The Complete Travel Guide through expat eyes

• Author / Photos: Angela Dansby
• Publisher: Borgerhoff Lamberigts
• Publishing year: 2026
• Pages: 224
• Cover design: Mary Mamian
• ISBN: 978-9493487628

https://www.borgerhoff-lamberigts.be/shop/boeken/best-of-belgium

Review:

Belgium’s finest

Angela Dansby came to live in Belgium a decade ago, as an expat for ‘only a year’. But that one year turned into a love affair with this little country and with the love of her life, Rob Vanoudenhoven (artist, tv icon). During the Covid-pandemic, she started a tourism column (she wrote for BBC, the Toronto Star, Brussels Times Magazine…) and started wandering and walking the cities and many (touristic) sites in Belgium.

Out of this came the book ‘Best of Belgium’ which is an ideal pocket-sized travel guide for us Belgians, who want to get to know our country even better, and for the many people that want to come visit (or those that need convincing to come visit) our little country. Because Belgium’s full of (Unesco-) heritage, history, amazing food (a lot of restaurants, among them quite a lot with Michelin stars or Gault & Millau ratings), culture and wonderful scenery. (These are not only my words but also those of the many tourists but most importantly, these of Angela Dansby herself).

She introduces this guide with a little bit of information on how our country is divided and then she immediately jumps into the action, so to speak. Brussels, our capital, is the first place she visits (it’s also where Angela herself is based). From then on she first visits the Flemish part of our country (the northern Dutch speaking part), goes by province and then city by city. Next is Wallonia (the southern French speaking part, and a small German speaking community as well), also per province and then city by city.

The guide is full of information and beautiful pictures, Angela herself took. There are also some QR-codes that guide you to recommendations on where to eat, drink, shop and sleep. (These can be very important if you want to visit and prepare your trip). Without a doubt, Angela could not include every single place, town, city or monument, heritage site… in this guide. It is quite complete, honestly. But there’s always more to discover. The main attractions and tourist places are included and that is the most important.

Because this is a pocket-sized guide, this means that sometimes some of the pictures are quite small. You need to get real close or use a magnifying glass at times (again, small book means small pictures) so take this in account (especially if you have bad eyes). And if it were me, but I guess again the size of the book has a lot to do with this, I would explain what is on the picture or put in the text -see picture- or work with some sort of index per province. There is no map of Belgium or of each city in this guide, so I would recommend while visiting Belgium to buy a map or ask a city map in the hotels you stay in).

All in all is this a great guide to get to know little ol’ Belgium (old… well, since 1830 we’re officially a country so not that old, I guess) and I would recommend it to my foreign friends if they decide to visit us. I might even send my copy to a friend of mine who has had a bad experience with Belgium and always says our country is one of his worst travel destinations. Maybe I can persuade him to visit again and use this guide to check out soms new things and reconsider his opinion. Who knows, right?

On the cover of the book, we see Dinant and its citadel. In case you were wondering.

Discover more about Angela and her travels:

https://www.angeladansby.com/about-me