I woke up in my sleeping bag on the roof of our hired jeep, perilously close to the edge, beside two Fermanagh friends who were still snoring. This was the morning of La Tomatina, the most bizarre of Spain’s bizarre summer festivals.

    Eighteen hours earlier, five of us had arrived in the small Spanish town of Bunol, thirty miles west of Valencia, and been slightly confused and disconcerted. For the arena which would later play host to the biggest food fight in the world, the atmosphere was strangely subdued.

    Ever since children’s birthday parties and Portora school formals, food fights have held a special place in my heart. It had always been my destiny to partake in La Tomatina- where a whopping 120,000 tons of tomatoes are hurled and squashed by 40,000 mad people for one hour through Bunol’s main streets on the last Wednesday of August. The origins of the festival are contested, but who cares? It has become one of the most brilliantly ludicrous couple of hours experienced on earth.

    When we arrived on Tuesday afternoon however, the Spaniards, as is their custom, were all asleep, while small groups of young, English speaking tourists ambled uncertainly around the narrow streets, nervously enquiring if this was really the place where the tomatoes were thrown, and if there was a campsite, a supermarket or any sign of life at all near by.

    At least the bars were open. And occasionally, somebody would drive by and shout ‘Tomate?!’ in friendly fashion, though with a hint of combativeness.

    Home and shop owners whose premises lined the 300 metres or so of tomato throwing streets were taping plastic covers to the fronts of their buildings, but at intervals there were red stains showing the hits of previous years like old bullet holes on historical castles.

    It was like arriving in the middle of preparations for a party to which we were not invited, and try as we might to get to the centre of things, it was impossible not to feel that the action was far away, and being deliberately hidden from us. In the coming hours of course, this feeling of exclusion would be shot down in a hail of over-ripe tomatoes.

    Eventually, about a mile out of town we found a supermercado and stocked up for the next 24 hours with food, water, beer and sangria, throwing in a bag of tomatoes for effect. We returned to our parking space on a corner on the edge of town and set up camp.

    Two Australian camper vans parked alongside us, and we looked enviously at their beds, kitchen facilities and toilets, although they looked enviously at our stockpile of food and drink, as they too had been unable to locate a supermarket.

    In time we were joined by three other Enniskilleners who had made their way to Valencia by way of floods in Prague, a gun-wielding madman in Bratislava and a Manchester United match in Budapest.

    Setting off from our jeep to meet them, I found them walking in the wrong direction, swamped by the biggest sombreros you have ever seen.

    Within the hour we had wolfed the salami, bread and cheese and were making steady progress on the San Miguel. Travelling groups had learned on the grapevine that our jeep was party central at this early stage of the festival and were joining us as night fell, spreading out across the main road, on a sweeping corner. It was not the most sensible place for a party, but the words sensible and Bunol never sit comfortably together.

    When the Spaniards eventually decided to shake off their Siestas and come out to play, we made our unsteady progress down the hill to where a funfair, rock concert and temporary bars had been set up. The town had transformed beyond recognition, and was now a jumping, jiving carnival of the sort we had imagined before arriving that afternoon.

    At last we felt a part of the action, and leapt on the stage to dance with the band in a gesture of inclusion. The illusion was shattered when we were summarily ejected from the stage with the bassist skilfully delivering murder threats without missing a beat.

    We had arrived, we were up for it and we had found the festival of legend. I felt confident that all I had read and heard about La Tomatina would come blissfully true next day. Eventually we trudged back up the hill to the jeep to fight for road space on which to lay our hats and call home. I felt jealous of the size of the home afforded by the largest Sombreros in Spain, but then remembered the comfortable if slightly perilous space available on the roof of the jeep.

    The sun shone brightly as we rose the next morning. One of the Australians had thoughtfully thrown a blue blanket in pity over the three Enniskillen amigos who were huddled together on the dirt beside his van, and slowly other people began to emerge again into the light, throwing around wild accusations about questionable behaviour the night before.

    At nine-thirty it was time to descend into the town and face our red destiny. Armed with a waterproof camera and a plastic bag full of cartons of wine, we hastened towards the epicentre of the action. The first rumour- that the festival incorporated some sort of bizarre beginning featuring a lump of ham and a greasy pole- proved correct, and we began to worry that the other rumour- that the locals freeze buckets of tomatoes and wing them at the heads of tourists, would also prove painfully accurate.

    Men with bronzed skin were clambering over one another in their efforts to get up a tall, greasy telegraph pole which had a lump of ham tied to the top of it. The ham had to be successfully removed before the beginning of the real action and the arrival of the water hoses and tomatoes.

    Impromptu human towers were formed, with adventurous souls getting close, but never quite making it. At one stage, a shaven headed American looked to be reaching the Zenith of his travelling experiences, but he was booed by the crowd who prefer Spanish festivals to be dominated by Spanish men, lost his momentum,and slipped down to an unrecoverable height. Eventually an appropriately long haired fellow of Mediterranean extraction reached the Promised Land (an admittedly inappropriate metaphor for a lump of pork), yanked the ham off its perch, and the fun was begun.

    The crowds teemed towards the centre, where a square stage had been erected and huge hoses were soaking everyone below. With everyone suitably wet, the shirt ripping began, and soon the world’s biggest water fight was underway. Ripped and discarded clothes became weapons lobbed at each other, and the sense of elation rose with each dull thud that accompanied a well-aimed, savagely knotted t-shirt.

    At some stage, a hairy Gorilla mask hit Letterbreen’s Stephen Wilson full in the face- was there to be no end to the surreal madness of Bunol? As the tomatoes arrived by the truckload and the gorilla smacked me between the eyes with squashed fruit I swore I was on a different planet.

    And I was. A seething mass of brown and red bodies, interspersed with the odd tourist sticking out like a snowman in a conifer forest, stretched unendingly in every direction. Four, or was it five trucks rumbled through the streets, each carrying tonnes and tonnes of tomatoes, which they released from the dumper out the back as they made their slow progress through the masses.

    On board the trucks, lucky Spaniards pelted those below, the opening salvoes of a battle which would rage with Medieval intensity for the next hour. Immediately below the dumpers, people dived and squelched through the dumped fruit, firing them into the air with gay abandon or taking careful aim at someone who had previously caught them with a t-shirt. And still the hoses drenched us, washing away the sting of tomato juice from the eyes and face.

    On one memorable occasion, as a truck weaved through the crowds, its wipers working overtime to remove the sodden clothes which now littered the windscreen, the dumper was raised steeply on its axis, and 10 or 20 bodies came tumbling out onto the street, surfing on a sea of red and orange. The wild crowd fell on them like barbarians, stuffing their heads in the tomatoes, drowning them in juice. They rose again from the red depths, laughing hysterically.

    Keeping the head down, ducking and weaving, we joined in the madness, realising in one horrible moment that there were no available toilets, and there was a lot of water. But it didn’t matter- the jubilation of leaping knee deep through tomatoes and pelting people in the face with squashed fruit supercedes base sanitary concerns.

    As the arms were getting tired and the water getting colder, we’d nearly had enough. Weak people were sheltering under the stage, and suddenly a great boom from a cannon singled the end of hostilities.

    I had a brief moment of clarity, and free at last from the danger of being smacked in the eye by a well aimed fruit or a sodden, knotted t-shirt, I stood up and surveyed the scene of carnage all around.

    It was like the aftermath of some mock battle scene. Rivers of tomato puree and ripped t-shirts were flowing down the drains at the side of the road. Previously sane people were rolling around and diving into the juice one last time, unwilling and unable to walk calmly away from such an experience. Old ladies had already begun the annual process of scrubbing their walls free of orange stains.

    Seeing one of our Irish contingent squelching his way up the road ahead, I picked up a stray, intact tomato and took aim for one last, satisfying throw. A middle aged man with a tomato-encrusted moustache told me in a barrage of Spanish and English that the festival was finished, and no more tomatoes were to be thrown. I acquiesced, marvelling that such a bizarre event could be regulated with such close observance of the rules.

    Stinking and stinging from the pelting we had received, we headed back to the car, wondering how we now set about transforming ourselves from human pizzas to ordinary decent travellers.

    From upstairs windows, householders, who had been under seeds (sorry) for the past hour, came to the rescue of many, pouring huge buckets of water for people to shower in below. Some residents had hose pipes in their garages and poking out through their front doors, which they directed surprisingly agreeably at semi-naked strangers.

    Other tomato throwers had enterprisingly prised open a water hydrant, and were availing of its geyser-like power exactly like small boys on the streets of New York in the 1950s, except that the throwers had red skin, and were noticably less mature.

    We leapt into someone’s yard, and stood scrubbing ourselves gratefully under the hose, picking bits of tomatoes from hair, ears and other orifices. With eyes bloodshot from the impact of tomatoes outside and Sangria inside we returned to camp, dried off quickly in the sun, and changed gratefully into (almost) clean clothes. They would have been completely clean had Adam Cairns not had an unfortunate accident in their vicinity the night before.

    In the town below, the clean-up was begun and completed in an incredibly short space of time. Visiting revellers began to slope off again, although a few were too inebriated to drive or even to make their way to the train station.

    On the short trip back to Valencia I began to wonder what was next. After the bulls of last summer and the tomatoes of this, what new delights did Spain hold for next year? Then the waft of tomatoes and stale beer from our soddeclothes in the boot hit me with a powerful force, and in a state of nausea I wondered whether we could content ourselves with a relaxing package holiday to the beach next year?