After my pleasant little vacation-within-a-vacation (warm showers, nice meals my parents paid for, cable TV etc.), I decided to really hoof it back to Guatemala so that I could be on Lago Atitlan for New Year's. The idea was that since I couldn't be with friends for New Year's, I might as well be somewhere pretty. I had imagined going somewhere quiet and spending the turn of the New Year quietly sitting by the lake and reflecting on the year that had passed. I would go to bed early and sober, and actually have a non-hungover beginning to the year 2004.

Um, right...

I did indeed make it to the lake for New Year's, though it wasn't easy. I had to put in two and a half days of solid traveling on boats, chicken buses, and a few tourist shuttles. I finally got to Panahajel, the biggest town on the lake, at 10 in the morning on the 31st. I knew exactly where I wanted to go: the Iguana Perdida, in the village of Santa Cruz. So i hopped in a lancha (small motorized wooden boats which are the primary means of transport on the lake) and headed to the Iguana Perdida in Santa Cruz.

This place had been recommended for its beautiful, quiet location, delicious family-style dinners and friendly atmosphere. When I got there I was shown to the dorm by a Dutch girl who told me she had only been on the lake for three days. Many of the people who worked there were people who had come to stay for a few days and liked it so much that they decided to work there in exchange for room and board.

I could immediately see the appeal - the location was indeed serene and beautiful and the atmosphere was, as the author Douglas Fine wrote of the Iguana, " nearly communal."

However, the serenity was not to last long on the last day of the year. As soon as I got there, I saw that there was an enormous party in the works. A delegation had gone to Pana the day before to buy $100 worth of fireworks (a necessity in any Central American celebration) and there was a box of dresses for the men to wear. Just what you need for a good party: alcohol, explosives and men in dresses.

I volunteered to help make decorations. I was sitting at a table on the veranda, blowing up balloons and making some new friends, when I saw a girl walk up that looked familiar to me. We both did a couble take and then she said "Sarah?!"
It turned out to be an Irish girl named Brenda with whom I'd worked years before. We had become friends that summer, but lost touch when she went home to Ireland. And now, of all the places in the world, we ran into each other on New Year's Eve on Lake Atitlan! It's a strange world.

The party that night was indeed great. I didn't have a quiet, pensive New Year's, but I sang, drank, made friends, ogled the nighttime beauty of the lake, and lit my very first firecracker. It was a good, and fitting, way to spend the New Year.