Most New Year's I find myself in the middle of a trip. More often than not, I am traveling at the end of the year and the holiday creates some inconvenience.
Traveling without reservations through Chile in 1992, Jon and I found ourselves joining a local family in their New Year's Eve festivities. They roasted a whole sheep on a spit in the back yard and put handfuls of lentils in our pockets. The party was warm and welcoming and we flew south the next day in high spirits, looking forward to adventure and some glaciers. What we found instead was a placed closed down for the New Year's holiday. No hotel, restaurant or travel agent was open. We wandered the empty streets and wondered what to do next. Another local took us in and let us sleep in their children's bedroom. The next day we went back to the airport and got the next flight out. The start of the new year was a bit of an anticlimax.
That pattern continued through the years. The New Year's Eve
celebrations in Rio cannot be missed. There is no way to avoid the party, it takes over the city. So we dressed in white and joined the millions on Copacabana beach for the fireworks. The air was thick with smoke and the water lit up with floating candle-lit rafts. It was a good idea to take a dip in the ocean before starting the long trek home. The New Year usually started with snarled traffic on the roads and the city badly in need of time to recover from the festivities. A sleepy and hungover start to the New Year.
This year I am not traveling, I am staying home by the fire. But as always, I will awake to a New Year and feel the need to do some cleaning up. It is time to put away the Christmas decorations, organize the now full cupboards, throw away the leftovers, and try to get back to normal life. Christmas was warm and fuzzy, but now it is time to take a cold shower and get moving.
This need not be as bad as it sounds. Last year, in Sri Lanka, I had a very different New Year's experience. Again, we were 10 days into our trip round the island. We didn't expect any party. The Sri Lankas don't party much. They don't drink or eat out. We had difficulty finding a place to celebrate Christmas. As we drove round the inner highlands I saw no bars, clubs or recognizable restaurant chains. We had stayed at a string of cheap hotels with only the bare basics. So on New Year's Eve we went out on safari, then went to bed like the animals, at sundown.
The surprise came New Year's day which, for once, outshone the night before. Our hotel (where we were the only guests) had rustled up a New Year's breakfast for us which we ate outside off banana leaves. It was made of sweetmeats, fruit, coconut rice, and colorful cake. I enjoyed it very much, and even was served decent coffee. The waiters hovered round and explained each dish and beamed. Then they showed us how to turn our cups upside down and 'read' the coffee grounds. The patterns would tell us what to expect in the year to come. I don't really know my way around coffee grounds, but I saw some high points between the drops dribbling down the side. I'm sure that means there was some good to look forward to.
After breakfast we received news of our driver. His mother had died overnight and he had gone home for the funeral. Another man was there to drive us on to our next and last destination on the coast. And just like that we were reminded that life is full of unexpected turns, both good and bad. We cannot even try to predict the events of the year to come. Thankfully we checked in to our next, and best, hotel on the beach. Our adventure over, we could relax in a place with western food and bathrooms. We took time to remember the events of the past year, what had brought us to this place, and what we wanted to do next year. New Year's is not an ending, or a beginning... it is the place in between the past and the future. And like Janus, we should pause and consider looking both directions at once, learning from the past and pursuing a future with hope.
