A Whole Hemisphere Away

It’s moving towards late evening and the cloudless sky, having spent a solid hour fading softly through 5/7th of the rainbow, has now settled on an inky blue-black: a perfect backdrop for the spectacle about to erupt. We’re lying on our backs in the grass surrounding the citadel. Buzzing just enough on a now familiar mix of exhaustion, heat, excitement, and cheap, fruity sangria, we fall into a comfortable, expectant silence.

The day has been a busy one. Starting well before sunrise with a bus trip from Zarautz into Pamplona, we’ve now experienced the wide-eyed chaos of a bull run, human and bovine alike clattering along the cobblestones in a barely contained river of pulsing mayhem. We’re experienced travellers, we’ll be the first to admit to that; more than 17,000kms northwest and a whole hemisphere away from a home country we’ve not set foot in for over a year. We’re experienced travellers, but we have never experienced this.

In 2004, San Fermin, it seems, exists as one of the last bastions of world renown festivals still wholly embraced by locals, not yet over-run by the tourist masses, the two groups slotting seamlessly together to provide just the right combination of knowing history and vibrant enthusiasm. That we, here, on our backs in the dry grass, exist as part of the second group, matters very little to members of the first.

My travel buddies are an eclectic bunch: expats currently working in London, we are three Australian girls and a Zimbabwean guy who was born when that troubled country was still called Rhodesia. We watched him run the gauntlet with the bulls this morning, and in a head-to-head between the two, I’m honestly not sure the animal would have that much of an advantage!

The sky overhead erupts, my eyes, having drifted closed for a beat, are wide open and awake now as the pyrotechnics that this festival is famous for temporarily graffiti the night. It feels like whole years pass me by, glittered gold and blue and green and red, red, red. From the centre of my vision to the very periphery there is colour. Colour and noise and art and magic.

Earlier in the evening, following a steak dinner in a crowded outdoor restaurant and in exchange for a single euro, a Spanish-speaking budgerigar had plucked my fortune from a stack of brightly coloured scraps of paper. I can’t read the predictions, but it matters little at the moment because I’m not sure I want to know.

As it turns out, the here and the now are working just fine for me.