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| From Pamplona |
Upon leaving the train station in Pamplona, I had expected to see every inch of grass just covered with tents of backpackers such as myself. From what I heard, this whole place was just going to be insane.
I didn´t see a tent in sight. I had to walk for 15 minutes towards town before I finally saw a lone tent down by the river. Where were all the hippie camps like I had expected? And where were all the people? I thought I was coming to Pamplona´s version of a rock concert, but didn´t see hardly a soul. Eric kept urging me to be patient...it would come.
We made it into the heart of Pamplona, which is a tiny little town set up like your typical Spanish village, containing plazas and streets that are laid out in a jumbled mess. At the Plaza de San Francisco, we checked our backpacks into the schoolhouse there and noticed that there was a long line forming of people picking up their stuff. We had just arrived 1 hour after Monday´s running of the bulls, and people were already starting to head home.
While walking around outside, I noticed that my sandals were strangely sticking to the cobblestone streets. It´s that same sensation that you get when you go to a movie theatre and your shoes stick after some idiot spills a Coke on the floor. I also noticed that the streets were just littered in human garbage: cups, beer cans, sangria boxes, lost shoes. It reeked like the morning after a huge frat party. Within minutes, the city´s sanitation department started coming through with their giant street sweepers and started picking up the litter. Workers were out with pressure hoses spraying down the streets, and you could see the stream of alcoholic sewage just running by you.
Eric and I started wandering the streets to get a lay of the land in Pamplona. Right off the bat, we passed by one individual who was crumpled up in the gutter, unconscious, as the water from the sanitation department started pouring over his feet. If this was just a foreshadowing of what was yet to come, then we were in for a big surprise. It was pretty dead throughout the city, and we couldn´t figure out where all the people had disappeared to. We did catch the occasional tourists such as ourselves wandering around, wondering what was going on. But then we started noticing that almost everyone was wearing the same exact thing: white shirt and pants, with a red ascot and red sash around the waist. I felt like I was at a bandito painters convention. With all the red and white, it gave off a weird Christmas vibe to the place. I felt a little out of place coming into town with my blue Sierra Nevada shirt on. I thought that everyone would shun me for being "different," so I promised myself that I´d jump on the red-white bandwagon the next day. I already stood out as a tourist...I didn´t need to stand out any further and get the crap beat out of me.
All around town, images of bulls were plastered everywhere. We also noticed that pretty much, every store had been converted into selling T-shirts for San Fermin, which is the technical name for this week-long celebration. In America, you know it as the "Running of the Bulls," but that´s just a small part of the entire San Fermin celebration as I was soon to find out. San Fermin is the patron saint of this town. You see images of him as well on the red neckerchiefs and on the lights throughout the city. I still don´t know what miracle San Fermin performed to become a saint, and how a week of binge drinking and getting gored by bulls honors him. Maybe he was the saint that chased all the Prohibitionists out of Spain. Now that would make sense.
As the hours wore on, we started noticing that people were beginning to appear again, and the stores and bars were starting to open. By around noontime, everyone was back in the bars, drinking and eating and having casual conversations with friends. Throughout the main plazas, some people were laying down in patches of grass or passed out on benches, trying to get some quick ZZZs before they started partying again. It was quite amusing to see those who were obviously hung over. They looked like the walking dead.
Eric and I located a supermarket in town and loaded up on some cheap sangria, cheap beer and cheap juice to eat with our sandwich fixings. It was overcast in Pamplona, and the temperature was in the 50s the entire time, which seemed rather odd to us considering we were in Spain and everywhere else was blistering hot. As we started to eat, the street cleaning crew came through AGAIN and started blasting water everywhere, so we had to move out of the path of the raging river of garbage. Then it started raining, so we took off and hid in a church to warm up and look at the Gothic architecture. But then we started hearing music, so we dashed outside to see what was going on.
We suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a parade going down the street. It just popped out of nowhere, similar to those "surprise parades" that you find at Disneyland/Disney World that just magically pop out of the ground. And what a crazy parade this was. Big headed characters came running down the street, bopping little kids in the head with balls on sticks. The kids were loving it. I don´t know where this odd tradition came from...maybe it dates back to Franco and his Falange when they´d go out busting Republicans in the head with sticks, and over time it got watered down with big foam balls to make it more kid-friendly. I don´t know. But it was a riot to watch, and these big headed characters definitely whacked the kids hard with them. It was like witnessing a live Punch and Judy show.
And then following directly behind the whack-a-kid characters, a procession of giant human puppets started going by. They had eight of them: 4 kings and 4 queens, each representing one of the four continents of the world that Spain ruled at one time. There was a person operating each giant puppet, and he or she would twirl around and dance to the sound of these odd pipes/recorders being played. I had never seen anything quite like this in my life, and the whole crowd was marching down the street with them, like they were part of the parade as well.
We spent the rest of the day wandering around town and passing out on street benches, as well, to try to catch up on sleep lost the night before. During all this, we happened to talk to a young Brit hanging out on the bench beside us and started asking him for advice on lodging. He had spent the night sleeping in the park, and said that he hadn´t had a problem. We should be able to set up some sleeping bags there and noone would mess with us. So it was decided: we´d give the park a try for the evening and see how that went.
The streets of Pamplona at nighttime were insane. Bodies upon bodies of late night revelers were crammed into rundown hole-in-the-wall storefronts set up as bars and disco clubs. Most of the clubs were set up along the same streets. You walk along one street of Pamplona, and it seemed like a ghost town. Then you turn the corner, and it was Mardi Gras with people singing and dancing in the streets and getting trashed on sangria. Then, every couple of minutes or so, you see another "surprise parade" go through, led by a political activist group. They´d wave their giant bedsheet banner at the front of the parade while a band playing drums and horns followed right behind. These Spanish really knew how to have a good time and celebrate.
After downing our cheap store-bought sangria, we wandered around, looking for a park to spend the night in. Eric suggested one that was near the "midway" section of the festival, where all the chocolaterias, churrorerias, cervecerias, and whatever other "erias" you could think of were stationed. Earlier in the day, it had been a peaceful park. Now, people by the whords were wandering all over the park on their way into the heart of Pamplona. This was not at all what we had pictured as far as park camping, and I was concerned that all the wasted people would keep running into our tent by accident and destroy it within minutes. So I suggested we check out this other park that I had seen earlier over by the bull ring.
Both Eric and I were extremely tired at this point, after sleeping only a couple of hours the night before. As we were making our way across town to the other park, fireworks started exploding overhead in enormous bursts. No matter where you turned in this town, things were going haywire with San Fermin fever. We finally made it to the park over by the bull ring, and there didn´t seem to be hardly anyone there, except for a tent or two. Finally...we had found a nice, quiet park where we could rest easy until the morning.
We found a small little area sheltered by bushes, so we dropped our stuff there to spend the night. We decided to just sleep out in the open in our sleeping bags to avoid being seen with our tent...we didn´t need to draw any more attention than necessary. I noticed that there was someone already sprawled out in a sleeping bag about 30 feet away from us, so it looked like we had picked a good spot.
Within minutes of setting up, the nearby discoteca in town started blasting house music as loud as you can possibly imagine. You could feel the whole ground shake, and the pulsating just made your head start to throb. At this point, I knew I was screwed and would not get any sleep at all, even with earplugs shoved way into my ears. So we decided to move to a spot further back that I had seen earlier. When we arrived, however, a bunch of drunk Spanish guys were already there, smoking and drinking it up.
So, we trudged back to our original spot. Along the way, we accidentally stumbled across a couple making out in the grass. The guy didn´t seem too happy and started yelling something at us in Spanish. We walked away quickly. Inside our bush fortress, I rolled out my sleeping bag and pad, hunkered down for the night and hoped for the best.
Over the next few hours, my park of solitude suddenly turned into the Playboy mansion. Inebriated couples were showing up, hiding in the shadows and "celebrating" San Fermin in their own special way. Outside of our bush fortress, two druggies sat down and started lighting up. Their dog wandered into our fortress and about marked Eric as part of its territory until Eric shooed it away. A group of girls showed up and started using our fortress as a changing room for their sangria-soaked clothes. Another couple moved into our fortress and got their mojo going while their large black dog started tearing into a bag of groceries someone had left. And amidst it all, the techno music kept thumping DOOS, DOOS, DOOS, DOOS, unchanging throughout the night. I just kept climbing deeper and deeper into my sleeping bag, hoping somehow it would all magically go away.
About 4:00, I awoke to hear an announcer at the techno club say that they were soon closing. That was sweet music to my ears. I also noticed that my bag was strangely soaked with water. I had slept through a rain shower during the night and didn´t even realize it. I looked over at Eric, and he had his soaked white sheet wrapped over him like he was a dead body at the morgue. He looked pitiful. I also noticed that a few more people had suddenly appeared and were passed out in our fortress. I just pulled the bag over my head tighter and wished for the morning dawn to arrive.
About 6:30, I awoke again to the sunrise. I looked around me, and all my stuff was still there. Down below our fortress, I could see some drunk couples slow dancing and making out underneath the light of the lamp post...and then they´d swap partners and continue making out. I nudged Eric out of his death slumber and, smiling, congratulated him on successfully surviving the park. He just looked at me, annoyed, and said "We are never, EVER sleeping in a park AGAIN!" I had to laugh. Eric is one of the cheapest people I know (aside from myself) who will do anything to save a Euro. Twenty-four hours earlier, he had been thrilled with the prospect of not having to pay for lodging. Now, he was adamant about staying in a campground, no matter what the cost. And that was fine by me. After a night like that, sleeping in a tent in a 1st, 2nd or whatever class campground seemed like a luxury.
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