One of our favorite nonprofits in the world is a San Francisco based or organization called Couchsurfing. They exist to connect travelers with locals in over 230 countries and territories around the world. The Couchsurfing community is made up of over 1 million members who come from 62,000 different cities and speak 1,270 unique languages. Since their founding in 2004, 1.25 million successful CouchSurfing stays have been recorded and 1.5 million new friendships have been formed.

I joined Couchsurfing over a year ago, but was never an active member. I had almost forgot about it until we starting thinking about how we could meet local people as we travel the globe. I remembered Couchsurfing and knew it would be the perfect for our situation. However, since we believed so much in the organization (and because we didn’t have any references yet) we decided to start hosting people at our apartment in San Francisco a few months before we left for our trip. In total we hosted about 15 people from all over the globe and have made quite a few great friends (even some that we’ll stay with while we’re traveling).

Couchsurfing with Ben and Kerri in Rundu, Namibia

So far on our trip, we’ve Couchsurfed with Jonathan in Cape Town, Ben and Kerri in Namibia and Baraka in Dar Es Salaam. They were all FANTASTIC hosts and each had a unique local persepective of the country we were visiting. They all went above and beyond the call of duty to show us around their city and make sure we felt comfortable in their homes.

As we continue our journey, we plan to Couchsurf as much as possible. While not all of the homes we’ve stayed at were as convenient as a downtown hotel, the expierences and friendships far outweighed any commute we had to a city centre. If anyone reading this isn’t already a member of Couchsurfing yet, I highly recommend you join the community and feel free to add me and Amy as a friend.