Wild Stories

Before Costa Rica, before the jungle, before the army ants, muddy roads, mystery leaks, nature moving in my house and the emotional support group I seem to need for owning a car, there was Northern Ireland.

I was twenty when I first left Belgium, young enough to believe that courage mostly meant saying yes before thinking too much, and old enough to convince my parents that studying abroad was a very responsible academic decision. In reality, it quietly became the beginning of a lifelong addiction to unknown wild places.

Northern Ireland was where the first crack opened in my well-organised life. Somewhere between restless skies, windswept coastlines, muddy shoes and hair that had fully surrendered to the weather, I felt the strange pull of being away from home and yet, somehow, closer to myself.

That pull did not disappear. It followed me across oceans, through animal rescue, burnout, recovery, unexpected detours and all the different versions of myself I had to meet along the way.

One place that truly got under my skin was Australia, with its red earth, endless skies, wild heat and the deep silence of the outback. I went back twice, drawn to that raw, open landscape of dust, distance and horizons that seemed to go on forever.

Life led me  to the green, dripping chaos of Costa Rica, where silence is rare, nature does not stay politely in the background, and the jungle climbs through windows, marches through drawers, drops fruit on the roof and occasionally leaves muddy paw prints under the house.

Wild Stories is a collection of short travel tales from the road, the forest, the sea and the wonderfully impractical corners of following a dream. They are  little windows into my books: short stories about wrong decisions, strange animals, near disasters and moments that made me laugh, panic, wonder, curse softly or realise that the best stories rarely arrive when everything goes according to plan.