they will do, and, often, they experience marvels that elude people who carry suitcases and make reservations. Every year, nearly two million American, and hundreds of thousands of British, Canadian and Australian, backpackers are drawn to Europe for travel, study and work.
Fresh from studying in and backpacking around Europe himself, Mark put out the word for stories on the Web, and, to date, we have received more than 1,000 submissions from around the world. He approached me to edit the first collection, Europe From a Backpack: Real Stories from Young Travelers Abroad, and the more I read, the more I realized we had to do these books. We select the stories based on simple criteria: well-written, authentic, first-hand. And each one brings back wonderful memories for each of us.
For me, it’s when I first knocked around Europe as a young man just out of the Coast Guard. I grew long hair and a beard, and hitchhiked with my buddy Craig out of London and across the continent, to end up picking oranges and grapefruit on a kibbutz in northern Israel. I started calling myself a “United Statian,” because calling myself an “American” seemed presumptuous, since everybody else from every other country in our hemisphere is American, too. These were months of new tastes and aromas, surprising characters, awesome horizons, adventures and discoveries; of exploration and growth.
Europe, the first book in our series, covered a wide range of travelers, juvenile to mature, and a wide range of subjects, simple to complex: the Berlin art scene, life and death on a Scottish farm at lambing season, and finding love again as a couple in Budapest. One was a serious art student seeking the right color for sky blue, for a painting class near the Eiffel Tower, when a despondent Frenchman jumped off its top. Others were party animals and thrill seekers (one snuck into the Roman Colosseum in one story, and flipped his Spanish rental car in another). Some just wanted comfort for their homesickness, as did the student who discovered an all-American Christmas in snowbound Lublijana, Slovenia.
Now, in this second book of our series, Spain From a Backpack, we meet a fresh group of young writers who take us through the flavors and characters of Iberia. They follow in the footsteps of Hemingway—running with the bulls in Pamplona, drinking local wine, fighting a war in Buñol (well, for an hour, with 90,000 pounds of tomatoes). But they also blaze their own trails.
One young woman fights through the weather and pain of the 800-kilometer Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, and transforms her life (“To Be a Pilgrim”). Two men just out for a picnic dinner in the beach dunes become the lightning rods for coleoptera beetles (“A Few Climb Up My Shorts”).
Some come to Spain seeking ways they can integrate into the culture, and perhaps even become Spanish, through dance (“Finding My Duende”) or family (“Meeting Pepe’s Mom”). Others resist integrating (“Bang, Bang! The Butane Man”) or actively fight it (“Robbed in the Rastro”).
Some happen upon an appreciation of the culture by accident, in their train car (“Eight to a Compartment”); some fall in love with it and get married (“Running for the Boy”); some just poke their heads into it (“Miguel’s Bar”), and some are shut out of it completely (“The Curse of the Tassled Loafers”).
Overall, these stories tell us what the guidebooks don’t: how to live on the ground once we arrive. We not only get the thrill of living vicariously through someone else’s travels—enjoying fond memories if we have traveled, and getting inspired if we haven’t—but we also learn, through the hindsight these travelers provide, wisdom about what to do and what not to do when we actually get there. The book serves as a tantalizing foretaste of what awaits us, and as an escape from our daily lives; a refreshing break from the ordinary.
As one of our readers noted, “This collection should inspire any traveler to record their memories in a journal. A few unforgettable travel anecdotes are far superior to a collection of a hundred photo slides to torture your friends and family with.”
Since the dawn of humans, we have loved good stories. So, we invite you to turn the page and indulge in this treasure trove of tales you’ve discovered.
Martin Westerman
www.europebackpack.com
Barcelona & Valencia
Buñol
Tomato Fight!
mike elkin
Whether the Americans to my right said “tomayto” or the Brits to my left said “tomahto,” what mattered was throwing as many tomatoes as possible. Behold La Tomatina, a gladiatorial tomato food fight in the village of Buñol. It’s a vegetarian warrior’s dream.
Imagine a junior-high cafeteria food fight. Now imagine the entire junior-high class participating in the food fight. Now imagine everyone from the elementary and high schools pitching in, too. Now imagine being outside, and that everything on the tables, from the sloppy joes to the foot-long hot dogs, is tomatoes. As the cliché goes, the streets ran red that day.
I had been traveling through Andalusia when a friend in Madrid invited me to join his gang heading to Buñol, about 20 miles west of Valencia. The tomato fight there takes place annually, on the last Wednesday of August. My instructions were to bring a bathing suit and shoes that I wouldn’t mind destroying. Off I went.
The village was not unlike other small Spanish villages in the region: a few narrow, cobblestone streets winding around whitewashed houses baking in the summer heat. But that week, thousands of Spaniards, Brits, Germans, Americans and Japanese flocked to the village for the tomato fight and the week-long festival that had grown up around it. We arrived in Buñol the morning of the fight and eagerly joined the rank and file for a breakfast of beer and tapas. As noon approached, the masses squeezed into the tiny plaza like clowns into a car, while the locals unfurled gigantic plastic sheets from their roofs to protect the buildings’ façades.
Suddenly a blast of water hit me straight on. People were spraying us with high-pressure water cannons, the kind used to remove barnacles from century-old ships, or anti-globalization protesters from international summits. Then Spaniards on rooftops began tossing buckets of water on unsuspecting people below. From 30 feet, that’s no sprinkle.
An unwritten rule decreed T-shirts were not allowed. “So let me help you remove that shirt, kind sir or madam,” the friendly mob would say, and proceed to tear the thing from your body. Then they’d tie the fragments of your former shirt into knots and fling the wet cloth at high speeds into the crowd. Turning my head at an inopportune moment, one caught my eye, whipping my head back like a Pez dispenser and busting a blood vessel.
I knelt down in pain. But there was no rest for me. A loud cannon shot silenced the crowd, and then the grinding of truck gears up the road ignited the atmosphere again. Six large dump trucks, bursting with soggy tomatoes, made their way into the plaza and unloaded their ammunition. Mayhem erupted as thousands of revelers snatched up tomatoes from the ground and hurled them at their neighbors. A friend gave me swimming goggles to protect me from the blinding tomato juice, but they just got caked with tomato bits. Off they came. My eyes stung, but I couldn’t dwell on it—there were tomatoes to be thrown.
My instructions were to bring a bathing suit and shoes that I wouldn’t
