Author: Maarten Van Den Driessche

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

If there is one dish that tells the story of Iraq better than any history book or news headline, it is Masgouf. Often called Iraq’s national dish, Masgouf is far more than grilled fish. It is a tradition rooted in the land, shaped by the great rivers, and preserved through centuries of shared meals and…

Fernando Pessoa, through the weary consciousness of Bernardo Soares in The Book of Disquiet, casts a long shadow over the idea of travel. He distrusts movement, questions distance, and insists that crossing borders rarely changes the self. Wherever we go, he suggests, we bring the same interior weather with us. The same anxieties. The same…

Khiva doesn’t feel like a city you visit. It feels like a city you enter, as if you’ve stepped through a seam in time and found yourself inside a perfectly preserved idea of the Silk Road. Tucked away in western Uzbekistan, near the edge of the Karakum Desert, Khiva is small, quiet, and utterly unreal.…

— A QuixoticGuide reflection There are two very different ways to move through the world: alone, or in the company of friends. Neither is superior. Both reveal different layers of a place — and of yourself. Travelling alone is the most honest form of movement I know. There is no audience, no compromise, no narrative…

Some cities feel old. Samarkand feels eternal. Set along the ancient Silk Road in present-day Uzbekistan, Samarkand has been a crossroads of traders, scholars, conquerors, and dreamers for more than two millennia. Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, and Timurids all left their mark here — and somehow, instead of chaos, what remains is harmony in glazed…