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Couch and camaraderie

They spend the night on spare couches or share a pot of tea with strangers. SHONALI MUTHALALY on the new band of tourists and their CouchSurfing network that's creating friendships across the world

THE COUCH CONNECTION CouchSurfing founders Casey Fenton, Daniel Hoffer, Sebastien and Leonardo

"Go someplace, meet nice people, share your life"

— CouchSurfer, Switzerland

Part hospitality hitchhikers, part diplomats, CouchSurfers might just be able to link the world in ways no peace mission could ever have envisioned. Which is rather ironic, actually. Because they aren't goodwill evangelists or philanthropic bleeding hearts. And they don't particularly yearn to save the world every time they zip up their backpacks or curl into yet another cramped airline economy seat.

CouchSurfers, after all, are everyday people doing everyday jobs. Quite ordinary, really. Except for one thing. Captivated by wanderlust, they travel from city to city, spending the night on spare couches or just sharing a pot of tea with strangers, thus creating remarkably strong bonds of friendship that crisscross the world.

It all began when founder Casey Fenton, the son of free-spirited hippies, decided that he wanted to see the world. Casey, fortunately, didn't believe that chain-booked five star rooms and stacks of travellers' cheques were the only way to explore. When he found a cheap air ticket to Iceland on the Internet, he just emailed 1500 students at the University of Iceland, saying he "was looking for a place to crash." Within 24 hours, he had almost a 100 replies. He finally stayed with Yoa, and whooped it up all weekend with her friends discovering "their Iceland". Not surprisingly, he decided that this was how he wanted to travel, every time. More important, he started work on a website to make adventures of this sort accessible to everyone.

`The CouchSurfing Project' works because there are still many people who have faith in strangers. Daniel Hoffer, aka Dan, an MBA student and one of the four founders of CouchSurfing, says they "attract a community of friendly, curious, engaged idealists," who want to believe in "the goodness of humanity." Dan, like 70,000 other CouchSurfers, believes because he has experienced first hand how this is often the only way a traveller can unfold the hidden, and far more delightful, world behind lustrous tourist brochures and stories told by glib guides.

Dipayan Sen, for instance, a Mumbai-based couch surfer, is planning to backpack around Europe, but Mona Lisa and Pisa are not even on his itinerary. Talking about how touristy Europe is so passé, he says he will be discovering remote parts of Germany and the French countryside through the locals. "There's a teacher with a farmhouse about half an hour from Amsterdam who has invited me to stay," he says. "He makes cheese at home and sells it in a small town. And he's going to teach me how!"

Using the website, travellers get to bond with people who share their passions, whether it's an ache to salsa through a continent, or learning how much pressure to exert on a cheese press. Dipayan, for instance, loves playing the guitar, so he welcomes travelling musicians. David Sears, a Canadian-American who lives in Varanasi — learning Hindi, hanging out with Indian friends and hosting couch surfers — says he gets a lot of requests from people asking to surf with him, but he's not interested if they only want a "cheap place to stay". Just back from surfing in Bodhgaya, he says he "spent more time with the host's family, learning to cook Indian food, than looking at tourist attractions." David's guests, more often than not, sit up late chatting and cooking. "I have a lot of Indian cookbooks," he laughs. "So we go to the market, and they enjoy trying out the recipes."

Of course, with hundreds of hosts in almost 200 countries signing up means you can spend the rest of your life travelling on less money than some people spend on cocktails, if you're a sensible backpacker. After all, as Prashanth Nagarajan, a Chennai CouchSurfer says, "All we need is a place to keep our bags safely and a couch to rest our backsides on at the end of the day."

If you're nervous about opening your front door to be confronted by a wannabe Don Juan, or finding yourself nose to nose with an axe murderer brimming with your salt and keema at midnight, there's a fairly elaborate security system in place by which people vouch for friends and get verified as hosts. Of course nothing beats common sense, and travellers should get to know their hosts before they even think of packing their toothbrushes. But so far things seem to be working out. "I've always met good people," states Rico, a CouchSurfing ambassador, "I doubt that luck has anything to do with it. There's a lot more good people than bad people in the world... But I follow my instinct."

For people who worry about letting a strange man or woman run wild between their saucepans and scented soaps, there are other options. Dan, in fact, says although half their CouchSurfers are between 18 and 24 (though they do have people in their 60s), this should appeal to older people too as "many of the best experiences can simply involve making new friends over coffee or a meal in a foreign town."

Dan says, "India is definitely catching on among the Couchsurfing community, as Internet use in India grows and more people are travelling both to and from India." For foreigners, this is an ideal way to explore the country without getting ripped off or just completely bewildered. India has more than 760 surfers, a number that grows every week. And this isn't just along the Kodak route. While touristy Mumbai might have about 180 couch surfers, and a metro city like Chennai has more than 50, even places like Raipur, Gaya and Kota show up on the radar, attracting visitors and giving them an authentic taste of India.

CouchSurfing, like any multifaceted movement, means different things to different people. `Stan Da Man' from the Netherlands, for one, says it's "freaky crazy people over the whole world meet up and party together," while Jim Stone from Texas, who describes himself as a "vagabond extraordinaire," and has a mission of sleeping "under a stranger's roof in each and every U.S. state," sees it as an adventure. But perhaps Cindy and Andy Blair, couch surfers from the United States, say it best: "We're on to something incredible here, folks... Couchsurfing is good medicine for a world that needs some love."

FACTFILE

Website: www.couchsurfing.com

Total number of Couch Surfers: 71,081

Successful surfing (approximate): 30,609

Friendships created (approximate): 35,914

Logins per day, this week: 8,477

Countries represented: 197

Cities represented: 12,740

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