Hello!
My name is Steven Ellery and I am from the little town of Howick in South Africa and I have a tremendous hunger for exploration and discovery.

Please read my full profile (especially about my space) to see if we’d be a good fit.

I am an environmentalist, a musician and an activist in my own right and I believe that travel and the multi-faceted learning experience that travel is, will empower me (and many others) to reach greater and newer heights. I try to bring as much joy to a space as I possibly can and I thoroughly appreciate interactions that are honest, kind, compassionate, empathetic and that have integrity.
I really hope that, through travel, I will be able to share in the joy of learning about other places, customs and cultures as well as share in the joy of teaching others about the place that I come from and the local customs and cultures of South Africa.
I have a huge appetite for adventure and I take every opportunity to learn and grow! I look forward to making meaningful connections and hopefully lasting friendships.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

I have not traveled extensively by myself and I would love to become a part of the global traveling network and I think Couchsurfing is an amazing platform for me to do that. I also feel that Couchsurfing really tries to provide the traveler and the host with an authentic and easy experience (this is obviously very dependent on the host and the traveler and the types of people they are) but everybody that I have spoken to who has surfed or hosts Couchsurfing in their houses have only had positive things to say about their experiences.

I am extremely interested in travelling and the concept of responsible travel. Responsible travel, as I understand it, is travel that tries (in the best way possible) to remain as environmentally aware and conscious as possible. Meaning flying less and taking local transport/hitching/walking as a means of moving around. Responsible travel is also encompasses the use of locally produced tourist attractions and services as opposed to corporate, generic tourist packages where everybody has the same experience as the last group. I think Couchsurfing really helps people who want to travel consciously and those who really want experience a place for what it is as well as for who is in it. I really appreciate the reciprocal nature of Couchsurfing and I resonate with the emphasis on personal interaction between the host and the traveler. We are so stuck in a world of screens and memes that we often forget the beauty of a simple conversation about somebodies else's day.

Interests

• music
• live music
• camping
• travel
• outdoors

Music, Movies, and Books

Music (I'm a musician myself - so have a weird mix of favourites and this is a seriously condensed list): Groundation, Alfa Mist, Bob Marley, Pink Floyd, Tatran, Rx Bandits, Fat Freddy's Drop, The Cat Empire, The Mars Volta, Submotion Orchestra, Thandiswa Mazwai, Freshlyground, 340ml, Karnivool, Yussef Kamaal, Tom Misch, Avashi Cohen, John Petrucci, Wordsuntame, Shackles and Bones.... this list is pretty inexhaustible.
Movies: Garden State, Star Wars Series, V for Vendetta, The Watchmen, Mud, Amelie, Marley, Woodstock The Documentary, Fantastic Mr Fox, Interstellar, Fight Club...
Books: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Joy, Illusions, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Astrix and Obelix, Calvin and Hobbes, Shantaram, The Poisonwood Bible, Bob Marley...

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

One of the most memorable experiences I've ever had was organising and playing in a national music tour of South Africa with one of the bands that I played in called Wordsuntame. We traveled over 5000 km (over 3000 miles) in 6 weeks and played a total of 42 shows in some of the most scenic and memorable venues. The music we played, the people we met and the memories that we created are some of the most beautiful I've ever experienced and I would do it all again in a heartbeat.

Teach, Learn, Share

I am all about the teaching and learning through sharing. I firmly believe that each person, no matter their age, can teach any other person, no matter their age, something through a social interaction. Our bodies and minds are all vessels in which we hold our memory and experience, which is completely and utterly different to anybody else's memory and experience.
One of my favourite experiences of learning unexpectedly was when I was trying to grow a vegetable garden on a communal plot of land where there were a few other people also growing their vegetables. I had just finished my degree in Botany and thought that I knew everything that there was about plants. One of the other vegetable gardeners in the area was an old man who, I later found out, had never been able to study due to the terrible Bantu education system that was forced upon him during apartheid in South Africa. Anyway, while I was digging up my garden and planting my seeds, he kept trying to gently give me advice about what I was doing. Being the hot-headed youngster I was then, I ignored most of his advice because I thought I knew better. Needless to say, he was able to feed himself for a whole 6 months with the produce that he reaped from his beautiful vegetable patch whereas I managed to produce a few tomatoes, a few beans and a lonely butternut squash in the 3 months of the growing season. Needless to say, I learnt an extremely valuable lesson from this experience, one that has stuck with me and infiltrated into many other facets of my life.

What I Can Share with Hosts

Joy!
Experiences and memories (and hopefully the lessons embedded within them).
Music.
Stories.
Gardening advice.
Delicious vegan and vegetarian cooking.
I'm really good at cleaning - I love cleaning a lot.
I'm really clean and neat and keep to my own space if necessary.
Information about southern Africa.
Knowledge - I know some stuff about the world and how it all works and stuff.
Interesting intellectual discussions about many things.

Countries I’ve Visited

Argentina, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Egypt, Israel, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Paraguay, Peru, Tanzania, United States, Viet Nam

Countries I’ve Lived In

South Africa