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 Coincidence Atlas
An atlas is supposed to explain the world.Borders, scales, legends. Certainty. The Coincidence Atlas does the opposite. It maps what cannot be planned. This atlas is not organized by country or capital, but by moments of alignment: places entered by accident, meetings that should not statistically exist, cities that appeared briefly and then rearranged your…
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On Dates, Dust, and What a Country Chooses to Celebrate
Travel teaches you quickly that dates are never neutral. We mark them on calendars, book flights around them, and photograph their parades and fireworks as if they were natural phenomena — like monsoons or cherry blossom season. But public holidays are not weather. They are decisions. They are curated memories, pinned down and repeated until…
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In Search of the Perfect Fry
A QuixoticGuide food travel essay There are foods you eat, and foods you travel for. French fries—frites, if you know where you are—belong firmly to the second category. I’ve eaten them on plastic forks beside canals, from paper cones stained translucent with beef fat, and late at night when the city has stopped pretending it’s…
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A World by Alphabet: What the First Letter of a Country’s Name Reveals
At first glance, the alphabet seems neutral — a simple filing system, a way to impose order on the world. But when you line up all 193 UN-recognized countries and sort them by their first letter, surprising patterns emerge. Some letters are crowded crossroads of history and geography, while others are nearly empty. This is…
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Najaf and Kufa: travelling in the footsteps of Imam Ali
In Iraq, there are cities you visit — and cities you enter with reverence. Najaf and Kufa belong firmly to the latter. Arriving here is not just a journey through space, but through time, faith, and moral legacy. At the heart of it all stands one figure: Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib. Najaf: a city…
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Winter in the Zagros: Traveling Through Snowy Northern Iraq
Snow in northern Iraq does not feel unreal. It feels earned. As the land rises toward the Zagros Mountains, Iraq changes character. The air sharpens, roads climb, and winter announces itself without apology. In the Kurdistan Region—around Duhok, Erbil, and Sulaymaniyah—snow is not a surprise but a season, shaping travel, daily life, and the rhythm…
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