DeeKnow’s Grotto

The other event of note on in Europe at the moment apart from le Tour de France, is the San Fermin festival in Spain. It kicked off on the 7th of July as it always does and since that day hundreds of people have braved the bull-run in the morning, while thousands more brave the cheap red wine during the night.

While I was living in the UK a bunch of us jumped on a bus with a boozy group of fellow Kiwis, Aussies, S. Africans and Yanks, and headed accross the channel and down through France to Pamplona in the northern region of Spain.

Its a fantastic festival and a must-do if you've got the stomach (and liver) for it. It was a double whammy for me too coz at the time a local boy from Pamplona, Miguel Indurain was dominating world cycling, which made for some entertaining scenes catching Tour coverage in the bars with hysterical (and pissed) Spanish fans cheering him on and going balistic in the streets after any hilight featuring their lad.

All day and night you'd hear cheers of "Indurain Indurain Indurain....." rolling up and down the alleys of the little town. Bloody brilliant.

The festival of San Fermin is better known by the ignorant (ie most kiwis) as "the running of the bulls". It was pretty much a given that if you were living in the UK you would attend "the running" at least once, probably in the year that you weren't going to "Oktoberfest" in Germany.

The actual bull run is the morning feature of each day of the festival and each year the international media make much of the goreing and injuries sustained by those that face the bulls in the barricaded streets. So far this year there have been the usual serving of hospitalised victims, some Spanish, some foreign, noone dead yet. An australian woman was also hurt this week, women are traditionally not supposed to run with the bulls, but its easy to see how an aussie broad might sneak under the radar :-)

I ran on the first day of the festival figuiring that the longer I left it the less likely I was to run once I'd seen a few serious injuries. I can say with hand-on-heart that running down those slippery cobbled streets with a dozen huge muscly stressed out and panicy animals chasing me was DEFINATELY the most terrifying thing I have ever done ... Honest !!! I was fair crapping myself.

That was about 9 years ago now, and bizarrely just a couple of months ago I was talking to a mate who I hadn't seen in awhile who said he'd just been looking at someones travel photos and who did they see in one photo with a terrified look on his face running ahead of a charging bull? ... yep... yours truely ... its a small world !!!

Since record-keeping began in 1924, 13 people have been killed at the festival. The last fatal goring was an American killed in 1995.

7:50:08 PM