The Dutch Ramon Stoppelenburg (1976) started blogging from his student loft somewhere in 1998. But he became world famous for being the first ever person to travel the world for free, totally relying on the hospitality of strangers from all over the world, who invited him over through his website www.letmestayforaday.com. Over 3,577 people from 72 countries invited him over and from 2001 to 2003 he travelled through 18 countries in total, varying from Norway to South Africa and from Australia to Canada. In return for the offered hospitality he received, he wrote extensive daily reports about his whereabouts, his hosts, their life and the culture of the country he was visiting. His website had once processed over 1,2 million visits in one month. The British Sunday Times even called him the Internet Personality of the Year 2001.
The media that carried them in the sky from the beginning, great to launch such a web project when all the other dot coms were falling down, made it pretty hard to continue this kind of living after two years. He became too famous and people where suddenly treating him as a special person instead of a young Dutch guy with a crazy idea. In June 2003 he even declined an invitation to be a guest on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show in the USA – fearing it would overload his website and have people invite him over ‘only because he was on television’.
In 2004 he published a book revealing his secrets: Letmestayforaday: How To Travel The World For Free, which was published in Dutch in The Netherlands and Belgium and sold over 10,000 copies since then. Foreign rights are available.
This unforgettable travel experience made him realise that he could never ever survive a spot in an office with a 9 to 5 job. Instead he became an active independent freelancer, covering his experiences in creative out-of-the-box marketing, photography, travel writing. He’s also become organiser of www.ExpeditionKilimanjaro.com and is developing a 21-days Cooking Trip through Europe to be sold and marketed online. Currently he is residing from Amsterdam, but he’ll be emigrating to the Far East in the end of 2010, to become a Location Independent Professional.
Also see:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Stoppelenburg (wikipedia)
- http://www.ramonstoppelenburg.com/ (English blog)
- http://www.letmestayforaday.com (travel site, the archives)
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj5dTonMHvs (Australian TV report)
