My name is Ramon Stoppelenburg and I am a writer, adventurer, creative entrepreneur, and one of the earliest digital pioneers of the Netherlands. My life has always been guided by a mix of curiosity, nerve, an instinct for going off-script, and an unshakable belief that stories, and the people behind them, matter.
A word of warning: what follows may feel like an overwhelming catalog of ventures and adventures. This isn’t meant to impress. Rather, it’s an honest documentation of a life deliberately lived across borders, industries, and possibilities. I have never believed in picking just one lane, and if that feels like too much, well, that’s exactly how I have always preferred it.
Born in the Netherlands but raised partly in Indonesia, I spent my early childhood immersed in the cultures and contrasts of Southeast Asia. I graduated from kindergarten in Jakarta, laying down roots that, decades later, would draw me back to this region, not as a child, but as a creative force building a life between continents.
My passion for publishing began early. As a teenager, I hijacked my high school newspaper and transformed it from a dull photocopied bulletin into a provocative platform, followed by starting the student magazine Smoel during my years in Journalism School, with essays, interviews, and jokes the university didn’t always appreciate. In the early 2000s, I moonlighted as DJ Mones, spinning records at wild student parties and weddings across the country.
At 21, I became one of the very first Dutch bloggers, publishing long before the word had even entered mainstream vocabulary. What began as an online diary evolved into something far bigger. At 24, I dropped a global bomb by launching Letmestayforaday.com, an experimental project that allowed me to travel the world without spending money on accommodation.
Instead, I invited strangers to host me for a night, and in return, I told their stories in daily travel reports. What started as a personal adventure quickly went viral, before the big social media giants even existed, generating thousands of invitations and international media attention and ultimately the nickname that would follow me for years: “The Godfather of Couchsurfing.” Over three years, I crossed five continents, stayed with more than 900 hosts, and became one of the internet’s first truly global personalities. My website was later recognized by UNESCO as a piece of early internet heritage.
Back home in the Netherlands, I never lost my drive to tell stories. In 2006, while managing a bar in my hometown of Zwolle, I hosted the travel show Weg Met BNN (Gone With BNN) on Dutch public broadcaster NPO Radio 1, combining humor, reporting, and a sharp sense of curiosity to bring faraway places to a national audience. This love for radio would resurface years later in Cambodia, where I hosted The Rock Show and Saturday Night Live Cambodia on Radio One Cambodia from 2015 to 2017, carving out a niche as one of the few foreign voices on local airwaves.
In 2008 I also edited and published the anthology Fasten Your Seatbelt, spotlighting then-unknown talents like Arjen Lubach and Murat Isik, both of whom went on to become literary fixtures in the Netherlands.
Since 2010, Cambodia has been the creative and spiritual home base for much of my work. I took over and eventually ran three locations of the most beloved art house movie theaters in Phnom Penh, introduced dinner box delivery service Foodoo, launched a vegan cheese brand with The Nutcracker, and created and distributed weekly English-language event guides. As Lord Penh, I mc’ed various standup comedy shows with international headliners.
When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill, I turned inward, and back to publishing. In Phnom Penh I founded The Quiet Reader, an online literary magazine that provided writers around the world a space for quiet, thoughtful fiction at a time when noise was everywhere. That instinct, to create space for others, to keep the conversation going, even in silence, is at the core of who I am.
My energy has also extended far beyond borders. In 2018, when earthquakes hit Lombok, Indonesia, I mobilized resources and coordinated logistics on the ground, distributing over €70,000 in international aid with the help of volunteers and local officials, ultimately coordinating with help from the Indonesian Army. It wasn’t charity; it was responsibility, the kind that quietly steps up and gets things done when the world looks the other way.
My return to Phnom Penh in early 2025, after pandemic-era years in Tbilisi, Casablanca, and Lisbon, felt less like a relocation and more like a return to form.
Having lived in over a dozen countries and dined in thousands of restaurants across five continents, and consulted hospitality businesses from Cambodia to Sri Lanka, from Tanzania to Portugal, I gained experiences that shaped not only my palate, but also my professional focus.
As a writer, I continue to publish essays, columns and features for outlets like de Volkskrant, NRC, Le Monde, National Geographic Traveler, and El País, but my travel stories have also graced the pages of Columbus Magazine, Arts & Auto, Malaysian Airlines’ Going Places, Air Finland’s My Way, The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, and the legendary WorldHum. My Dutch memoir Letmestayforaday was released in 2004. As a translator, I have worked on novels, documentaries, screenplays, and journalistic content for clients ranging from Netflix to international publishing houses, always with a meticulous ear for voice, tone, and rhythm.
My latest upcoming non-fiction project, Eat Out, Lose Fat, is a culmination of decades of curiosity about how people eat, live, and connect across cultures. Drawing on my background as both a discerning diner and a hospitality consultant, the book offers a practical, evidence-based guide to navigating restaurants without compromising health goals, a sincere manifesto for dining with awareness rather than anxiety.
I also consult on communication, digital presence and storytelling, helping creatives, NGOs and ethical businesses refine their message and reach real audiences.
In my spare time, I still organize treks up Mount Kilimanjaro, a mountain I’ve summited several times since 2008. And between projects, I can often be found house-sitting across Europe, offering peace of mind while reading and writing from quiet corners of the continent.
At heart, I am still doing what I started doing at 21: documenting the world, listening carefully, writing clearly, and refusing to live by someone else’s script. Whether on air, on paper, or halfway up a mountain, my work remains a testament to presence, possibility, and the quiet radicalism of simply showing up.
From teenage newsroom mutinies to global trust experiments, from radio to literary lifelines, from Jakarta to Phnom Penh, my life has been one long publishing project. Always curious. Always human. Always writing the next page.
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 year 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”
– globetrotter and travel writer Mike Pugh, Worldhum.com
“It’s the flying Dutchman!”
– The Citizen, South Africa
“One guy from Chicago said he could stay as long as his wife didn’t object. And if she did, hell, he’d pay for a hotel.”
– Wired.com, USA
“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 a entrepreneur”
– The Courier Mail, Australia