Couchsurfing and bed-dwellers

(11:15, 18 March 2011, La Casa de la Paula, Sector Papirua, Chile) The sound of the waves has been right outside the door for a day and a half now, and still I sometimes look out at the sea just to check that it’s real. It’s a brown beach, unlike the beaches I am used to, but its lovely. Pine forest lines the shore and spreads up and down, and up and down the horizon hills behind the houses. There certainly aren’t a lot of people around. Yesterday evening I went for a walk on the beach. And I had a laugh because, if I was worried about finding my way back to the right place, I just had to follow my own footprints – they were the only ones on the whole beach.
I have a new preoccupation about being able to find my way back because the other day I left all my bags, money, everything, in a guy’s apartment and went down the road to see a church and when I got back, I couldn’t recognize his door. The postman saw me wandering around and tried to help but I didn’t even know the guy’s surname. I was supposed to be back in 30 minutes but I ended up going back to the church and waiting until he came to look for me. Apparently it had been 3 hours, haha.

Let me explain why I’m alone on the beach, and why I left everything I owned in the apartment of a guy who’s surname I didn’t know… When I was in Valparaiso, the artsy bohemian city just north of Santiago, I stayed at a hostel with a wonderful, crazy Spanish woman called Paula. I liked her a lot, because although she only speaks Spanish, she talks so so much that even if I only understand a fraction of what she is saying, it’s still quite a bit. In my rush across the border to celebrate Vendemia in Mendoza, Argentina, we didn’t swop contact details but I was sure I could find her on couchsurfing if I tried hard enough, since I had spent a few hours with her setting up her profile.
Couchsurfing is a global web-based organization in which people offer their “couch” (or just their company for a coffee or an afternoon about town) to people travelling in their city. It’s a great way to meet people who live where you are and get the scoop on the best spots in town, and, if you use it to find a couch, it’s free accommodation. I’ve been meaning to use the site since I started travelling and what with Chile being so much more expensive, it was just the motivation I needed. I heard about some couchsurfing events when I was in Valparaiso, sundowners on the beach one evening and another evening meeting for drinks at a bar, so I went along and met a bunch of great people. One of them lived behind the door I couldn’t recognize. On my last afternoon, we went together to see a park on the other side of town, after I’d checked out, and then I left my stuff with him while he did some work until I had to go to the bus terminal.

Anyway, it was only in Santiago, when I came back from Mendoza, that I actually “couchsurfed” for the first time. I picked four people to send out requests to and the first response I got was from a Danish exchange student, Jonas, who lives in a shared apartment right in the centre of the city. He had an awesome sense of humour and we had good fun chatting together over the next few days. Whenever we were with other exchange students, we spoke Spanish, as well as when we were in the apartment, since his roommates are all Chilean. (All except the Argentinian couple who are currently in Santiago performing a juggling show at the traffic lights and seem to be doing rather well) But we spoke English whenever we were walking around the city together.
Jonas had just started classes, so he was generally busy during the day, which suited me fine because I had loads of time to visit museums and churches. When I got back in the evenings, he was usually puzzling over a Maths problem or, if I was lucky, had just taken some bread out of the oven (he is experimenting with making his own bread) and after a snack, we would go for a long, very fast walk through a new part of the city. One evening, I was telling him how for some reason I’ve been feeling really tired, and since I only have a few weeks left, I’m thinking of not trying to see everything in Patagonia and the south of Chile, but rather stopping somewhere pretty for a while, maybe spending some time thinking over my trip, and we ran into Paula! She had just stepped onto the pavement outside of a restaurant for a moment to take a phonecall. Considering that there are millions of people living in Santiago, of which I know probably less than 10, and that Paula was only working there that week, and that Jonas and I walked a completely different, random route of the city each night – it was quite the coincidence! She immediately asked when I was leaving Santiago because I had to “couchsurf” with her to see her house on the beach a few hours south. Anyway, we set a date to have lunch the next day. I spent the rest of the walk home telling Jonas why I shouldn’t go stay at her house, she wasn’t going to be there til the weekend and, although she offered to give me the keys and the directions, there was so much left that I wanted to do and so little time, I couldn’t get stuck a couple hours outside of Santiago for a few days just doing nothing. Of course, I soon realized that it was exactly what I had been wanting. So after we had lunch, she wrote out the directions to find her house and by the following evening I had arrived.

It’s a simple wooden cottage, right out on the beach, with bits of colourful material draped over the furniture and a windchime of shells that taps against the door with the constant whistling wind. There are quite a few clusters of houses if you look down the long beach, and the main road is maybe 500m away where there’s even a small shop, albeit with a very sparse selection of groceries, but there is definitely a sense of being alone. It made me want to have a conversation with myself, or to sing something, very loudly. Paula insisted I sleep in her bed and not on the sleeper couch, so when I arrived and had cooked myself a bowl of pasta, I set myself up in her bedroom and climbed into bed. I lay there driftily, with the kind of tiredness that comes from not doing enough during the day, and waited for the moment I would suddenly wake up in some hostel somewhere and realize it had all been a dream. I lay flat under the pile of heavy layers. I couldn’t believe I was completely alone. I could do whatever I wanted for two whole days… I felt like there was something crawling on me, but it was obviously just the numerous unfamiliar blankets or something… I could do nothing at all if that’s what I felt like… Maybe there was some dry grass stuck in my pants from the walk I did the other day, gosh it really was itchy… Anyway, I told myself, I know it seems too good to be true but -
Ok, no. There was definitely something crawling on me. I threw open the blankets and whipped off my pants to see at least four or five hopping off in every direction: fleas! I don’t know if I’d ever even seen a live one before but there was no mistaking them. I ran to the bathroom and took off my underwear and did a thorough check. I don’t know anything about fleas! I don’t know where they like to hang out! Ok, I thought, smiling, now my being here is believable. (To be continued)