Tasty Tipples and Travellers' Tales - On Phnom Penh's Weekly Couchsurfing Meet Up

Tasty Tipples and Travellers' Tales - On Phnom Penh's Weekly Couchsurfing Meet Up

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The merry, multinational masses

"We were meant to be driving from London to Mongolia in the smallest rustbucket of a car we could find. Unfortunately, we only managed to get as far as Kazakhstan."

This is a random sample of the kind of talk on offer at one of Phnom Penh's Couchsurfing Group's weekly meet ups.

For the uninitaited, Couchsurfing [4] is a network of travellers and hosts that aims to allow people to experience travelling the world in a more personal way. The idea is deceptively simple; if you have a couch/spare bed/hardwood floor/small area of scrubland where you'd be happy for travellers to lay their weary heads, you sign yourself up as a host. Travellers passing through your area then drop you a request to surf (for 'surf' read 'sleep on for free') your couch and you can accept or decline at your will. When you head off on your own travels, hosts in the places you pass through will return the favour. And so it all goes round in one big, swirly ouroboros of good karma and travellers' tales.

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But it's not just about securing a sleeping surface for the night: CS is also about meeting likeminded people. To this end, CS groups have sprung up in more or less every town, city and mountain retreat you can think of, with CSers gathering together to share stories and compare their travelling war-wounds.

Last night was the turn of PPs group, with representatives from Germany, Romania, Mexico, Switerland, the UK and the Netherlands gathering at The Empire [6] for a good natter. Topics of discussion included the Mongol Rally, settling into a new country, Hungarian pornstars and how to say 'Cheers' in a dozen different languages.

If you want to get involved, join the Phnom Penh Couchsurfing Group [7] and keep an eye out for details of future meet ups.