A bare-chested 70-year-old man burst into our room, shouting something in Spanish and waving his arms. It was 4am. My boyfriend and I had been asleep: it was our first night couchsurfing in a stranger’s house. His voice boomed around the dark room for a minute and then he slammed the door shut and stormed down the hallway. I turned to my partner in bed, we looked at each other, and having no idea what else to do, we decided to roll over and try to feign sleep. Then the chainsaws started…
I’d been couchsurfing for a year at this point, and this was without a doubt the weirdest experience so far. We’d arrived late the night before at this small farmland in the backwaters of rural Uruguay. Our host Pedro, who we soon dubbed Crazy Pedro, had picked us up from the bus station on his clapped-out moped around 7pm. He seemed nice and quite smartly-dressed, although you couldn’t help but notice he didn’t have any shoes on. ‘Fine’ we figured, we’d both been living in flip flops for the past year so who’s to judge? Then we arrived at his ‘house’. I use inverted commas intentionally.
On the couchsurfing website he’d described it as a large farmhouse with three double rooms, a beautiful farm of friendly animals and a private beach. It sounded dreamy and, on honest reflection, a bit too good to be true. As we arrived to what can only be described as Dorothy’s Kansas crib after the tornado, Crazy Pedro explained to us that this was his grandfather’s house – which until yesterday, had been abandoned for 35 years. This he said with a gleeful and slightly manic smile. Super, we thought. It got more disappointing and all the more strange inside: derelict, broken furniture; a dank bathroom with no running water (bucket and hose outside for manual toilet flushing); and the small red handprints of a child sliding down the walls (they weren’t blood apparently – he was a school teacher and had invited one of his kids to paint the walls… reassuring? Definitely not.) We spent the night eating BBQ-ed sausages indoors – Crazy Pedro decided it was fine to light a fire in the middle of his kitchen floor – and watching our host dance around to acid house music until the early hours of the morning. This all appeared quite eccentric and a little bit loopy, but he didn’t seem dangerous and so we figured it was fine. That was until we heard chainsaws outside our bedroom window at 4.10am.
