Travel Stories

Last month I joined Jeffrey Van Daele to guide a STARLING trip into South Africa, to the infamous Zimanga private game reserve. Those last three words mean that the land is privately owned, and that ecotourism (not hunting) is the purpose of the reserve. Tucked away in the heart …

How often does someone do anything for you, that you could not do for them? Apart from cooking a nice exotic meal, that is. Not that often I reckon, and it's usually your parents that do it. So when our friends Willem & Eva invited a bunch of friends and their kids to Las …

Ten years ago, Pieter-Jan D’Hondt and myself grew bored of taking pictures we had seen taken by others. We saw people -often retired people with more time on their hands- spend weeks outside, coming up with pictures we could only dream of taking ourselves. Simply because we did …

In July I was given the opportunity to guide a Starling trip aimed at the amazing wildlife Brazil has to offer. We would focus on the biggest wetland in the world, the Pantanal, after a visit to some of the higher upstream regions that flow down into the Pantanal. The Pantanal …

The past two weeks, Eli and I were able to combine business with pleasure, and got to visit Hawaii. NASA Satellite image of the Hawaiian archipelago. You can instantly see big differences in local geography (dry versus wet parts of the islands) and the huge volcano Mauna Loa on …

This is the trip report of the 2023 STARLING India trip I guided over the last 2 weeks. As you can see, this trip was mainly aimed towards seeing and identifying as much plant species as possible: Now, where to begin... there is so much to tell about India's wildlife. First of …