A travel site with a system behind it. Every place, route and read here was pulled from my own sources and intelligent systems — weighed, not scrolled. Wandering, with structure underneath.
Built on a decade of trips made queryable, thousands of curated highlights, and a personal knowledge system that remembers what's actually good.
"Structured wandering" isn't a contradiction. Structure is what frees you to wander — a system that already knows the good places, the honest sources and what you actually liked means you spend your attention on the trip, not on the search.
The same architecture behind everything I build: raw sources → cleaned and connected → published. Only the data is travel.
Trusted writers, my own trip history, highlighted reading — chosen deliberately, not aggregated blindly.
Places, routes and notes turned into structured, connected data a system can reason over.
The system remembers what actually landed — so recommendations reflect judgement, not popularity.
Curated trips, places and reads — the output of the system, not a content mill.
Curation is only as good as what you let in. These are the inputs the system draws on — chosen deliberately, weighed for taste, and structured so recommendations reflect judgement instead of whatever's trending.
A short list of travel writers and thinkers I actually read — not an aggregator's firehose.
A decade of trips made queryable: where I went, what worked, what I'd do again.
Thousands of saved highlights from books and articles, distilled to what shapes how I travel.
Spots visited and judged in person — the honest reason a place earns a mention.
Recommendations from a handful of people whose taste I'd stake a trip on.
Everything above, connected — so a good source compounds instead of scrolling past.
Every source here was chosen. That's the difference between curation and a feed.
Starting deliberately small. Each lane is fed by the same system and grows only when there's something genuinely worth adding.
Routes and itineraries that actually worked — deliberate, not exhaustive.
Spots worth the detour, with the honest reason why.
The books and writers that shape how I travel and see places.
The few things actually carried and used. Where a link earns a commission, it's flagged.
Nothing here is bought placement. Taste over algorithm — the whole point is that a person chose it.
Essays on deliberate travel and the system behind it. Published from markdown, like everything else here.
I'm Jaco van der Laan — a data architect who builds knowledge systems. This is what happens when I point that machinery at travel: not a bigger feed, a better-structured one. It's the personal, on-the-road sibling of my thesis, Structure Beats Magic.