Loving to travel around the world, we both started working for Belgian Foreign Affairs back in 1991. That was the beginning of three decades of discovering foreign countries and cultures.
Our travels took us to a few terrible places in dangerous countries and a few dangerous places in terrible countries. You can understand this pun if you know we called Zaire our home for several years, as we did Pakistan. Afghanistan was in our jurisdiction and we set down our suitcases in Lebanon with jurisdiction over Syria for 4 years … I kid you not!
But our jobs also took us to wonderful places like Moscow (we consider Moscow a country in its own rights), the Philippines and Hungary.
Being posted in a country for 3 or 4 years is, of course, a whole different ballgame from visiting that country on a weekend trip or a two week long, organised holiday. Living in a country gives you the time to really get to know the place and the neighboring countries and the habits of its people (good & bad). Although we live privileged lives as diplomats, this also gave us the opportunity to visit and see places where “common” travelers would never be allowed to go. But on the other hand prevented us from going places where an ordinary passport holder could freely travel.
It is unfortunate therefore that this travel blog only goes back a limited time. We only started writing down our experiences a few years ago, so there’s nothing here about our life and visits in Zaire/Congo. Nothing also about Moscow, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Cambodia, Thailand, the Maldives, Sri-Lanka, Malaysia…
We only picked up our pen in 2016, so this blog will span most of the time from back in those days until the present.
But despite all our exotic traveling we never neglected our own small Belgium. We will regularly post blogs also about interesting visits we made in Belgium.
We hope you enjoy, we also hope you will come back regularly and we promise to keep the posts coming.
