Two Decades of Curmudgeonly New Year's Eves
When your heart, mind (and feet) are blissfully in warmer climes for New Year's Eve, but your body didn't manage to escape the Northern Hemisphere…
Happy New Year's Eve! Or, if you're not into the whole brevity thing, Happy Random Day Arbitrarily Chosen to Be a Significant Demarcation of Time, Even Though Time Is Just, Like, A Social Construct, Man!
Since Christmas and New Year's are holidays in most of the world, I've spent most of the past two decade's worth of the festive season travelling, usually in random countries, and those nearer the equator if at all possible. And while the list of destinations I've chimed in the new year in over the years might look impressive on paper (or in pixels), not all New Year's Eves are created equal.
Some have been fun, some have been miserable. And on more than one occasion I've been fast asleep at midnight. Anyway, I thought it'd be fun to put together a list, accompanied by a pithy sentence or two. So that's what I did. Also hoping that all the relevant statute of limitations have expired in cases where crimes may have been committed....
2003 Seattle 🇺🇸
2004 Beirut 🇱🇧
2005 Seattle 🇺🇸
2006 Prague 🇨🇿
2007 Tirana 🇦🇱
2008 Dakar 🇸🇳
2009 Bujumbura 🇧🇮
2010 Addis Ababa 🇪🇹
2011 Ljubljana 🇸🇮
2012 Ljubljana 🇸🇮
2013 Muscat 🇴🇲
2014 Ljubljana 🇸🇮
2015 Beirut 🇱🇧
2016 Koh Phangan 🇹🇭
2017 Los Angeles 🇺🇸
2018 Doha 🇶🇦
2019 Cairo 🇪🇬
2020 Kuala Lumpur 🇲🇾
2021 Bogotá 🇨🇴
2022 Pokhara 🇳🇵
2023 Wadi Rum 🇯🇴
2024 Havana 🇨🇺
2025 Islamabad 🇵🇰
2026 ????
One of these I was asleep in bed, because the desert gets freezing cold at night.
One of these I fell asleep before midnight, because Lonely Planet maps aren't drawn to scale so I ended up walking some 35km in flip flops and arriving back at the hotel late into the night exhausted.
One of these I dumped water off the balcony at midnight, and then drank sparkling apple juice and ate apples, because that's the local tradition.
One of these I had terrible food poisoning from hotel restaurant lasagne, which I was suspicious of because it was ready in like 2mins, but ate it anyway, because the lasagna in this country was perhaps the best I'd ever had.
One of these I was on the roof of a guesthouse because they said it was too dangerous to go out and then at midnight nothing happened at all and the next day I found out there had been a grenade attack at the central market a few days earlier so a curfew was in effect.
One of these I stayed in my rooftop studio, because it was pouring rain all night, and listened to fireworks with a bit of trepidation (and PTSD) after recently spending significant time in Lebanon and Ukraine, and also because locals are known to like to fire guns into the air to celebrate (and the bullets come down at some point).
Two of these I was on my roof to watch the fireworks from the city's quaint little castle, only it was too foggy to see them, even from less than 1km away.
One of these I was on my roof to watch the fireworks from the city's quaint little castle, and this time I could actually see them, because, as they say, the third is indeed the charm.
One of these I was only in the country because of cancer (a friend's, not mine) and now don't remember if I actually did anything on New Year's Eve.
One of these friends rented a 1950s bus and drove around the city stopping to party in random squares and intersections, and when we joined them around 11pm didn't know the water bottle we got handed was actually MDMA, so drank half of it in one go, had an amazing night and then got stopped by vice police at 7am on my walk home along empty streets, but it was fine.
One of these I passed up the opportunity to go to a private party on an uninhabited island in the Nile, because I was trying to be responsible, and my reward was to have the police bang on the apartment door first thing in the morning anyway (but luckily didn't open it).
One of these I played minigolf, then fell asleep on a very comfortable couch before midnight watching Gremlins with friends.
One of these I was relieved to arrive in the city in time to check into the hotel and get to the main square for midnight - even though it was total chaos and I spent most of the time fending off pickpockets - because the day had started getting on the wrong bus, going in the opposite direction, in a different country.
One of these I sat on plastic stools drinking beer poured from giant bottles into little glasses and eating various delectable foods sold from carts in a corner of a Tesco parking lot underneath red lanterns.
One of these I slowly drank the 200ml of vodka I'd smuggled into the country because I didn't know that they confiscated duty free alcohol at the airport and didn't want to pay exorbitant amounts for drinks at the bar in the 5-star hotel I was staying in for free.
One of these was spent wandering around trying in vain to find a hotel room after three different reservations were cancelled, almost giving up and going back to the village, before finally getting lucky and then hanging out with a very international group of trekkers on a rooftop.
One of these started at a private party in an art gallery in a skyscraper, then later ended up getting kicked out of a limo, chased by the army, losing my glasses, waking up in a stranger's bed and walking home blind the following afternoon.
One of these I stayed on the rooftop, because it had an amazing view of the entire city, which is notoriously dangerous even when the streets aren't packed with revellers on New Year's Eve.
One of these I was technically a war refugee, and at midnight were in the city's main square, which most of the year is covered in (British) piss and vomit.
One of these I tried to go to a beach only accessible by boat but ended up at the worst place on the island, where at least one person died when the the new year sign fireworks didn't go to plan, but I didn't know this at the time and ended up euphorically walking home in the early afternoon the next day nevertheless.
One of these I went to a house party, but have zero recollection of the night, except that we were in a white Honda.
One of these I wished I had a bird's eye view of the main square so could see what it looked like when people scattered every time someone randomly threw a giant firecracker into the crowd for reasons that were never quite clear to me.
Note: These are listed in something of alphabetical order, excluding the initial ‘One of these (I was)'…