CouchSurfing

I write this sitting in the living room of my 'host's' house in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. My 'host' is a member of couchsurfing.org. Basically, you make a profile about yourself and your travel experiences, and as you approach a city, you can search people in that city who are willing to share their time (coffee/drink) or thier house (thus you 'surf' their couch). Everytime you have an experience with another member, you write a reference for how that meeting went - was it positive/negative? What things were unique/helpful? And so on.

I have been a part of it for 2.5 years now, with my first experiences coming in West Africa and the Middle East. I then opened my house in Korea to several surfers and I'm now surfing again in Central Asia (and did so in SE Asia as well). It's an opportunity to get an inside look at the city/country that you're visiting and a chance to share your culture with a complete stranger. Now, I know this may sound a little crazy to some - I mean who would let a complete stranger into their house to sleep with them and eat thier food? This is one of the reasons I love CSing the most - it puts blind faith in humanity, something we don't do enough of these days (okay, with the profile and references it's not totally blind faith, but imagine a stranger called you up and asked to sleep at your house, and told you the number of another total stranger to call as reference). In all my experiences - probably somewhere in the range of 30-35 (not counting the 'unofficial' couch surfing done with friends in different places in the world) - I've never had a negative experience, although I have had some very interesting conversations.

One memorable experience was when I was couchsurfing in a country called Mali with a 60 year old Dutch man who had quit his job as a computer engineer in The Netherlands to help women grow sustainable gardens in the villages outside the town of Mopti in Mali. On Friday nights he would take his computer and projector and play movies for the local children on the wall of his house (which he painted white for the movies). We were lucky enough to be there on a Friday and saw this man in action - literally hundreds of kids and their parents showed up to watch the movie, some walking an hour one-way. You must consider, a lot of these people don't have running water, let alone power or TV. This weekly event was something out of the future for them. It was inspiring to watch this man and the joy and laughter he was bringing to the people around him. These are the types of things CSing can add to your travels.

Another amazing thing? It's completely free, both to join and to take part in. I've never been asked for money, and I never asked for money when I hosted. You just clean up after yourself, replenish whatever food/drink you take and share some of your time with the host/surfer. Check it out.