words rachel mok

Despite Hong Kong’s crammed living spaces, it is possible to welcome strangers into your home – and more.

Would you invite a foreign stranger in to doss down on your sofa? It might sound insane but that is the aim behind an internet phenomenon known as couch surfing, a travel network that connects people from all around the world. Finding freeloading house guests through a website might appear tantamount to inviting in scoundrels and ragamuffins but that is not the experience of Kay Ross. “It’s actually safer than picking up a guy from a bar in Lan Kwai Fong. I don’t get to read a reference in that case!” she laughs, referring to feedback left on the couch-surfing website by both guests and hosts.
 
Couchsurfing.com was launched worldwide in 2004 by American Casey Fenton, who developed the website after an unconventional weekend trip to Iceland. Refusing to be trapped in some overcharging and tedious tourist hotel, he dug up the University of Iceland’s student directory and emailed over 1,500 students asking if he could stay with them over the weekend. Fenton ended up with a ‘host’ of positive replies, had a blast in Iceland and the rest is history – most importantly he created the CouchSurfing Project.
 
Now anyone can sign up at the website, create profile pages and in 10 minutes be connected to the planet’s couch-surfing community. With more than 567,000 registered members representing 230 countries, couch surfers can find a home away from home almost everywhere in the world. Say you are heading to London – just log in, click CouchSearch! and choose London, narrowing your search by choosing the gender, age or language etc of your host – if all that really matters to you – and look up surfers who have a couch available. Email them, ask nicely if you can stay at their place and the rest is up to you.
 
Does this work in Hong Kong, where living spaces are limited, security as strict as a prison in some residential buildings and, more crucially, we may not even know the name of the neighbour we have been living next to for the past 10 years? How can we invite a complete stranger into our home? “But the whole philosophy [of couch surfing] is about trusting people. We would not have joined if we don’t have that in us,” Kay says. And to Joni, a local Chinese couch surfer, guests are not complete strangers. “We can browse their profiles, communicate with them through emails and get to know them from their messages in advance,” she says.

 
While Kay has received requests of a mere two sentences like “I will arrive in Hong Kong tomorrow. Give me your address,” other couch surfers have suggestions on how to prevent people from abusing the system. Sathi was first introduced to what she now hails as the best thing that happened in her life after her daughter during a visit to Bombay where she saw strangers of different nationalities wandering around her uncle’s home. She registered a page on the website and has so far hosted more than 50 guests. “Some users actually put a certain word or sentence that a couch surfer must use in a request to show that they actually read your profile,” she says. “I didn’t do it myself but it is a great idea to avoid abuse!”
 
Looking at the Hong Kong group, out of the nearly 700 members it seems more are expatriates than local Chinese. Does that mean locals are still averse to the idea? Laetitia Lam, who has become the city ambassador of Hong Kong for couchsurfing.com, believes there is no ‘east and west’ in the travel network and says the numbers don’t represent the couch-surfing scene in Hong Kong. “A lot of time when we have gatherings with guests staying in Hong Kong, they say they are staying with local Chinese hosts, though we have never heard of those hosts.” She describes such hosts as ‘invisible members’, who don’t necessarily take part in gatherings but enjoy rather the one-on-one experience. That is, in fact, the spirit of couch surfing – there is no pressure to do what you don’t want to do. To Laetitia, it boils down whether you want to spend time doing a couch surfing activity or not. 
 
The ladies agree that both the tiny living spaces and the generally youthful age of members who will still be staying with their families make it difficult to host in Hong Kong. (The average age is 26 and 48% of all CouchSurfing members are between 18 and 24.) However, Kay has had a more unconventional intervention to her hosting activities. She stopped taking guests last November when her neighbour complained to the landlord about all the ‘foreign strangers’ she was hosting, especially after learning that Kay had only previously met them online. The landlord checked on the lease and told her that she had violated some of the clauses, even though she made no profit from hosting people.
 
“He brought out some legal sounding terms like ‘thou shall not share, sublet, assign, allowing the use of… a whole list of words,” she recalls. When Kay challenged him over, for instance, a visit by her sister from Melbourne, he allowed that she could host immediate family members. And friends who were not CouchSurfing members? “The landlord thought for two minutes and said ‘So long as you have known them for 10 years it is okay.’” Everyone at the interview couldn’t help laughing – though sadly it keeps Kay from hosting.
 
Jokes aside, any serious CouchSurfing user will agree that couch surfing is more than free accommodation: it is about international friendship and cultural exchange. The international couch-surfing community has even started volunteer programmes, a recent example aims to help rebuild post-earthquake Peru. Despite restraints on hosting, one can do much as a part of the couch-surfing community. All the couch surfers we spoke to mentioned it is not the couch that matters. Showing others around, meeting for a cup of coffee, or simply replying to enquiries about one’s city are all part of the joy. Laetitia will always remember what one of her hosts said to her: “Take as much as you can now and give back as much as you can when you go home.” Have fun surfing!
 
June 12 will mark International Couch Surfing Day and the couch surfing group in Hong Kong will be throwing a gathering in Lan Kwai Fong. If you are interested to find out more, log on to www.couchsurfing.com/meetings.html?mid=12076. Other international free accommodation networks include Hospitality Club (www.hospitalityclub.org) and Global Freeloader (www.globalfreeloaders.com).