Before Costa Rica, before the jungle, before the army ants, the muddy roads, the mystery leaks, the questionable mechanics and the ongoing emotional support group I seem to need for owning a car, there was Northern Ireland. With its restless skies, windswept coastlines and weather that could make even the most carefully brushed hair surrender within minutes it was the place where it all started.

I was twenty when I first left Belgium, young enough to believe that courage was mostly a matter of saying ‘yes’ before thinking too much, and old enough to convince my parents that studying abroad was a very responsible academic decision rather than, as it quietly turned out to be, the beginning of a lifelong addiction to unknown wild places.

Northern Ireland was where something opened in me, although not in a dramatic film-scene kind of way, with music rising in the background and my future suddenly unfolding in golden light. In reality, there was probably rain on my glasses, mud on my shoes and my hair doing something deeply unfortunate in the wind.

Still, somewhere between the grey skies, the wild coastlines, the strangers who became friends and the landscapes that looked as if they had been invented by poets, I began to understand that life could be bigger, stranger and far more surprising than the one I had known.

It was the first place where I felt the peculiar pull of being away from home and yet, somehow, closer to myself.

That pull did not disappear when I returned to Belgium, because once wanderlust has found a small crack in your well-organised life, it tends to keep pushing at it until the whole sensible structure starts to wobble.

Over the years, that same restless curiosity followed me across oceans, through work, animal rescue, burnout, recovery, unexpected detours and all the different versions of myself I had to meet along the way. Again and again, it seemed to pull me towards wild places rather than comfortable ones.

One of the places that truly got under my skin was Australia.

There was something about the vastness of it that stayed with me long after I had left: the red earth, the endless skies, the strange silence of the outback and that feeling of standing somewhere so wide, ancient and indifferent that your own worries suddenly became a little less loud. It got to me in a way I could never quite explain.

I went back twice, drawn to that raw, open landscape, to a place of dust, distance and horizons that seemed to go on forever.

But wanderlust, as I have learned, has a rather strange sense of humour. After being pulled towards dry earth, red dust and vast open spaces, I somehow ended up in the complete opposite world, not in the Australian outback, but under the green, dripping trees of Costa Rica, in a jungle where silence is rare and nature does not politely stay in the background, but climbs through windows, marches through drawers, drops fruit on the roof and occasionally leaves muddy paw prints under the house.

Back then, I did not know that one day I would live under the trees in Costa Rica, write books about the wild beauty of it all, guide people through rivers, organise animal welfare projects, and consider a peaceful morning a small miracle if nobody had stolen my bananas, blocked my road, or moved into my underwear drawer.

At the beginning, I was simply a Belgian girl in Northern Ireland, trying to find out how the world worked outside the safe little borders of home, not yet realising that the world would answer mostly through small disasters, awkward moments, strange decisions and uncomfortable situations that would later turn out to be perfect material for a book.

That is what this Wild Stories category is about: short glimpses from the road, the forest, the past and the wonderfully impractical corners of following a dream, written not as full chapters from my books but as little windows into the life behind them.

Think of them as travel journal entries, snapshots of moments that made me laugh, panic, wonder, curse softly, or realise that the best stories rarely arrive when everything goes according to plan. They happen when you say yes to the adventure, when you get on a rusty boat, when the weather turns, when the red dust calls, when the jungle answers back and when life looks nothing like the brochure, but somehow becomes far more interesting.

So let’s begin where my wanderlust quietly started making plans for me.

Northern Ireland, and a boat to Rathlin Island that may or may not have taught me that adventure does not always whisper politely from the shore. Ssometimes it crashes over the bow and makes you grin like an idiot.