In 2001, I asked strangers on the internet to let me sleep on their couch. In exchange, I’d write about them. No money changed hands. No algorithm matched us. Just a website, an open invitation, and enough nerve to see what happened.
What happened was three years across five continents, 900 hosts, and a level of access to ordinary life that no travel budget could have bought. UNESCO eventually called it digital heritage. At the time it was just the only way I could afford to keep going.
That project — Letmestayforaday.com — didn’t make me a travel writer. It made me someone who understood that the interesting story is almost never the destination. It’s the person who opens the door.
I’ve been writing from that position ever since. Essays and long-form features for de Volkskrant, NRC, Le Monde, National Geographic. Novels in Dutch. Translations for Netflix and book publishers. A literary magazine built during a pandemic. A Kilimanjaro expedition company. Three art house cinemas in Phnom Penh, where I’ve been based since 2010 and where I keep ending up no matter how many other cities I try.
This site is where none of that gets packaged neatly.
Ramon Stoppelenburg
Here I Go Again On My Own
Vanity Fair
“Cyber-Begging Bags Man a World Wide Bed”
— ABC News
“Hitching a World-Wide-Ride on Web”
— Wired.com
“Web personality of the year 2001: this year’s web eccentric is not some unfortunate and unwitting nutter, but a personable 24-year-old Dutch media student”
— The Sunday Times, United Kingdom
“He has become a mascot for living the impossible dream, laughing in the face of caution and conformity, embodying the spirit of reckless adventure that most people yearn for… when the geyser’s fixed and the kids are older and the mortgage is paid”
— The Dispatch, South Africa
“Ramon Stoppelenburg has become one of the first true internet celebrities”
— Evening Herald, Ireland
“Bloomin scroungers, all of em! Go get yourself a proper job and be miserable and parochial like the rest of us!”
— The Register.co.uk, UK
“These are classic travel stories from a modern time”
— Mike Pugh, Worldhum.com
“It’s the flying Dutchman!”
— The Citizen, South Africa
“Have website, will travel”
— Daily Mirror, UK
“The whole world knows our Ramon Stoppelenburg”
— Het Parool, Amsterdam
“Critics would call him a freeloader but fans call him an entrepreneur”
— The Courier Mail, Australia