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We live in a small world. We also live in a riven world. Where common sense tells you not to trust too soon. Where footloose strangers with alien accents are best not welcomed home. But when Avinash Dhayani, a 21-year-old from Delhi looking to travel to China began trawling the Internet a few months ago, he found a group of travellers who were ready to junk common sense, open their doors and offer him a place to stay—for free. He found couchsurfing.com.

“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.

If you have to join this group, all you have to do is sign up. You can then contact the community of the place you want to visit or search through profiles to find the person you think is most suited to host you.

Travel guide
couchsurfing.com is a site for travellers looking for a cultural experience and not touristy trips. It gives you a chance to view a city from an insider’s perspective and, of course, gets you a place to stay for free. It’s NOT a dating site.
* Travel enthusiasts can join the site after filling in a simple online form that asks you for your name, address and hobbies. You also have to mention if you have a couch to offer.
* To ensure that travellers trust you and people want to host you, you can get your address verified by paying $9.04 (Rs 362 approx) through your credit card. The card information is used to check if the name and address provided by you is correct.
* Complete your profile, from putting up your picture to listing all that you are interested in. This helps people choose you as a host and helps a host get to know about you before he agrees to have you over.
* If you are hosting, make your conditions clear. If you have any pet peeves tell them. If you don’t want smokers, say so. Check the traveller’s security status.
* If you are travelling, go through profiles to pick a host who is most likely to match your interests. Make sure you are verified, it helps the host select you.

“CouchSurfing is about regaining trust in the world. At a time when everybody lives in fear of the other, it shows that there are good people everywhere who are willing to share their home, stories, feelings and lives,” says Spyro Manson, a ‘nomadic ambassador’ for the site in Vienna.
Idealism apart, the site does have a referral and verification system to sift people who could misuse the network. For verification, you have to pay a small amount to the site through your credit card. Using this information, it checks if the name and address you have provided is correct. When you travel, you get to rate the host and vice versa. This rating then helps other travelers decide who they want to stay with. The site also has a network of local ambassadors, people who are most active on the site and know their areas well.

“But there are security issues,” says Dipayan Sen, a CouchSurfer from Mumbai. “Some people have different intentions,” he adds. “If any body complains to us about any misdemeanour, we contact the local ambassadors and the international administration and delete the profile of the person responsible.”
As she lounges in the south Delhi home of her CouchSurfer buddy Nilima (name changed), New Zealander Clare O’Rourke is eager to tell you how the website salvaged her trip. “I wanted to experience what the tourists did in Delhi. Sure enough I landed at Paharganj. But the tourists never spoke to each other; there was just no interaction.” Even the sites mentioned in the guidebook didn’t match up to the Indian experience O’Rourke was looking for. She went online and got in touch with the local CouchSurfing community—and found her friends. “I never expected to get such a welcome. If it hadn’t been for CouchSurfing, I would probably have left India the next day.”

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