UNITING THE WORLD

Derzhavnaia Church on Olkhon Island.

We were minutes away from our final stop on Olkhon Island, the biggest of the 22 islands of Lake Baikal, and also considered one of the most sacred places in Buddhist Asia. It was getting late and we needed to get to where we were staying that night before it was pitch dark and there was no one in the street. I called Sergey (our host on the island) to verify the address.

– Yes, the house behind the church. Just come on in! – replied Sergey.

5 minutes later I was knocking on the door of the house behind the gorgeous Russian Orthodox Church overlooking the steep hill cascading into Baikal. "Bon jour!" – was the response of a friendly blond lady, who opened the door and retreated to continue some table game with 2 children and 4 outdoorsy looking adults of different ages.

Emi and Yura with their pikes at the "Turbaza".

To put it mildly, we did not expect to find a house full of French travelers in the middle of Russian Siberia, especially not at this refuge-shack administered by a 30ish year old Russian church guardian. The lovely French found Sergey the same exact way we did – on Couchsurfing.com. I have heard about the site some years ago, when my old housemate (without consulting his roommates) opened the doors of our house to a Finish couple, who turned out to be wonderful and loved Washington DC. I never gave this idea much thought until Emi and I began our expedition. Emi, as it turned out, was registered on the site, but has never used it before. Since Latin America is cheap and with plenty of hostels we never thought of becoming active couch surfers until we got to Russia. Our first intention was to have a place to stay and save money on hotels, but once we had our debut with Ksenya in Krasnoyarsk, we became loyal converts.

Emi, Lisa, Marco and I in Terelj National Park, Mongolia.

It is basically a cultural exchange-meeting place for people who like to socialize. You can stay with people when you travel, you can host people at your home if you stay put, or you can just offer to hang out or show your local sites to the foreigners passing through where you live. At Ksenya’s in Krsnoyarsk, we learned that she loved hosting people just because it gave her a special spice in her daily life and she got an opportunity to practice English. She hosts people in her one bedroom apartment where the guests get the bedroom and sleep on mattresses on the floor, and she and her boyfriend do the same in the living room.  She has very little, but still she chooses to share that little with the fellow travelling souls that came through her nostalgic Siberian town.

Lisa in  our ger.

In the case of Sergey (college educated in Russia and France), he felt that it made him more connected with the world when he received people in his island house, especially if he could practice his French and English while showing them around.  When Sergey moved to the island some 6 years earlier to restore and revive the local church, there was no housing either for him or for any travelers. Little by little, him and his wife built a little log house and began thinking of a guest reception/cafeteria area, which every Russian church is supposed to have. Sergey did the thinking and couch surfers did the action.

Hong Kong - floor 62.

When Sergey began hosting people, everyone felt it was their duty to help with construction. As long as Sergey found building materials, the guest house did not stop to grow. When we were there, the structure was in place and only in need of insulation and interior beautification, to which we contributed almost every day of our stay. We also built a 15 meter long fence to protect the church grounds from the fierce winds ruling those lands. Every day when we returned to our new home after routine explorations of the island we (alongside with our French housemates) Iooked for new improvement projects. Just like at any other country-set household there is no end to activities and chores: there is wood to be split, garden to be weeded, shacks to be built and walls to be painted. No matter how cold it was, or how tired we were we did the work with great pleasure and felt that we were contributing to a common good that will stay and grow.

 Our hutong street in Baidjing

Our Severobaikalsk stay with Yuri was just as different and as fulfilling as the days with Sergey. Yuri, hosted people at his friend’s country camp, where he also lived for the time being. He was the only person from Severobaikalsk to host people, and he tried to accommodate everyone. Besides the excitement of meeting new people Yuri also “used” his guests to help him brain storm about tourism opportunities in northern Baikal where he was starting his travel company. Our contribution to Yuri’s new enterprise was in the form of photos for his website and a presentation video, which travelled to Moscow’s Young Entrepreneur’s competition which Yuri successfully won.

Chris is helping Emi to negotiate some deal in Mandarin.

There were many other stops along our way at the houses of great couch surfers. Liza from Germany, who hosted us in Ulan-Ude, became our dear friend and joined us on a trip to Mongolia where we spent a fun weekend in a ger of a local nomad family. Chris from Canada, “the master of Beijing hutongs”, taught us all there is to know about tea drinking and showed us how to do Chinese-style grocery shopping at the neighborhood market. Ting Yan from Singapore, who showed us the wanders of living on 62d floor in a Hong Kong residential neighborhood. The experiences that really stood out for us were the ones where we could help or contribute in one way or another, which always happened for us spontaneously and unexpectedly.

Anyone wants to start an export business: Beidjing-Moscow?

Since the beginning of our trip I have been looking for ways to help in places that we visited. The reality that I have discovered was that many volunteer projects have become an alternative way of travelling, where a volunteer has to pay a substantial fee in order to work for free. Administering volunteer projects takes time and effort and that is what the fee covers (they say). However, isn’t it ridiculous that your efforts to help are rejected if you can’t pay the fee?! It is the first time in my life when I have plenty of time and energy that I can and want to devote to helping this world, and I can’t find places where I can volunteer without having to pay for it.

Not surprisingly, Couchsurfing became for us the way to find people who needed help and who at the same time were willing to host us. It looks like Couchsurfing might become a new way to find real grassroots volunteering where it is still raw and clear cut: volunteering means donating your time and efforts to help those in need.