Can you imagine traveling the world while meeting like-minded people, and not having to pay a single cent for accommodation? Well, for me, the charm staying at someone’s living room means easy and quick access into a local community, getting to learn local customs, being able to listen to stories and experiences from family members or other guests of your host. You will learn more about the city and the most prominent places to visit and see than those mentioned in any travel guides, simply over a shared dinner with a local host.
What began as sending out a request for permission to crash on a stranger’s couch 20 years ago has today transformed into a B-Corporation with 11 million members worldwide. Fomenting affordable travel and facilitating cultural exchange, Couchsurfing has reinvented the realm of travel, allowing people to connect, via an app, to surf couches all over the globe and, in turn, have their couch surfed by others.
I’ve been a member of the Couchsurfing community since 2014, hosted 17 couchsurfers at my home in Malé, and when it comes to my travels, I have really not been much of a surfer at all, primarily because my itineraries are sometimes quite complicating – I could be arriving in an evening and still have a bus to catch at 3am and I genuinely do not feel comfortable waking up my host at that wee hour to open the door for me. More importantly I do not want my host to think that I was just searching for a place to crash until I begin my next adventure. There are also days when I arrive a new place that there are no Couchsurfing meetups or activities available throughout my stay, and that’s when I had the idea of hosting my own Couchsurfing activity.
Our ride to Zoe Yellow
Three months ago, I hosted a solo travelers meetup in Chiang Mai, and although we didn’t have a lot of people joining us that evening, we still had a lot of fun that dragged late into the night. When I first created the event on Couchsurfing a month ahead of my arrival to Chiang Mai, we had 28 people that joined the event, and I even had to limit the participants because it was difficult to find a venue that could occupy 28 people in close proximity so that everyone could move freely from table to table to connect with others.
It was an exhausting day for me and my friend Ilyas, as we left our guesthouse in Chiang Mai on a day tour to Pai at 7.30am and returned only at 7pm, but still managed to freshened up ourselves and make a quick visit to the Maya mall at the corner of Nimmanhaemin/Superhighway and Huay Kaew Road. Never did we expect we’d be caught in Chiang Mai’s horrendous Friday night traffic and would be late for the meetup at the Bus Bar, 6 kilometers from where we tried hailing several passing taxis. Ilyas managed to hail a red truck and explained the location of the Bus Bar to the driver, but he couldn’t just understand and ultimately Ilyas sat in the front seat next to the driver and instructed to follow the directions from Google maps. It still took us about 45 minutes to traverse through the busy narrow streets and we finally arrived at the Bus Bar, five minutes late.
Ideally located by the Iron Bridge, Bus Bar has transformed vehicles into Chiang Mai’s favorite watering hole.
There was Ashley sitting at the long table near the entrance of the bar, and the moment we saw him sitting alone, we assumed he was one of the participants for the meetup, because he sat at the table that we reserved for the event. We introduced ourselves and apologized for arriving late. A couple of more minutes and another four arrived, we were still disappointed considering the amount of people that actually registered for the event and didn’t show up. We exchanged travel stories and anecdotes over a couple of drinks and some tasty but inexpensive food.
Zoe in Yellow is where backpackers come to sink pitchers of cold Chang every night.
By 10.30pm, we decided to move our little get-together to Zoe in Yellow, an area of a complex of open-air bars at the corner of Th Ratchaphakhinai and Th Ratwithi. It is where local students and backpackers blend into a crowd of sweaty dancing bodies to different genres of music all through seven days a week. By midnight, I surrendered and excused myself from my newfound friends as I didn’t have any sleep for more than 32 hours – that amounting the time I departed from Malé to Bangkok with a four-hour delay resulting to miss my onward flight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai a day later. I walked straight back to the guesthouse and and fell asleep under the spell of a super-tiring day. I may have missed an amazing night of fun in North Thailand, but I am glad I met some wonderful people, made new friends and learned lots from them.
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