Quixoticguide
Hi, I’m Maarten Van Den Driessche, a curious human, aviation enthusiast, vexillophile, world traveler, and food lover with over 14,000 days of life experience.
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The Country That Runs on Timetables
100 Years of NMBS — Belgium’s Quiet Machine of Movement There is a peculiar Belgian habit:we measure distance not in kilometers, but in minutes. “Gent is 36 minutes.”“Antwerp is one delay away.”“Brussels is… complicated.” For a century now, that mental geography has been powered by one institution: the NMBS / SNCB — the National Railway…
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One Day in Singapore — a perfectly engineered 24-hour adventure
Singapore works beautifully for a short visit: compact, hyper-efficient, safe at nighOne Day in Singapore — The City That Works There are cities you visit, and cities you understand only after slowing down. Singapore punishes ambition.Not because there is nothing to do — but because everything functions.Efficiency removes the drama tourists unconsciously search for. So…
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The World Turns Red: A Quixotic Journey into Chinese New Year
Every year — usually somewhere between late January and mid-February — almost a quarter of humanity presses pause at the same time. Airports fill. Trains overflow. Cities empty. Villages glow. Not for war, not for elections, not even for sport —but for dinner. Chinese New Year, more accurately the Spring Festival, is the largest annual…
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Constanța — Where Europe Hesitates at the Black Sea
There are cities that welcome you loudly — and cities that barely notice you’ve arrived.Constanța belongs to the second category. You don’t enter it so much as drift into it. The train from Bucharest slows, apartment blocks appear, and then suddenly the air changes. Not salty in a Mediterranean way. Softer. The Black Sea doesn’t…
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Where Should You Celebrate Carnival? (A Traveller’s Map of Masks, Madness, and Meaning)
Every February, Europe briefly forgets how to behave. Cities that spend the rest of the year enforcing order suddenly legalize chaos. Bankers dress as pirates. Grandmothers throw oranges at strangers. Entire towns wake before dawn to the sound of drums older than the nation-states they now belong to. Carnival is not one festival — it…
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Yellowstone and the Invention of Nature Worth Saving
On March 1, 1872, something quietly radical happened in the United States. With a signature, President Ulysses S. Grant turned a vast, wild, and geothermally bizarre landscape into Yellowstone National Park — the first national park not just in America, but anywhere in the world. No monument, no private hunting ground, no royal reserve. Instead:…
Where curiosity leads
Travel isn’t about collecting countries, but about understanding them.
These are places that shaped how I see the world — not just destinations, but contexts, encounters, and stories waiting to unfold
Travel Beyond Tourism
- Discover Places
- Understand Cultures
- Travel Better
- Meet the World
- Learn the Context
My Travel guides
- Not instructions, but orientation.
- These guides explain how places work — so you don’t just visit, you arrive.
“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” –
Ibn Battuta
Maghrebi traveller