Surfing the Travelling Couch

I love T-Town, but it has one big problem. It lacks new blood. I mean new English speaking blood. Us English speaking locals are thin on the ground as it is, and during low season, barely any tourists make it out of the train station. Though I am lucky with the people I know here, we all crave a wider social network. My friend decided he would tackle the problem head on and offer a bed to anybody willing to have a conversation with us poor, dialogue starved, expats. So he popped his details into couch surfer and waited.

He struck it lucky (as we are now realizing) with the first response. A couple arrived who were in Thailand on the second year of their attempt to cycle round the world. The poor couple looked half starved (being vegetarians in the land of pig worship) and a bit knackered to be honest, but they had some fascinating stories and we sat and devoured their experiences. They were polite, interesting and self-sufficient. Just the kind of house guests you would want. They used the house to sleep, but during the day they peddled off around the town to restock their supplies of tofu and brown rice and to see the limited sites T-town has to offer. They stayed two nights and then carried on their merry way.

So far so good thought my friend. And the rest of us, who had come to believe that we now had a constant source of well travelled, intelligent people, who would leave just at the point that they started to get annoying, or just plain ordinary. The next person to apply for my friend’s spare room was a girl making her way up by couch surfer from Kuala Lumpur. The warning signals should have been heard when she asked to stay for 4 nights. NO-ONE wants to stay 4 nights in T-town. My friend was working all these days, which he warned her about, but she seemed to think that was fine.

So she arrived, and came out with us on the first night for a few drinks, and that was where she emitted the immortal words when we asked what brought her to T town, she wanted to “get off the beaten track”. Well fine I thought. I bit clichéd, but at least true. T Town is certainly one of those places. It’s REAL Thailand, with REAL Thai people. The problem was with her saying this was, as it transpired, that she was less than able to cope with being in an environment like this. She proceeded to spend the next 4 days calling my friend at every opportunity saying that she needed food and water. Or asking him where she thought she should go next AND if he could give her all the travel details to get there (times, costs etc). The rest of the time she spent holed up in her room talking to no-one and doing nothing. The problem was it seemed, that she wanted to get off the beaten track, and she wanted to stumble across a ready made tour guide on every unbeaten track that she took. She made no attempt to go out by herself, research anything or generally stand on her own two feet.

In my opinion, as soon as you make an assertion about going ‘off the beaten track’ you are giving yourself a task which is both impossible and unnecessary. In this case she though couch surfer would be the answer. Undeniably I am sure this would offer her some great experiences, but it meant she was unwilling to move on until she had somewhere, and she wasted 4 days in a place where she did nothing. For me traveling is all about the freedom of not knowing what is happening next. The beaten track or unbeaten track are irrelevant. If you leave yourself open to whatever opportunities come up, then you will at some stage end up doing something no one else has done, in a place where no one else is. You will also end up having a fantastic time somewhere where thousands of other tourists are, and you don’t have to feel guilty about that. Tourist places are often touristy for a reason, they are great places to visit. Of course there are other great places with not so many tourists, but by focusing yourself purely on these you are ending up just as blinkered as the tourist who books a package tour.