Valencia Golf Hotel Betera

... to anyone and as well as the wine tasting there is a whole host of other entertainment happening, in particular our kids enjoyed the fair, complete with roller-coasters, bumper cars and candy floss.

Of course, no celebration, fair or fiesta in this country is complete without the fireworks display, and what a display it was. AND IT WAS LOUD. But hey, that's how do things here, all in nothing .................. I'll take the all :)

Okay, the event I've been waiting for for years--the Tomatina! For those of you who don't know what it is, it's the main event of a weeklong festival in Buñol, Spain. It is, plain and simple, a huge tomato fight. (At this point, some of you will probably be thinking, Oh, I've seen that on TV.) So, here's my viewpoint on the Tomatina 2009.

First and foremost, I'm glad I went. It was something I really wanted to do ...

Up bright and early with the thousands of other crazy tourists to cram ourselves onto the 9am train from Valencia to Bunol – 30 minutes out of the city!

We arrived in Bunol and walked through the small town into the area of festivities.

The locals were all out on the closed off roads eating and drinking in large numbers. A lot of people were drunk and others were getting there. We got ourselves a beer and headed across the bridge to where the street was already jam packed ...

Why is it, that whenever we told people we were going (or had been) to Tomitina - the tomato festival - they shook their head and laughed???

For some reason, Gary got in his head, (I'll blame him), that we'd go to Bunol to participate in the world famous tomato fesitval. This basically involves throwing very ripe tomatoes at each other, that of which is supplied on big trucks to the crowds of partygoers lining the main street ...

TOMATINA SPECIAL

The 48 hours between meeting up with the Polish crew at Valencia Station at 9pm Mon and returning from Bunol at 9pm Wed are like nothing we've experienced before (nor particularly compelled to ever again), and the experience has been indelibly etched into our collective minds. When we're old and drooling and in diapers, we'll still have searing images in our heads of dust, tomato juice, flying T-shirts, and arms pushing you into and out of ...

To say that I'm a big fan of Spain would be an understatement. Fans don't pee in their pants listening to people speak their language and enjoying the typical Spanish accent. Since I first attended the course in Spanish culture and traditions I had this idea that I needed to see all the most important Spanish fiestas in person to be able to merge into the Spanish folklore and be closer to their day to day life. I already went to see las Fallas in Valencia, Semana Santa in Sevilla ...

The Tomatina event takes place each year during a day in the city of Buñol. This is a big popular event in the streets, where people throw themselves tomatoes just for fun, with music, and activities organised by the city. This is definetely a good event, I still remember this day as one of the funniest of my life.

It's bright and early Wednesday the 29th of August - well not bright (it's still pitch black) but definetely early. We rose just after 6.15 and jogged to the train station to get there just after 6.30am. At this time, there was already a line but we managed to get tickets for the 7.08am train pretty quickly. We met Joe who bought tickets, but for the 8.38am train, and so we agreed to meet him at the train station in Bunol. After these arrangements were made, the 7.08 train ...

... a few hours, it finally happened. I actually looked away for a few seconds and just missed it! The cannon was fired, signaling the start of the fight. The anticipation built to a feverish pitch - already squished and barely able to move, our bodies were crushed even more as the fire trucks made their way through the streets delivering the ammunition. I really don't know how we managed to make way for the trucks ... but somehow they got through ...

I've been on some pretty crazy rides on this trip, 42-hours on a train across Australia, 27 hours of international smuggling messiness on a bus in Asia, but at least those were to get from Point A to Point B and where Point B was a place I'd be staying a while. But Spain was another story. I did, for the record, work in five days in Barcelona, but I took an overnight train from Italy to Barcelona and was then on another overnighter later in the week right back to Italy just to have the ...