New Year on a Costa Rican beach

I have spent New Year in places that sold tickets for it. This one had fires on a beach.

Jacó is the closest surf town to the capital and it is not anybody's idea of unspoilt – a long grey-sand beach with a
developed strip behind it, busy and unpretentious. In the last of the light on the last day of the year the beach was
already filling, families and surfers and people carrying wood, with the headland at the far end going dark and the
sea flat and pale.

Then the fires started. Not one, not organised – a line of them, separately lit, spaced down the sand as far as you
could see, each with its own circle of people around it. No stage, no countdown that anybody could hear over the
water, no wristbands. Just fire after fire and the Pacific black beyond them, and the particular pleasure of a crowd
that has assembled itself without anyone being in charge.

What I remember is how little effort it took to be part of. You walk down the sand until a fire looks welcoming, and
then you are at that fire. Nobody checks anything. Somewhere out in the dark the surf keeps going and the year turns
over and the fires burn down, and eventually you walk back up the beach past all the other ones.

I have had more spectacular New Years and none that felt easier to belong to. If you are working out where to be at
the end of December in this country, you do not need a plan and you do not need a booking – you need a beach and the
willingness to walk along it until you find the right fire.