Couch surfing uncovered

Andy Gale discovers how to get your holiday accommodation for free courtesy of the human race and the power of the internet.

When a Jewish man I met on the road to Dubrovnik evangelised me with the gospel of Couch Surfing, I knew it was destiny. It appealed to both my inquisitive nature and tight budget.

I soon found out that "CS" is an international 'online social networking community' where like-minded travellers can view each other's profiles and provide a place to sleep or a friend to hang out with on holiday.

CS provides a brilliant alternative to the accepted norms of travel and challenges the usual notion of travelling to far parts of the globe only to hang out with your neighbors at the backpackers' bar.

If you are serious about getting off that beaten tourist path and steering clear of all those Londoners and Australians slagging each other off, then maybe CS is for you.

What I found was instant new friends everywhere. People who picked me up from the airport, took me to festivals and family celebrations, let me stay in beachside apartments, and even took me partying with Brazilian soap opera stars in exclusive Rio nightclubs.

It truly was incredible to find out how kind and generous people are. Within minutes of meeting, people were giving me a home and helping to organise my time.

Monstrously huge cities, like Sao Paulo or Lima for instance, are often far too intimidating for most tourists and are treated as in-transit destinations only. But if you stay with a local, you may find it hard to leave.

Indeed, the only travellers I've met that had good experiences to share of such cities were fellow CSers. One middle aged man I met, who had the physique of a body builder, told of how he was so scared in Lima that he hired a body guard to escort him everywhere. What a great journey of cultural discovery that must have been…

In Sao Paulo I CSed on two separate occasions with a family made up of three generations of Japanese Brazilians. The grandmother only spoke Japanese, the parents and children only spoke Portuguese, and I only spoke English.

But despite the language barrier, everyone made me feel like part of the family, and boy could they cook. I’ll never forget how the grandmother asked if I was hungry with hand signals every time we crossed paths. When I left she even prepared a special bag of goodies for me to take away.

Bad experiences? Sure. On one occasion, due to an honest mix up with the keys, I found myself locked out of my couch surfing host's apartment and grossly underdressed in wintertime Buenos Aries.

With no money on my person I had to spend the entire night in a 24-hour bingo hall just to avoid freezing to death. But you have to look on the bright side; at least it was a novel way of learning to count in Spanish, so every cloud…

Andy Gale