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.
Some of my best aerial views in 2026
▲ Departing Greenland from Qaqortoq and flying to Reykjavik in Iceland here’s a final views of Greenland as my Icelandair Dash 8 flight approached the east coast of the island. Check my Greenland blogs Part 1 Nuuk & Ilulissat and Part 2 Paamiut & Qaqortoq – for more views.
▲ I always like looking out the window to a shadow of my aircraft and, if you’re an airline nerd like me, being able to identify the type of aircraft by its shadow. Here’s my Air Greenland Dash 8 approaching Paamiut Airport.
▲ And here’s my Singapore Airlines Airbus A350-941 passing a field of solar panels on final approach to Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport.
▲ Another final approach, this time I’m in an easyJet Airbus A319 coming into Athens Airport over Lemos. Once we’d landed we spent a day in the Athens port of Piraeus and then departed by ferry to visit Milos, Kimolos and Serifos islands.
▲ For airline nerds you couldn’t ask for a better aerial view than approaching Papa Westray Airport in the Orkney islands – the Westray-Papa Westray flight is the world’s shortest scheduled flight. They point out from the Westray Airport that you can see the Papa Westray runway across the narrow strait between the two islands. I set my stopwatch as the Loganair Britten-Norman Islander started its takeoff run. Two minutes later, perhaps it was less, we were back on the ground. Check my Orkney Islands Part 2 blog for more on the two Westray Islands.
▲ Or for a fine departure view, looking down at the reef edge as I left Cocos Keeling for Christmas Island on a QantasLink Airbus A320 – from left to right the multiple islets of South Island, Home Island, Direction Island and Horsburgh Island
▲ We’re flying from London to Seville on a Vueling Airbus A320 and look, there’s Guernsey in the English Channel down below. Seville was the starting point for the one week Spanish Al Andalus Train trip to Madrid.
▲ I’m unhappy if I don’t have a window, but sometimes the seat screen is a good substitute, my Singapore Airlines A350 is flying over Afghanistan, we’ve passed Herat, Kabul to the north, Kandahar to the south. Afghanistan is, once again, safe aviation territory. We definitely did not encroach on the skies of Iran, behind us, Dumb Donald Trump has ensured that is not a good idea.
▲ Looking out over China from my Cathay Pacific Airbus A350 on a Hong Kong-London flight. Further along we’ll be avoiding the skies over Iran, Russia and Ukraine, what a disaster world politics can be?
◄ And sometimes your flight is interesting even before you board it – we’d arrived in the Scilly Islands on the ferry (two hours 45 minutes) but returned on a Twin Otter from Skybus Airlines (15 minutes). That is to say we returned once our flight had arrived. We waited through repeated delays while they sorted out some sort of technical problem at Land’s End Airport on the mainland. I was keeping watch on the FlightRadar24 tracking app and eventually our aircraft took off from Land’s End and flew this complicated series of circuits before they eventually decided it was OK and flew it out to collect us.
Some of my best aerial views in 2026▲ Departing Greenland from Qaqortoq and flying to Reykjavik in Iceland here’s a final views of Greenland as my Icelandair Dash 8 flight approached the east coast of the island. Check my Greenland blogs Part 1 Nuuk & Ilulissat an...
Maureen and I went to a preview of the new Everest film Tenzing, directed by Jennifer Peedom and written by Luke Davies. It’s great, even for non-mountain climbing enthusiasts, and also shows Nepal and its mountains in a magical fashion. Perhaps best of all it makes T...
Jump on a high-speed Spanish train in Seville – capital of Andalusia, stunning architecture, sunny weather, flamenco dancing – and you can be in the capital, Madrid, in less than three hours. Well straight line the two cities are less than 400km apart, even by road it...
◄ With a group of friends we rented Castello Punta Ala in Tuscany, perched on a hilltop overlooking the marina of Punta Ala and looking west to the island of Elba (briefly Napoleon’s prison island) and south-west to Montecristo Island. Corsica is further west. The ca...
Writing a blurb line for Peter Fiennes’s book En Route (a literary trail around France) led me to his earlier book Footnotes (ditto for the British Isles) which introduced me to the remarkable Celia Fiennes. In the late 1600s, but particularly in 1698, this intrepid w...
I was sent a copy of Peter Fiennes wonderful literary exploration of France and asked to provide a quote: ‘The best books are always starting points, they inspire you to head out and read other books. En Route certainly did that for me, gave me a reading list of au...
I’d learnt that the Orkney Islands is the correct term for those north Scotland Islands and I soon learnt that it’s the Isles of Scilly – not the Scilly Islands or the Scillies. After a brief stop in Penzance our group – Maureen and me and seven friends – took the Sci...
In Nigeria – Michael Palin visited Nigeria with a film crew to make a three-part TV series released in early 2024, so just before I was in Nigeria. And now – two years later? – there’s a rather brief, rather badly designed (in my view) and rather disappointing book on...
I’ve certainly been hitting the islands this year – Christmas Island and Cocos Keeling, out in the Indian Ocean off Australia and Indonesia. Then a brief stop and a walk on Sharp Island in Hong Kong, on a stopover between Australia and the UK. A visit to the wonderful...
In Part 1 of my Greenland travels I arrived in the capital Nuuk, it’s only a two hour flight from Iceland, and continued north across the Arctic Circle to Ilulissat, the iceberg tourist centre of Greenland. Then I returned to Nuuk and continued south to Qaqortoq, the ...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013