Take your pick – CouchSurfing, HelpX, WWOOFing. Different acronyms, same broad principle: a kind of barter network for the twenty-first century wanderer. Travellers exchange their labour, skills, or mere enthusiasm for food, lodging, and a taste of local life. No money changes hands – just goodwill, elbow grease, and a pinch of cultural curiosity.

CouchSurfing always sounded vaguely disreputable, conjuring images of scruffy backpackers slumped in smoky lounges. In reality, it’s more often a polite, Airbnb-lite experience. Mostly urban. Mostly brief. And nowadays, largely sanitised.

WWOOFers, meanwhile, tend to head for the hills – or at least for the nearest compost toilet. In return for shared meals and fresh air, they plough the permaculture furrow, dig ditches by moonlight, and discuss lunar planting cycles with soft-spoken eco-hosts and their dogs. Always dogs.

HelpX falls somewhere in between. It casts a wider net – no requirement to know your nitrogen from your phosphorous, or to ferment your own vegan kimchi. If you’re willing to paint a wall, prune a vine, or just not leave toothpaste streaks in the bathroom, you’ll probably do fine.

When I stumbled back home to France after one of my extended spells in Thailand, I started hosting. Sceptically, at first. But a year in, I had to admit – it worked. Mostly.

There were hiccups. One Brit arrived oozing menace, told us he kept a gun in his lorry cab, and allegedly pulled a knife on his previous host over dinner. His stay here ended with Kathryn, a wonderful Yorkshire lass who returned for multiple stays, being thrown against a wall. After he left, he rang late at night to threaten us all. The usual pleasantries.

Then came John – a wide-eyed Englishman with a time perception problem. You could send him to weed a remote patch of garden and find him an hour later in the same spot, mid-stare, seemingly locked in existential awe at two coupling gendarme beetles. Then cannabis plant began popping up instead of courgettes. Nina, our 90 kilo English Mastiff – who would sample anything remotely edible amongst the veg – ambled erratically poolside early evening, and fell in. It was a full moon, and she apparently discovered her inner lupus and began howling at the moon. John wrote later, asking if he could return. We declined.

Another helper, a sweet but baffled French girl, was asked to turn over a flower bed. Half an hour later she returned, garden fork in hand, looking forlorn. “It doesn’t work,” she said. She hadn’t realised you needed to use your foot to push the fork into the earth. To her credit, she later became an expert at adorning the sunloungers.

But there were gems. Retired Canadians who could tile a roof without complaint. Hungarians who cooked like angels and fixed broken water pumps. Germans who repointed walls with frightening efficiency. A couple of Irish lads who drank most of the pastis but rewired the entire barn. An entire New Zealand farming family who had taken a year off to tour Europe in a camper van, and stripped the brambles from steep slopes with hand-held scythes at speeds a Stihl brush cutter would struggle to match. And countless others, from early-twenties backpackers to seasoned nomads in their sixties, who left behind more laughter than mess.

At the dinner table, stories were swapped about hosts. There was the swinger couple in the Dordogne, who preferred jacuzzi-based bonding to house renovation. The Dutch château owner who believed aliens lived at the Earth’s core and fed his helpers little more than lukewarm lentil soup. One HelpXer escaped on foot to the nearest village, with the host following in his car, accusing the poor guy of “ingratitude” through the open window.

Of course, the system has its flaws. A minority of hosts exploit cheap labour; a minority of travellers exploit generous hosts. There are the overstayers, the under-washers, and the pathologically oblivious. But the same could be said of any extended family.

What struck me most, though, was the sheer global sprawl of it all. There were host listings in Moldova, Fiji, El Salvador, even Jordan (spelled with an extra “n” on the site last I checked). South-East Asia was catching on too – Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, even parts of China.

Would I recommend it? Without hesitation. If you’ve got a spare room, some half-finished projects, and an appetite for strangeness – yes. If you’re twenty and restless, and you don’t mind weeding courgettes in exchange for clean sheets and dinner – absolutely.

It’s not Shangri-La. But it’s real. Human. Messy. And occasionally magnificent.