Sleeping Around (4 page)

I said nothing for a minute.

‘Oh,' I said. I'm not very good at this talking-about-emotions caper (just ask my wife).

‘Please don't say anything to Miguel or Jorge,' Claudia said with a tear in her eye. ‘No one else knows.'

Claudia hadn't even told her parents yet. She was too scared.

‘Abortion is illegal in Chile and if I have the baby by myself then my family and friends will disown me.' Tears were now rolling down her cheeks.

I realised Claudia was telling me all this because she knew she would never see me again and she just wanted someone to speak to, but I had no idea what to say.

We both stood staring as the sun finally dropped below the horizon and thousands of sparkling lights came to life in the valley below like an upside-down starry sky.

‘Is that Santiago?' I asked. I
am
good at changing the subject whenever conversations get too heavy (again, ask my wife).

‘I don't want to be a single woman in that
fucking
city,' Claudia said.

I just hoped that she wasn't going to ask me what she should do.

‘What should I do?' Claudia said, looking at me with wet eyes.

Oh dear.

Because I really didn't know what to say, I covered all bases instead. ‘Maybe you could go to Canada and have the baby . . . or not have the baby, and see if it works out with Bob . . . or if it, um, doesn't.'

Gee, that was a lot of help.

‘Thanks, that was a lot of help,' Claudia said, squeezing my hand.

Claudia was chatty and chirpy over dinner, but I could tell that she was doing it so Miguel and Jorge wouldn't think something was wrong. Miguel made some traditional Chilean fare for dinner—hamburgers and fries—and I had to restrain myself from saying ‘Claudia
is
eating for two' when she had a second burger.

After dinner Claudia snuck off to bed while the rest of us crashed in front of the TV with steaming mugs of hot chocolate. The more I travel, the more I realise that it is indeed a very small reality-TV-obsessed world. After Chilean
Big Brother
came Chilean
Dancing with the Stars
followed by
South American Idol
(which we all agreed the Chilean girl was a shoe-in to win). During the Colombian girl's soppy slow love song, I dozed off. ‘What sort of boring couch-surfing guest was I?' I thought when I woke up an hour later. Then I realised that Miguel and Jorge were so engrossed in a reality TV show involving women with large breasts shouting a lot that they hadn't even noticed I'd been asleep.

‘I'm really sorry, but I'm going to have to go to bed,' I said with a big yawn.

‘You'll probably need a few extra blankets,' Jorge said, handing me a large pile of blankets. ‘The heating has been turned off in the rooms and it's like a fridge in there.'

I'm an idiot. When will I ever learn? I worked as a ski guide in the Swiss Alps and I know the weather can change in an instant, so why hadn't I taken any sunblock with me up to El Colorado? Now I looked like Mr Tomato Head.

Jorge was in his usual spot in front of the TV. ‘Oohh, your face is red,' he said gravely. Over the next few days I would get that from every single person I met.

It was another gloriously sunny day, so before I left for Vallee Nevada I slapped a thick layer of sunscreen onto my face (yeah yeah, I know it was way too much way too late, but if I got any more burnt, my face would self-combust).

I had to drag Miguel away from TV to come skiing with me.

‘I'll start the cleaning then,' Jorge said—without looking up from the TV.

The resort of Vallee Nevada looked as if they had shaved the top off a mountain to put in the parking lot and an impressively monolithic hotel. There was no time for sightseeing, though, as we headed straight up Tres Puntas, the highest lift at 3670 metres, then dropped off the run (actually it was more like dropping off a cliff) into a stash of wind-blown powder. Not only was it wonderful having a local to ski with, but on our long rides on ski lifts we had a lot of time to chat about life, skiing, football, Chilean culture and teenage girls getting their chests slashed open and their innards yanked out. Miguel pointed out the highest peak (El Plomo at 5430 metres), where a few years ago an Inca mummy was found preserved in the ice. ‘The Inca princess took two weeks to walk to the summit in bare feet and then she was sacrificed,' Miguel said matter-of-factly.

Later on Miguel told me that there was no culture left in Chile (now that the good ol' days of tearing apart virgins had gone). ‘Chilean culture is based around gossip,' Miguel said angrily. ‘All we have is gossip magazines, gossip TV shows and TV shows talking about gossip magazines.'

We then talked about Brad and Angelina's relationship problems.

I did find out that I was Miguel's first couch-surfing guest. He'd had a few requests before, but he'd always been too busy. He thought I sounded interesting and he also felt a little sorry for me. ‘You sounded quite desperate,' he said.

‘Maybe just a little bit,' I said. Okay, maybe it was more than just a little bit. I may have pleaded and begged for a couch in my last few emails.

As usual when you're having such a fabulous day, it ends all too soon. And with it my time in the mountains. Miguel was staying on to ‘finish cleaning the lodge'—or more accurately to
start
cleaning the lodge, since Jorge was still glued to the TV when we returned—so I was grabbing a lift back to Santiago with Roberto the axe murderer.

It was going to be a strange feeling popping in and out of people's lives throughout this trip. Miguel and I hugged knowing that we would probably never see each other again. ‘Um . . . good luck,' I whispered to Claudia as we hugged. By the time you're reading this, Claudia might have had a baby, might have settled down in Canada or might be living back in that fucking city, Santiago.

3

‘Everyone is welcome to stay at my place as long as you do the dishes.'

José Levican, 35, Santiago, Chile

HospitalityClub.com

José's city apartment block looked like an office building and José looked like a clerk. José was a studious-looking chap with neat clothes, neat glasses and an incredibly neat haircut. His apartment was also very neat, but that was because it was so tiny there was hardly any room to fit anything in it. José greeted me at the door with a clerkish handshake and by the time I'd taken two steps into his apartment, I'd already walked through the kitchenette and into the lounge room—which was very light on for lounges. There was only barely enough room for the one-and-a-half seater couch that took up half the lounge room.

Sitting on the mini-couch was Caroline, a pretty and petite couch surfer from France. She already had dibs on the couch, so my ‘bed' was to be a few cushions thrown onto the floor. Mind you, I was happy to sleep anywhere. Apart from the fact that my bed of cushions was free, I was still so excited about staying in a local's home and having the opportunity to experience how other people live. Albeit a tad squishy.

The introductions were barely over when I asked, ‘Have you guys eaten yet? Would you like to go out for dinner?' My enquiry was perhaps a little precipitate, but that was because I was ravenous after a big day of skiing and my stomach was making terribly embarrassing loud gurgling noises.

‘We have eaten already, but I will make you some dinner,' Caroline said. She stood up to walk to the kitchen, although she could have very easily reached the stove from the couch. This was wonderful: One couch surfer was cooking dinner for another couch surfer she'd only just met in someone else's home.

José poured me a beer from an extraordinarily large bottle of Heineken, and then joined me on the couch. I knew a little bit about José from his HospitalityClub profile. I knew his interests included languages, astronomy, sciences, baroque music, playing the guitar and ‘trying to understand the human mind'.

‘So, you're an engineer,' I said. That was the other thing I knew about José.

‘Yes, I'm designing pipes for making ice-cream at the Nestlé factory.'

‘Oh, so you do contract work?'

‘No,' José said, shaking his head. ‘I have worked there for three years.'

‘I see, so . . . why do they need so many pipes?'

‘They have to operate under the Swiss system,' José said. ‘The pipes are . . . supercalifragilisticexpialidocious . . .' Well, that's what it sounded like to me and it still made about the same amount of sense after he'd dragged out a pile of draft plans and talked for ten minutes about how to limit the vortex on the groove gasket when the zirconium blind flange preferred strawberry to chocolate.

Before starting at Nestlé, José had worked in the States for three years. Just when he was about to fully explain how pipes operate under the American system, Caroline handed me a steaming bowl of beef risotto. I quickly changed the subject to couch surfing and soon discovered that José was a bit of a couch-surfing hosting junkie and effectively had the world passing through his lounge. Folk from Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Austria, Spain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the States had all crammed onto his cramped couch. Some had requested his couch, but a whole bunch of them were headhunted (in the nicest possible way) by José to come and stay. On the HospitalityClub website you can not only do a search for a host by city or country, but you can also search by gender, age, language spoken, occupation and—this is where José hunted down his very own couch surfers—‘planned trips'. Every once in a while he would do a search to find out who was planning to visit Chile then he would email them and offer up his place. Yes, it might sound a tad weird, but José just seemed genuinely interested in meeting people from around the world. ‘I love people,' José gushed. ‘And I love hearing about people's lives.' He certainly did love hosting people and he was also a member of CouchSurfing and GlobalFreeloaders.

José had surfed with a few people, but he had mostly used HospitalityClub because he could use the advanced search feature. By searching under ‘occupation' he'd found fellow engineers to surf with in San Diego and Buenos Aires. Mind you, if he so desired he could travel the entire planet staying with people who like talking about pipes. There are 843 engineers on the HospitalityClub website.

I've since done an extensive search under ‘occupations' and found that if you wanted to, you could also stay with a taxidermist, weatherman, rickshaw driver, anthropologist, NASA rocket scientist, magnetic fridge poet, chimney sweep, hugger (she runs hugging workshops), roustabout, computer games tester and someone who lists their occupation as a ‘watcher of life' (I'm not sure the pay's too good, though).

There seemed to be an inordinate amount of people ‘working' as ‘bums', including a ski bum, beach bum, world bum, professional bum, part-time bum, cycle bum, social bum, internet bum, poker bum, occupational bum, jazz bum and a ‘plain old bum'. If you can handle a few nights of water-squirting novelty flowers and balloon animals, there are 39 clowns to stay with. The Finns account for most of the seventeen stand-up comedians, while all of the five butlers you can stay with are English (including the very butler-sounding Gareth Parry-Jones).

There are 28 professional footballers, with eleven from Nigeria (the national team, perhaps?) and one from Congo who says that he is going to be the next David Beckham. If you feel that the world is no longer a safe place to travel, there are 97 police officers from 38 different countries to look after you. You might (or might not) also feel safe staying with one of 113 military folk from 27 countries. Personally, I'd stay away from Zafar, an army officer from Pakistan who wants to ‘melt lots of new people'. You could try getting a couch that's out of this world by sharing with an astronaut. I'm not too sure of their legitimacy, though. One is from Amsterdam, so he's probably in space, but not in this universe. The other is from that world-leading aerospace giant Peru, where they must not pay too well. This ‘astronaut' is 36 years old and still lives with his mum and dad.

If you're having trouble with your love life, there are four sex therapists and two love counsellors to help you, while the three exotic dancers/strippers would certainly know how to entertain you for the evening. Lora Cherry from Orlando, Florida, says in her profile:

I'm a stripper, and I'm a vegan. I'm a vegan stripper. The only meat I eat is man meat!

Exotic dancer Candy from the Gold Coast, Queensland, says that:

You are more than welcome to stay as long as you share your drugs, be nice to my cat and don't steal my stuff. No perverts please. I am normal.

Last, but certainly not least, is Manuel, a male stripper from Detroit. He says:

My house rules are as follows:

1) If you bring someone home—everyone fucks or nobody fucks. So unless you're into orgies, don't even think about it.