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.

  • You Don’t Need a Plan to Travel

    There is a strange obsession in modern travel. Spreadsheets.Pinned maps.“48 Hours In…” itineraries.Color-coded Google Docs titled Masterplan – Version 7 Final FINAL. And yet, some of the most transformative journeys begin with a sentence so simple it feels irresponsible: “I’ll just go.” This is not anti-preparation. It is anti-overcontrol. Because sometimes, the most Quixotic way…

  • Hachikō — The Dog Who Taught a City How to Wait

    Tokyo moves fast — trains every few minutes, crowds flowing like tides, screens flashing with news from a planet that never pauses.And yet, right outside Shibuya Station, Japan’s busiest crossing, stands a monument to waiting. Not efficiency.Not technology.Not progress. Waiting. The bronze dog at the Hachikō exit is one of the most quietly powerful places…

  • The Singapore Girl — Memory Worn as a Uniform

    QuixoticGuide Addendum No airline symbol has survived the decades quite like this one: Singapore Airlines created a figure that is neither mascot nor stereotype, but ritual — the Singapore Girl. She is not famous because she smiles.She is famous because she repeats. A Brand Built on ContinuitySince the 1970s the sarong kebaya has barely changed.In…

  • The Acceleration of the Century

    When progress stopped being generational and became personal For most of human history, innovation moved slower than memory. A farmer born in 1200 would die in a world recognizable to his grandparents. Roads were the same roads. Ships were the same ships. War, trade, and distance obeyed identical physics for centuries. Change existed — but…

  • 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…

  • 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…

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
ed-Deir (“The Monastery”) in Petra, Jordan

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