By the time Tony co-founded Lonely Planet Publications in 1973, he already had the travel bug. And ever since, travel and discovery have been at the heart of his life and career.
Crazy, doomed, hopeless, wonderful – my first thoughts when I read about the very first Tour d’Afrique – 12,000km, four months, all the way from Cairo in Egypt to Cape Town in South Africa. It really is the Mt Everest of cycling. I didn’t realise that a few years late...
I don’t just read travel books – although three recent novels also travelled through their pages. I really liked Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011. Following the inter-connected lives of rock mogul Bennie Sala...
Recently Maureen and I visited the National Library of Australia in Canberra, a visit which included a spell in their map department looking at some very interesting maps. ▲ Looking at maps in the National Library’s map room We looked at an Indian Ocean naviga...
Robert Mugabe’s economic incompetence has done enormous damage to Zimbabwe, leading to huge unemployment, a massive exodus of Zimbabweans (millions of black Zimbabweans, tens of thousands of white ones), a dramatic decline in life expectancy and the conversion of ‘the...
◄ I didn’t see all the big five (elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, leopard), but leopard was the only one missing on my brief visit to Zimbabwe. In other countries in Africa the rules are that you must stay (safely) in your vehicle. In Zimbabwe if you want to get out an...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013