Manic weirdos, introverts and geeks.’
Leika, 28, Manila, Philippines
CouchSurfing.com
I ended my Grand Couch Surfing Tour of the Globe exactly the same way it started.
Couchless.
And it wasn’t as if I didn’t try to find a couch. I’d already known for a few weeks that Jude couldn’t host me for the last night in Manila, so I’d sent out a whole bunch of requests. I don’t know why I didn’t haven’t any luck, because some of the potential hosts seemed quite accommodating:
You are free to use my TV, kitchen, laptop and even my clothes (medium size only). You are also free to use the toilet and my shampoo and body soap.
Jerome, 27
I’d love you to stay and I don’t really mind weird, crazy people as long as they’re not homicidal and don’t trash my place.
Carmela, 23
Still getting no response, in desperation I even sent a request to Rex:
Sorry, I can’t offer accommodation because I’m often lying in the gutter.
Rex, 29
Eight different people said they would ‘love to have me’, but they either had family staying for the holidays or they’d gone away. One girl had five family members staying in her lounge room—another one won’t make a difference, I told her. I did, however, find two girls who said that they would join me for dinner and drinks—even though I wasn’t sure I met their criteria as the type of person they liked. Leica was keen on ‘manic weirdos and geeks’ and Zane preferred ‘people with a high tolerance for randomness’. The girls were also excited about meeting up because, quite coincidentally, they were friends. They lived on opposite sides of the city and hadn’t seen each other for a couple of months.
I’d finally given up all hope of finding a couch when I checked my emails back in Manila. Just as on the first night of my Grand Couch Surfing Tour, I was going to have to check into a hotel. I rang Jude and he recommended Bianca’s Garden Hotel near his place in Malate. It was an inspired choice. The hotel was in an old Spanish mansion filled with antique dark-wood Filipino furniture. It was my last night, and I’d just had nine weeks of free accommodation, so I decided to lash out and took the ‘Premier Suite’. The suite, which had a king-size bed and cable TV, overlooked the swimming pool and lavish gardens.
I was meeting the girls at a restaurant in Greenbelt 3 (which sounds like a space station from Babylon 5) in Makati, Manila’s business district. Greenbelt 3 was part of an immense modern shopping complex with three levels of designer shops, hip bars and restaurants, including the Filipino restaurant Sentro 1771. The girls hadn’t arrived when I turned up ten minutes late, so I grabbed an outside table on the terrace looking out across landscaped gardens, fountains and palm trees draped with fairy lights.
Leica was the first to arrive—40 minutes late. ‘We call it Filipino timekeeping,’ she said bashfully. I could see why Leica liked introverts. I think she was one. Leica was quite shy and would often talk to her hands instead of making eye contact. Her job seemed perfectly suited for her then— she worked as an over-the-phone IT consultant.
‘I live with my family, so I can’t have couch surfers to stay,’ Leica said after apologising for not offering her couch. ‘But I love meeting people for dinner.’
After I’d finished my second beer Leica said, ‘You may as well order now. Zane is the running-late queen.’
I had marinated monkfish, that although it was delicious, was four times the price of a meal in Siquijor. Zane turned up just as I was finishing my dinner. ‘That’s okay,’ Zane said, then promptly ordered two desserts. Under occupation on her profile Zane had put ‘editor, overall critic and frustrated dancer’. Zane was very bubbly and chatty, so I wasn’t surprised when she told me that she worked in PR. She also lived with her family and hadn’t had any couch surfers stay with her. ‘I’ve met a lot of couch surfers for dinner and drinks, though,’ Zane said, with a mouthful of chocolate sundae. ‘Last night I took out a tall Swedish gay guy who was wearing pinstripe hot pants and braces.’
The girls hadn’t seen each other for a while, so they had a lot to catch up on. ‘Did you see Lost on Wednesday?’ Leica asked Zane excitedly. They also had American Idol, The Amazing Race and Prison Break to compare notes on.
Not only were they talking about US TV shows, they both sounded as if they came from the suburbs of LA.
‘It must be a dream come true being a travel writer,’ Zane said in her American drawl.
‘Yes, it was a silly dream I had many years ago.’
‘I have a dream, too,’ Leica said.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘My dream is to marry Wentworth Miller from Prison Break.’
‘I think that guy’s fulfilled his dream,’ I said, nodding subtly to the table next to us. An American guy, who must have been 60, was canoodling with his Filipino girlfriend who looked about twenty.
‘That’s nothing,’ Zane said. ‘There’s a bar downstairs that’s full of them. Do you want to go have a gawk?’
We wandered downstairs to the Havana Club and grabbed a table outside. ‘Okay, let’s play spot the paid-for girlfriend,’ Zane said, eyeing off the crowd.
‘Gee, that’s hard,’ I said. Most of the clientele were old, paunchy, bald men in Hawaiian shirts accompanied by slim, young Filipino girls. At the table next to us an old fellow with white hair and a bulbous beer belly was asleep at the table, while his young ‘girlfriend’ sat forlornly staring at her drink. When I noticed that a few of the men were staring at me, I realised that they were thinking I was just one of them. Except I had two girlfriends. They were also probably trying to figure out how I managed to get two when I didn’t look like I had a lot of money.
Leica was feeling uncomfortable. ‘It’s just a dirty old man’s meat market,’ she winced.
‘It’s fun,’ Zane said brightly. ‘They all keep looking at Brian thinking that he is some sort of rich stud.’
Zane then started playing gently with Leica’s hair.
‘This will make them real jealous,’ Zane smiled cheekily. ‘They’ll think he’s got himself a couple of lesbians.’
After we finished our beers Leica said that she’d had enough. I didn’t mind. I was looking forward to my hotel room—and my own space, my own TV, my own shower and my own toilet to make whatever loud noises I desired in. One thing I would recommend for anyone planning a couch-surfing trip would be to break up the couches with a few nights in your own space. In fact, it’s more than just having your own space. Your liver will probably need a break as well. One of the great discoveries I made on this trip is that the entire planet seems to be fuelled by alcohol.
On that note I stopped at a bar near the hotel for one final couch-surfing drink just to ‘soak in’ what had been an incredible and incredibly long journey. My Grand Couch Surfing Tour of the Globe had taken me over 60 000 kilometres on 22 flights through 15 countries on 23 different couches. What an extraordinary and privileged experience it had been being welcomed into people’s homes to share, even for a short time, a snapshot of their lives. Yes, I also got free couches to sleep on and a local’s perspective, but mostly I’d forged instant friendships.
Couch surfing is such a great way to learn about a country and its people. It encourages you to travel in an engaged way—as opposed to the disengagement of seeing places packaged for tourists through a coach window or the viewfinder of a camera. And by witnessing other lives, we open up to possibilities that we were once blind to.
Never before had I appreciated so much that the real rewards of travel are not seeing transcendentally beautiful buildings or breathtaking landscapes, but enjoying the simple friendship and trust of strangers.
On the short walk back to the hotel I was propositioned by a gaggle of prostitutes.
‘You married?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s okay. You can call me your wife’s name, so there’s no confusion.’
One woman, who was acting as a pimp
for her daughter, tried to cajole me back to her place.
‘I’m not interested.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You can sleep on the couch.’
A couch? Hmm?
‘Thanks anyway,’ I said, ‘but I think I’m done with couches for the moment.’
EPILOGUE
The couch surfing wave just keeps getting bigger and bigger. When I made my trip there were 150 000 members from 20 000 cities on CouchSurfing.com with around 1000 new members joining each week. By the time I’d finished writing the book there were 700 000 members from 45 000 cities and 10 000 new members joining every week. By the time you read this the membership will have probably have hit the million mark.
In July 2008 couch surfing passed the mark for one million positive experiences. Out of the eighteen people I stayed with on my trip I gave seventeen an ‘extremely positive’ (and one ‘neutral’ for Vikram and his Marble Emporium—which may have been a tad generous). Since my return I’ve also had a few couch surfers crash on my couch and I’ve enjoyed that every bit as much as staying with someone else. It has opened up my own city to me. I’ve taken my surfers out to tourist attractions (and lots of bars) that I didn’t know existed until I’d searched them out on the net and showing them around has made me feel proud of my own city.
From my own couch surfing experiences I think the most amazing thing about the concept is that hosts and guests can really get to know each other. When you visit a place while couch surfing it’s mostly the people you remember. By reaching out to travellers and hosts around the globe couch surfing has crossed social barriers and bridged cultural differences to create this unique experience where we share our homes, stories, inspirations and lives. I now consider my couch surfing hosts good friends and we all agree that the relationships formed through couch surfing are what matter most. I still keep in touch with most of my hosts and a few have threatened to come and surf on my couch in the near future.
It’s actually been a while since I left my surfing friends, so I thought I’d give you an update on what they’ve been doing since I moved on:
Miguel hasn’t changed at all. He is still cooking, riding, skiing, fighting off pumas and sleeping later from time to time.
Jose will be designing new vortex flanges for Nestlé for many more years to come. Last time I heard from him he was couch surfing, and comparing pipes, with another engineer in El Segundo, California.
Juan achieved the maximum score for his thesis and created ‘a little revolution inside the university’. ‘People stopped me just to say how wonderful and incredible was my project,’ Juan told me in an email. It was so good that he won the ‘Thesis of the Year’ prize, then married Katya in Moscow and is now living there. They’ve started up a website promoting the Spanish language (www.spanishclass.ru) for Russians. Juan told me that he is the ‘webmaster, designer, editor, redactor, moderator, journalist, philologist and translator’.
I get no response from my emails to Mariano, so I can only assume that he’s been eaten by one of the roaming packs of dogs in Valparaíso.
Pedro finally finished recording his band’s CD, and his dad did the cover illustration. I told him that I’d look out for it in the charts. Pedro and Nathalia are coming to surf on my couch in Australia in 2009.
I was Mariana’s somewhat nervous first couch-surfing guest, but since then she has embraced the couch surfing concept (and one lucky Portuguese couch surfer). Mariana has had 31 people from 23 different countries stay with her, and they all say that is she the coolest carioca in Rio.
A few months after I left Bob he put an ad on Craigslist asking for budget travellers who wanted to see North America:
I will be touring the US, Mexico, and Central America for the next year. I have a 15 passenger van loaded with quality camping and cooking gear, 4 bicycles, a kayak, a computer with WiFi, a DVD player and movies, a radio, music for any situation, books on tape, a National Parks Pass, a frisbee, binoculars, field guides and anything else you can think of bringing on a prolonged road trip.
The last I heard from Bob he was in Nebraska with seven passengers. What surprised me the most was that with all the stuff he was taking there was any room left for people.
Jeremy emailed me recently and wrote: ‘I am still employed at the same place despite my best efforts to slack off and get canned. In fact I was promoted a few months ago and am now a Tactical Development Systems Analyst.’ He explained the job to me, but I still have no idea what he does. Jeremy has also been very busy dating a couple of women who live in his apartment building plus a woman he works with. ‘It keeps me on my toes,’ he said. ‘I had a close call the other night when one of my romantically inclined neighbours dropped by while I was entertaining my romantically inclined work colleague.’
Smári moved into a bigger place with a friend (more room for empty Pepsi bottles) and is still studying and writing complicated mathematical equations. Smári has a blog that he regularly updates, although mostly I have no idea what he is talking about:
Ah, yes. The good news is that The Random Number has been found out to be 4. All other random numbers are actually less random than 4, irrespective of the distribution they are taken from. This can be seen by calculating the respective entropy of 4 on the one hand, and the respective entropy of all other integers on the other.
Let’s remember that information entropy is defined as:
The rest is obvious.
Joris emailed me recently to see if I was interested in buying Belgium. The entire country was up for auction on eBay. The initial bid was one euro ($A1.67). I put in a bid for ten euros then there were 26 subsequent bids culminating in a 10 million-euro offer before the auction was halted by eBay. The last time I heard from Joris he was in Mali doing research for a thesis. He’d gone back to university to do a Masters degree in Conflict and Development. When he has resolved the conflict he still plans to finish his Grand Bicycle Tour of Africa.
Cecile is still living in Luxembourg and still doesn’t have any Luxembourgish friends.
On the day that James and Aylin got married it snowed. It was the first time in more than 30 years that snow had fallen in Istanbul in October. At least it made a perfect prelude to their icy honeymoon in Iceland. ‘We couldn’t afford to drink or eat much,’ James told me. ‘And my credit card was on fire.’
Mutisya has turned his ‘couch surfing bedroom’ over to volunteers working for the ‘African Child Initiative & Community Development Forum’. Mutisya set up the organisation to help a local orphanage, but has since expanded the initiative to help those affected by the 2008 post-election violence in Kenya that displaced over half a million people. In partnership with local community groups Mutisya started the project ‘YOU CAN SAVE, YOU CAN HELP’. Mutisya is no longer a member of couch surfing as he wants to ‘reserve his couch’ for volunteers.
Walindah is still nursing and she even managed to get Elijah a job at the hospital. The last I heard from Walindah she was waiting for a response to an application to be a ‘house member’ on South African Big Brother.
Penelope and Sarah finished their call centre contract and travelled around India for a month before coming home to Australia to ‘get a real job’. Sarah tells me that she now likes curry. Her belated conversion occurred within one week of their departure from India.
Vikram is no longer on couch surfing. I think he may have just pushed his Marble Emporium a bit too much and was politely asked to leave the site.
Jude is now the editor of two magazines. The latest one is called Expat Travel & Lifestyle magazine. At least his Masters degree in Spanish is coming in handy—he’s been to Spain twice since I stayed with him.
Elvie is still living in paradise. The lucky thing.
Finally, I’d just like to give a few thanks. First of all a big comfy couch gracias, obrigado, thanks, takk, Dank je, merci, sagol, enkosi, shukriya and salamat to my hosts Miguel, Jose, Juan, Mariano, Pedro, Mariana, Bob, Jeremy, Smári, Joris, Cecile, James and Aylin,
Mutisya, Walindah, Penelope and Sarah, Vikram, Jude, Elvie, Leika and Zane. If it wasn’t for you guys I wouldn’t have a book! A beautiful chaise longue thanks to my wife Natalie who never rolls her eyes even once when I tell her about my new madcap travelling idea for a book. A large ottoman of thanks to James Richardson with his red pen and wordsmith wizardry. And lastly a big chesterfield of thanks to my agent Pippa Masson at Curtis Brown and Jo Paul at Allen & Unwin.
If you’d like to view photos of my couch-surfing hosts (and their couches) you can check out the photo album of my trip at www.brianthacker.tv. Or drop me a line—I’d love to hear from you.
Brian Thacker
East St Kilda, October 2008
Sleeping Around Page 28