was all topped off with Allan insisting on getting the bill. I offered, my parents raised me well enough for that. I offered quiet firmly but in the end the impoverished traveller in me won out and I bowed to Allan’s will. Then Allan suggested we go to the library as he had heard that there was a hot air balloon exhibition on. Not really thinking that it was to my tastes I once again begged off but he insisted that we do dinner at another winstub. As we parted ways I reflected on how eager my guide seemed for my company. How well dressed and neat he was. How he held his hands. Wait, was he plucking his eyebrow last night?

Did I just go on a date?

I had forgotten, I couldn’t come to dinner Allan. I'm sick tonight.

When worlds collide

Strasbourg was a spur of the moment choice for me. My main criteria was proximity to Paris, cost of travel. And oh, wouldn’t you know. It just happens to be the capitol of Alsace, one of my favourite wine regions.

The journey to Strasbourg was painless really. It may have taken four hours but there was only one change, I was in a spacious carriage and I had a power point for the lap top. I'm a weak excuse for a traveller I know... So as I said, the main attraction of Strasbourg was its proximity to the Alsatian wine region and the train ride took me its entire length. Seeing as I had time to kill and an open ended ticket I decided to get off at Colmar and poke around. The only notable thing was my introduction to the winstub. Pretty much it’s a pub that sells good wine and fantastic local food. How could this be a bad way to spend a day?

All this food and wine is pretty unique to the region. Everything here seems to be an even blend between French and German and although I may have alluded to this being a potential abomination in my last post, I think it has come off pretty darn well. The food is mostly freshwater fish with potatoes and herbs. The wine is predominately Gwertstraminer and Pinot Blanc and the houses are Parisian terraces sharing walls with Germanic lath and plaster construction.

Now I may be wrong, but all this sharing of culture could be to do with the valley changing hand four times in less than one hundred years...