Published on March 11, 2002

A night on the Net

‘Stoppelenburg travels around using the power of his thumb and the kindness of his hosts’

LIKE many people his age, 25-year-old Dutch university student Ramon Stoppelenburg wanted to see the world but didn’t have enough money to leave home. But unlike the rest of his generation, he built a website asking the world to e-mail him if he could stay for a day.

And his travels began.

Since setting off on his journey, the journalism student has stayed for a day with people in The Netherlands, Belgium, France, England, Ireland, Northern-Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, South Africa and Spain.

And last month, with help of sponsors, the man who has been described as the “Internet Personality of the Year” has arrived Down Under.

His critics would call him a freeloader but fans call him a entrepreneur.

Stoppelenburg paid about AUS$70 to set up his website www.letmestayforaday.com in March last year, at which he invites people who are willing to put him up for a night to e-mail him.

The first offer of accommodation came within two hours of the site being launched and, so far 3100 people from 67 countries have invited him to their place.

Australians are clearly very hospitable folk because Stoppelenburg said in an interview with Lonely Planet his first international offer of a bed for the night came from an Aussie two days after the site was launched.

The Deal

The deal is you give him a bed and feed him, like you would any guest. In return, he will write about you on his website, which has more than 250 diary entries and 4000 photographs, and include you in his book to be written when his travelling days are over.

You are also able to stay with him if you ever make it to The Netherlands, although it might be hard to time your visit when Stoppelenburg is home.

If you can’t cook, think carefully about inviting Stoppelenburg to your place. His journal entries are very details, right down to how well he liked the way you cooked the vegetables with dinner.

No budget

Stoppelenburg travels around using the power of his thumb and the kindness of his hosts, with his self-imposed rules and no budget preventing him to pay for bus, train or plane fares.

In some cases, his hosts give him a lift to his next port of call.

The idea for the website came when he was watching a talk show which featured the guy behind the SendMeADollar site (www.sendmeadollar.com), who has so far received more than $US4000 from people.

Wired.com, the journal of the Net generation, picked up Stoppelenburg’s story and he soon became a Net age personality and celebrity.

His website has attracted millions of Net visitors and Stoppelenburg now expects to travel for four or five years, without paying a cent, before settling down with his girlfriend, Irena, a trauma consultant commanger in the Dutch Royal Army.

His travel are now sponsored, with companies paying for his backpack and the clothes in it, his digital camera, his mobile phone, his laptop and even his flight to Australia in return for this financially strapped backpacker mentioning them on his website.

And he hás become something of a celebrity, joining the A-list party folk at the London premiere of the film Pearl Harbour on one of his recent trips.

"People are made scared"

One of the questions visitors to his website most frequently ask is whether he is worried he will turn up at someone’s house to stay for a day only to find they want to dice and slice him into small pieces.

“Why should I be scared?” he says on his website. “People are just made scared by television.”
“One story about a hitcher with an axe who kills people does not mean that every hitcher has an axe with him.”
“People just don’t trust each other that much anymore.”

His safety plan is that his support team back home knows the address and phone number of the person he is staying with each night, so if his host does turn out to be an axe-wielding killer then at least the police know where to start looking for the body.

Exhausting

It might sound like a free ride, but Stoppelenburg says travelling for nothing is hard work.

“Even though I am doing something unique, it is exhausting,” he says. “Everyday I am a guest and every day I have to say goodbye again. Without any money in my pocket, I am just depending on people.”

And there have been some bad experiences along the way, such as the night two very friendly Irish girls, took him out to lunch, then to the dog races and out for a pub crawl until he begged, literally, to go home to bed where he slept for 12 hours.

His description of the night, in which he criticised the two girls for being to keen to party and drink a lot of beers, sparked outrage from other Irish visitors to his site, saysing he should “get a life". While is approach probably only works because it is novel, his site has inspired several other websites, including the tongue in check “Let Me Shag for a Night” in which a fake Dutch student is asking for women, who would like his particular attention for an evening, to drop him a line.

Stoppelenburg researched Australia before heading south for six months. “The country with the kangaroos, the unmeasurable spaces, the Opera House, Ayers Rock and where all the phrases end with mate,” his website says on his latest destination. “This Commenwealth has 19.2 million citizens and I hope they all have Internet. ”

It’s not too late to e-mail Stoppelenburg if you want a Dutch student sleeping in your spare room for the night, but he already has offers of accommodation in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, Cairns and the Whitsundays.

His travels have interrupted his journalism studies, but this student of life has already learnt the importance of the media.

“Without the attention of the media, my website would never gain enough national publicityh in the particular country I am visiting, so I always answer any question and have fun at the same time,” he says. “In every country I have my 15 minutes of fame.”

And, along with helping him see the world for free, ther is another motive behind his website – getting an invitation to be a guest on American Jay Leno’s Tonight Show and to get an invitation to stay with the first family of the White House.

Given he has received several hundred invitations from Americans offering him a place to stay, it seems only a matter of time before Stoppelenburg pops in to see Jay and stay with the American President and family. After all, the White House surely has the room for a traveller looking for a bed for the night.

Written by Rodney Chester