Author: Maarten Van Den Driessche

At first hearing, Austria and Australia feel almost like twins — separated by just a few letters, easily confused in casual conversation, and often mixed up by schoolchildren, travellers, and even seasoned newsreaders. Yet beyond their similar names, they could hardly be more different. One sits quietly in the heart of Europe, wrapped in Alpine…

Most people arrive in China through its superstars — Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu. But if you move eastward, past the familiar skylines and high-speed rails, the Shandong Peninsula offers something quieter, saltier, and more atmospheric. This is China facing the Yellow Sea: part maritime province, part agricultural heartland, part industrial frontier. Qingdao: The German Memory…

The United Nations sits in Manhattan like a promise carved into concrete: a place where the world gathers, argues, negotiates, and, occasionally, agrees. Yet every time I walk along the East River, past that slim slab of international idealism, I feel the same quiet tension. For all its symbolism, the UN is anchored to one…

If you’ve ever been confused by the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, you’re not alone. Two neighboring countries, almost the same name, even capitals facing each other across a river—it feels like history played a prank. But there’s a good reason both countries kept the name Congo, and it has far deeper roots than modern…

Some of the most meaningful journeys don’t begin with a plan, an itinerary, or even curiosity. They begin with restlessness — the quiet kind. The kind that doesn’t demand escape, only motion. We rarely talk about that version of travel. The Pressure to Justify Motion Modern travel is obsessed with explanation.Why this place?Why now?What’s the…

Maarten’s Note I’ve crossed many borders where flags were treated as unquestionable facts—stitched onto uniforms, printed on documents, fixed above checkpoints. Traveling long enough teaches you something else: identity is rarely that stable. It shifts, overlaps, and sometimes contradicts itself. When I first encountered Marc Napier’s net.flag, it felt less like digital art and more…

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…

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…