Mark Gielen

Mark Gielen, born in 1953, came into the world on April 3 under the sign of Aries, somewhere between Jacques Brel and Hugo Claus, between Casanova and Muddy Waters. He spent the first five years of his life in his hometown of Turnhout, in the Belgian Campine region.

As his father was a soldier and his mother a homemaker, the family moved to Soest, Westphalia, in Germany during the Expo year of 1958. At the time, West Germany was still very much a post-war occupied zone. Every day, he walked through fields and farmland to his primary school. He attended secondary school at the boarding schools of Rösrath and Bensberg Castle, just a few kilometres from the carnival city of Cologne. There, he studied a broad range of subjects, including mathematics, science, Latin, and briefly, Greek.

In 1970, he returned to Belgium. He first studied Law and Philosophy at UFSIA in Antwerp before switching a year later to Germanic Philology at Ghent State University, where he graduated in 1976 with a modest thesis on the plays of Büchner and Weiss. Alongside these studies, he also pursued Moral Sciences at the same university, graduating in 1979 with a stronger thesis on Marx.

Travel has always been one of his greatest passions. Together with his parents, he explored the Alpine countries, Italy, and Yugoslavia before setting off on his first solo journey to Scotland. In 1974, he hitchhiked across the Algerian Sahara with his friend Jan for seven weeks. Four years later, he crossed the world's largest desert once again in the Renault 4 belonging to his then-wife, Anne. These journeys marked the beginning of a lifelong exploration of every continent.

After completing his civilian service, celebrating the birth of his daughter Sara, and spending several years teaching and working as an educator in Ghent's public school system, he made a radical career change. While unemployed, he travelled to Mexico for five weeks in 1986, where Belgium's legendary Red Devils were competing in the FIFA World Cup. He returned with 23 travel reports and finally made his decision: from that moment on, he became a freelance journalist.

Initially, he wrote about educational topics, reviewed books, retraced the footsteps of long-deceased writers, and gradually devoted more time to travel writing. Soon he also began working for Belgian public radio (including Het Vermoeden, Het Vrije Westen, and De Eeuw van Gerard Walschap) and television (Vlaanderen Vakantieland).

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, his relationship with his second wife, Regine, blossomed and eventually came to an end. Alongside articles on literature, the arts, and philosophy, travel projects increasingly became the focus of his professional life. He evolved into a travel journalist, amateur ornithologist, and photographer of the world.

His travel features have appeared in many of Belgium's leading newspapers and magazines, including De Morgen, De Standaard Magazine, De Tijd, Knack, Weekend Knack, Feeling, Intermediair, Grande, and the Dutch edition of National Geographic Traveler. He has also authored several smaller tourism publications for organisations such as Artis and KBC.

The world is vast, and there are still blank spots on the map, but his stories have taken readers across every continent. From Belgium to Madagascar, from the Philippines to Peru, from Antarctica to the Marquesas Islands. Spain and Africa remain his enduring favourites, while, as the years have passed and the world has somehow grown smaller, an increasing number of European destinations have captured his attention.

Ultimately, he embarked on what seemed an almost impossible undertaking: writing a travel essay about his beloved Spain, a country too vast to ever fully conquer which eventually grew into a book comprising 182 chapters.

For the past decade, he has lived with Karina, the last great companion of his life, in a green oasis in Lievegem, interrupted only by inspiring journeys together to the farthest corners of the world.

Telle est sa quête.