We smelled them first. The odour was of Spanish tomatoes, long past appetising and slightly pungent. The atmosphere had reached boiling point at this stage and the 120 000 kilograms of off-fruit could not come any sooner. For half an hour we had been squeezed and squashed in the cobbled streets of Bunyol in Spain. We had arrived on a rowdy bus from Valencia, in high spirits in anticipation of the looming anarchy. The revelers assembled in the middle of the town on the middle of a hill and we weaved our way towards the centre. The people on their balconies sprayed us with water as we soaked up the energy of the rowdy morning. Making our way to the town centre we soon hit a wall of bodies and could go no further. The majority of the crowd was boisterous groups of Spanish men, giddy for the impending brawl. Scattered amongst them were the tourists who, like us, had come a long way to be involved in the world's biggest food fight first hand. We made four - Steve, Gavin, Gregg and myself. We adjusted our goggles. We checked out the crowd. We were ready. The festive, sing-a-long environment of waterbombs and chants escalated into something more hostile as the wait went on. The mob throbbed and thrashed and grew bigger and bigger. There was soon no way out as more and more people arrived pushing forward and trapping us. We were alright, we were four guys, but you could see and feel the terror on the girls faces around us. The smiles turned to frowns as they were pushed a little too hard, and the frowns into screams as a push turned into a fondle and the screams into shrieks as the fondle turned into their entire shirt getting ripped off.
You know those old videos of the Beatles in America in the '60s and those teenage girls fainting in the front row. The delirium was kind of like that, it just wasn't the good kind.
I was too pre-occupied with not spilling my bottle of Don Simon sangria to protect anyone but myself and the truth is that it soon turned into a matter of self-preservation. Our group got split in two as the tide of hooligans washed us apart. We merged and ambraced our own inner hooligans. The crowd grew anxious and angry, I grew anxious and angry, and soon discarded wet t-shirts were being used as practice missiles. You could sense the mayhem, disorder and anarchy rising. Somewhere a girl screamed. Somewhere closer a girl screamed louder. Somewhere else a girl got kicked in the head. Another girl, who moments earlier was a postcard of festive ecstasy, was crying and retreating. This can't be legal! we shouted at each other in between gulps of warm sangria.
But then the stench came. The wait was over. The riot had just begun. As the trucks pushed through the 40 000 people in one street there was nowhere to go but further into the person next to you and the peson next to you, further into you. It was a battle to breathe as my rib cage compressed further. I braced myself and flexed everything I had. That didn't help at all. As the trucks brushed past us, the minions on top of the trucks pelted us with the over-ripe tomatoes. My arms were stuck by my side, my face a free target and as a tomato smashed into me and blurred up my goggles, I had a moment of clear thought and was amused that we had all chosen this. Then the panic of battle took over and I thought nothing. Once the truck got past we swelled back into the open street, picked up the tomatoes stuck to our bodies or on the floor and bombarded everyone and anyone. I discarded my goggles and immediately got hit directly on the eyeball with a full tomato. The sting of the hit energised me. Ten, maybe fifteen trucks went by. Each dumping the excess tomatoes onto the street at the end. The pandemonium went on for fifteen minutes. It was a hilarious free-for-all that ended with us covered head-to-toe in a basic pasta sauce.
For the next hour we basked in the aftermath and walked the streets splashing in the knee-deep river of red fruit. Our group rendezvoused at the bar in the middle of the street party, we found some drinks and continued the party that would end much much later on a beach in Valencia. None of us could bare the smell of tomatoes for months afterwards, and to this day the sight of a squashed tomato evokes the memory of that glorious day, something inside of me stirs, I scope out my surroundings searching for a perfect, unsuspecting target and then I take aim.
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