The world on a couch

“I was in Bangkok and I had just decided to visit China as well. So I joined the group and requested someone to play host,” says Dhayani. At first, no one replied. “Then, Tinnie, a Chinese girl responded and her family invited me to dinner in Schenzhen,” he says. Over a sumptuous meal, Dhayani found the initial hesitant silences giving way to warmth. “Suddenly, before the evening was over, they had invited me to stay over. They even booked my train tickets for the places I wanted to see in China.”

Like the European backpacker and the American nomad on a shoestring budget, the Indian traveller is also logging into this hospitality exchange service organised, promoted and run by a host of volunteers. According to statistics on the site, it has well over 300,000 members around the world. In India alone, the website has over 800 members, covering every major city. An article carried in The New York Times last month described the project as “an ancient notion of hospitality...tucked into a modern paradigm, the social networking website”.

CouchSurfing encourages cultural encounters and not just sampling of touristy delights. When someone opens their door for you in a strange land, you don’t just get food and a couch to sleep in. You also get to drive off the done-to-death track. Harmeet Singh, a 27-year-old businessman from Delhi, did just that when he went visiting Canada last year. “It was the second time I was visiting Quebec but I got in touch with a local CouchSurfer. She took us to an island far away from the tourist jaunts. We drove all around the island and lazed on the lovely beaches. It was a completely different experience. I wouldn’t have had it if I didn’t have a local person showing me around,” says Singh.

The story of how this group of wanderers came to being goes like this. A few years ago, Casey Fenton, a computer programmer from US, was on his way to Reykjavik, Iceland. He had no place to stay and no desire to get stuck in the tourist-only haunts of the city. Fenton decided to email 1,500 students in Reykjavik, hoping that someone would be willing to let him stay in their house. It worked. An email dialogue followed and soon the students wanted to show Fenton their version of the city. That’s when he decided that he wasn’t going to spend hours in crummy hotels or run around a new city on a blink-and-you-miss-it tour of its various attractions ever again. Fenton was going to live with the local people, savour each area’s flavour and start a cultural interaction. In January 2003, he brought this experience to fellow travellers through the Internet and couchsurfing.com was born.

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