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.
I’ve recorded several podcasts, interviews, conversations recently.
At London Business School Maureen and I recorded Journeys, a conversation with Rajesh Chandy the Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Developing World at the Wheeler Institute. People seemed to enjoy it, someone suggested that we ‘looked like two teenagers our to start an exciting adventure,’ not business like at all.
With Tyrel Cameron Eskelson I talked on his Interlocutor podcast about my travel life, starting in Pakistan when I was a small child right up to travel in recent weeks and for the rest of 2025.
Transiting Buenos Aires recently I encountered this sign in the immigration area at the air- port. Canad- ians were up for a single entry fee of US$70 if they wanted to enter Argen- tina. For Aus- tralians it was US$100, but not single entry, pre- sumably once they’d ...
Terrific. Peter Hessler has written the best book I’ve read on contemporary everyday China. Depending on where you see Country Driving it might be subtitled Three Journeys Across a Changing China or A Journey through China from Farm to Factory. Peter, a long term Chin...
My trip to Margaret River for their Readers & Writers Festival kicked off at Albany with its whaling station. Then I made two stops to check Western Australia’s big trees, there are plenty of them in the south-west corner of the state. Check our Perth & Wester...
▲ sperm whale skeleton Why have I never got down to Western Australia’s Southwest? Over the years I’ve driven the Gunbarrel Highway, travelled the opposite direction along the Tanami Track from the Northern Territory, followed the Gibb River Road across the ...
Have I maligned poor Nimbin? It’s an Australian counter-cultural capital in the north of New South Wales and when I put together a ‘worst in travel’ list for Doug Lansky’s Titanic Awards I accused Nimbin of having turned out the worst pizza I’d ever tried (and failed)...
I’ve been a Geoff Dyer fan for some time (is there a better book about being young and footloose in Paris than Paris Trance?) and this one pushes all the Dyer buttons. Riffing on the big issues while indulging in sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, going off on yet another w...
Quite the funniest – and surprisingly funniest – travel book I’ve read this year. The review line on the cover – ‘Excellent Book’ Daily Telegraph – makes it sound utterly bland and boring, but the byline that it’s about ...
I read to Hellholes and back, Chuck Thompson’s account of the ‘art of extreme tourism,’ principally because he goes to Congo and I read most things that come up about that country. Chuck decides not to follow Conrad’s miserable haul up the Congo River, but instead end...
I’ve always liked destinations where there’s a certain make or model of car which somehow typifies the place. Old ‘Yank tanks’ (aka ‘lead sleds’) in Cuba, Land-Rovers on the Falkland Islands or original Minis (not the new ones, nice though they are) in England. &nb...
Need a page turner while you’re travelling around India? Then try one of Chetan Bhagat’s books. His best selling novels are a fine introduction to contemporary India and the life of young middle class Indians. People leading the charge into software, computers and cal...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013