What do you get when you send a daydreaming Dutch seventeen-year-old on an exchange program to the other side of the world? Results may vary, but fast forward a decade or two and your most probable outcome would be a moderately successful nomadic freelancer that suffers from the blissful curse of wanderlust.

You could say I’m somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades who found his purpose in life by writing about his travels. After working in hospitality and having a vaguely successful attempt at a formal education for most of my young adult years, I decided I needed to live life on my own terms, income be damned. What other choice did I have than to walk the path of an aspiring travel writer? A low chance at a stable income, a social life that can be called nebulous at best, and the joy of an ever-so-gentle but firm decline towards either obsession or hermitry. What’s not to love?

All jokes aside, I love to write as a way to entertain and inform. There is beauty to be discovered in this world; inspiring vistas and profound new experiences to behold that no algorithm or trend-dependent feed could ever hope to spoil. I’m a firm believer in the validity of long-form written content: written by humans, for humans. No matter how hard the overflow of information we call social media might work to demystify and commercialise our experiences, I believe that there will always be a demand for emotion, for that touch of romance to entice us to look beyond our collective horizons.

My main focus lies in promoting remote or unusual places, or in finding new things to write about in well-known destinations. In my opinion, there’s no better way to discover a remote region than to turn off your smartphone, strap on a backpack and a pair of hiking boots and just hike, scramble, and camp your way across it for a number of days. I follow the same principle when travelling anywhere, really; I tend to avoid luxury resorts, mass tourism, and all-in-one travel packages to allow myself a level of immersion that I find invaluable for understanding the people and places I visit.

But what do I know? I’m just a daydreaming thirty-something-year-old who found himself chasing an old dream of becoming a full-time travel writer. Whether it’s foolishness or a worthy goal, only time will tell. In the meantime, I’ll try to inspire, entertain, and inform to the best of my abilities.

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind, wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes to make them possible.

(T. E. Lawrence)