Ottawa, Canada

View of Ottawa.

My time in Ottawa was a great example of how a great couch surfing host can vastly improve your travel experience. When travelling solo for such a long time it can be difficult to find the motivation to get out and explore, ending in lots of procrastination and time-wasting. Also because the amount of time ahead of me in the trip was so vast, everything seems a little daunting. Not to mention how difficult it is to meet people, but to be constantly having to meet people "cold" - that is, starting conversations with complete strangers.

This is where couch surfing is amazing, and despite all its difficulties for a trip like this (locks you in to a bit of a schedule, making touring a bit less opportunistic and spontaneous), the benefits of being able to meet interesting people far outweighs the downsides. Ottawa wasn't the most interesting city I went to in North America, but I had a great time due to the people I hung out with. If I hadn't managed to find a couch surfing host I would have stayed at a hotel, gone out drinking, maybe talked to a few Canadians at the bar, then spend the next day walking around the city by myself taking photos.

Ottawa's parliament building.

Because I stayed with these lovely Canadians - Paige and Matt - I got to meet interesting people (people on Couch Surfing are generally very engaging, interesting and fun) and see Ottawa from an local's perspective which is far more fascinating than a tour guide's view. I think without this human connection travelling can turn into some sort of scavenger hunt, where you look up "best things to do in X" on trip advisor, wander to each sight/monument/attraction, take the obligatory photos and then go back to you hotel room that looks the same as every other one.

My situation for couch surfing was a little unique, I needed to find lots of hosts and stay for a relatively short amount of time. So to improve my changes, I'd find a few (3-5) profiles that I'd like the look of and write messages to each one. Hosts generally want more personalised messages - which is fair - so I always tried to pick out bits of their profile that we had in common or ask them questions. Sometimes this could be rather difficult.

Awesome looking spider sculpture in Ottawa.

A small number of hosts would have strange little games in their profiles like "mention my dog's name in your response", or "the first word of your response should be the 3rd word of my description". Once I'd see something like this I'd generally move on to the next profile. I didn't have the time for these shenanigans

Even if I jumped through all those hoops, who's to say the person was going to be free to host anyway? Hey hosts, CS recommends writing 5 requests per travel destination, which means I have to:

1. Find suitable profiles
2. Read your long-ass profile
3. Gauge whether or not you're a psychopath (believe me, there are some weird-as-fuck people on CS)
4. Workout if we'd get along
5. Respond with a personal message, using my comprehension skills to try and relate bits in the profile to me or my profile.
6. Rinse, repeat x4

A completely unstaged scene.
Left to Right: Dale, Matt and Paige.

This takes a significant amount of time - time spent on a tiny laptop where I could be seeing the sights. Or drinking!

Plus there was some push by CS to find something in common with my hosts. Why do I want to meet people like me? Yeah let's go find some boring system engineers so we can talk design methodologies and argue what programming languages are better. I want to meet all sorts of people, that's what makes travelling interesting. I don't want to hang out with me all the time. I already do that every day!

Ultimately I did achieve the diverseness I wanted through couch surfing: From pot-heads to police officers, hippies to enlisted air force personnel - I was damn happy with the result!

Paige and I in Gatineau Park.

Paige's couch surfing profile was very refreshing. It basically just said (apart from her interests etc.), "no games, just send me a message and let me know what's up". Paige was a hardcore traveller though, so I think she could better relate to people in my situation. Paige and her husband Matt were planning to take an entire year off to go travel through Asia, and both seemed to work with a purpose of saving up for the trip. Paige herself had travelled for very long periods of time on her own.

Gatineau Park, Quebec.

When I arrived in Ottawa, I met Paige at her home; A nice little apartment made out of the basement of a suburban house. When Matt arrived home we all hoped in the car and headed downtown to meetup with Dale; the other couch surfer. Dale was an Australian (Melbournian, which make up 90% of the Aussies I met in the US) who was also on a very North America long tour such as myself. He was travelling across the US with a friend in a van, and had parted temporarily so he could head up to see America's Hat. 

We all drove around some famous parts of Ottawa we saw the parliament building, eternal flame monument and other historical landmarks. Then we all got a beer at a Russian-themed bar. The bar's back room had an awesome collection of Russian propaganda posters from WWII right through to the cold war. It also had some dude sleeping back there who didn't seem too pleased when we turned the lights on.

Gatineau Park, Quebec.

For dinner we all went to the best kebab place in Ottawa (according to Matt). The kebabs in Canada seem almost exactly the same as the Australian ones, except they have more pickled vegetables in them. It was like pickled turnip or something? Can't quite remember.

That night I saw first hand the weird North American activity of feeding your cats catnip - basically cocaine for cats. I've never seen anyone do this in Australia where you give your pets a "recreational" substance to make them more entertaining  It made Paige's cats go kind of mental, but they loved it - the fat one would push the other cat out of the way if it got into the way of his drug hit. Dale and I were very fascinated by the whole thing.

The next day Paige did not have to work, so she drove Dale and I through Gatineau Park, which was beautiful this time of year. The leaves on the maples were all changing, I would have loved to ride through the park but did not have time.

Later that day I set off for Montreal, French Canadian country!

Denver, Colorado

Mary Kay - My first couch surfing host!

Denver was my first experience with couch surfing, I was to be staying with a nice young lady named Mary Kay, who works as a teacher in the area. For those who don't know, couch surfing is done via a website (www.couchsurfing.org) where people act as hosts and let random travelers stay in their house (usually on the couch) for a couple of nights. From my experience, it kind of acts as a platonic dating website, where everyone has a profile and you message members to get hosted etc. I decided to take up couch surfing after a conversation with a guy in Colorado Springs, who told me it was a great way to meet different people without the need to get fucked up with them at bars. Plus it is way cheaper than hotels!

Mary Kay had never hosted before, so this was a first for both of us. In fact she had put together her profile a long time ago but was never able to find the right time to host. Eventually I guess she started to drop down in the search results, and only recently did she log in (she was getting a bunch of emails from the website), and that's how I picked her profile up. I thought that an older woman (profile said 36) who was a high school teacher was a good safe bet for my first experience.

Some government building in Denver.

What threw me a little bit is that she wanted me out of the house when she was not there, as her roommate didn't really trust couch surfers. This was pretty fair I suppose, but it was a little confronting to be treated like a possible criminal or creep.

Anyway, I arrived at MK's house in the evening, and she suggested going to the gym. I hadn't been since Boise, and I was really feeling it so I gladly accepted the offer! Plus I could get in for free. After the gym we got some Indian food and frozen yogurt. The Indian food was a little different to Australian-Indian; In this fast food place you selected either beef or chicken and then selected the sauce. It was a bit like a Subway sandwich. It kind of made sense from an efficiency point of view, and it wasn't too bad for the price. The frozen yogurt places over here are pretty awesome, it's all self service with 20 or so different flavors and heaps of different sprinkles, toppings and sauces. And after you're finished putting it together you just pay by the weight. This means it can end up being really cheap!

The attractive Coors Brewery building.

The next day I decided I should head down to the Coors brewery - The tours are completely free. From memory this is the largest brewery in the US. It is located in a small town just outside of Denver called Golden. The tour is self guided, a bus comes and picks you up from a car park and drops you at the brewery and then get one of those electronic tour guide things. You also get a photo in front of a green screen - just like the Seattle Space Needle. I'm guessing now that this is just a cleverly disguised security measure to get a photo of all the visitors. I pretty sure this is the case because you can't refuse the photo - you have to get one taken and then opt not to get it printed out at the end of the tour.

So the tour was pretty good, the place smelled pretty awesome. They just sort of went through the entire brewing and packaging process as you'd expect. But there was a little sales-y undertone going on, they definitely liked talking the company up. At the end of the tour you get 3 free beers which was pretty awesome! However, the glass size is fairly small, I'm guessing that they figured out that people would be able to legally drive with the smaller glasses. Or they are tight-arses, who knows. You could choose from Coors Banquet (the best regular Coors beer), Coors Light (a super popular beer over here - by the way "light beer" over here  means low calorie) and a Coors red beer.

Cases of Coors Light.

Copper kettles at the Brewery.

After the tour I headed to the famous "Red Rocks" which is a natural amphitheater formed out of a rock formation. They have a lot of concerts at the amphitheater, and apparently the acoustics are so good that bands often record albums there. I only knew about this place by seeing a Zach Brown band video clip with Bec! Unfortunately for me they were just closing up (got there at 2PM) for a concert that night. Oh well - I'll come back tomorrow!

That night MK and I went and had some Mexican food (I had the Quesadillas) and margaritas. I haven't had a margarita in years! Anyway, the food, drinks and conversation were fantastic! I was pretty lucky to have such a great couch surfing host. We had lots of great conversation, definitely contentious ones about religion - I learnt that the word "atheist" over here is often seen as confronting and negative. It's best to say that you're not religious :)

The next day I set off to Laramie, Wyoming but on the way I headed to Red Rocks again. This time I managed to get in. The place was full of keen bean exercisers who run up and down the stands doing pushups and shit. It was a pretty amazing place though.

Thanks to MK for being such a great host. I wish her all the best!