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.
Trekking is becoming increasingly popular in Burma. The far north of the country borders the Himalayan region of Tibet, the country’s highest mountain tops anything in the European alps, so presumably one day there could even be Himalayan trekking in Burma. Meanwhile ...
At Burma's Inle Lake tourists flock to the ‘Jumping Cat Monastery.’ As a break from meditating the monks trained their cats to jump through hoops, which turned Nga Hpe Kyaung into the most popular monastery on the lake. The monks seem quite relaxed about it although i...
There are good airports, bad airports and plain silly airports. Mandalay International Airport in Burma certainly qualifies in the third category. Mandalay used to have a handy little airport close to the town. Today it’s a 45km drive south to reach Mandalay Internati...
Burma is so tightly packed with Buddhist sites – brand new ones as well as the ancient ones – and visitor numbers are still so comparatively low that it’s easy to stumble upon something new every time you visit. This trip Maureen and I ventured south-west of Mandalay ...
We all know about the Great Firewall of China, how about the lesser known Firewall of Burma? We’ve taken a lot of criticism at Lonely Planet for publishing a guidebook to the country, officially known as Myanmar today. We published the first edition of our Burma guide...
I was in Haiti in 2007, less than two years before the disastrous earthquake hit the Caribbean Island. Back in 1998 I was on another island that’s recently suffered earthquake damage, Chile’s Robinson Crusoe Island. Eight people on the island are known to have lost th...
I was in Bali from 15 to 20 February, Maureen was having an important birthday and we’d convened a family get together in Ubud to celebrate. We were paying for it so during our visit there were assorted ATM withdrawals, nine charges to my Visa credit card and two to...
Public transport smartcard systems are all the go. All over the world cities are rolling out computerised transport tickets which allow commuters to use one card to access multiple forms of public transport. For the transport operator it means efficiencies, for the tr...
Travelling around Libya it struck me that Muammar al-Gaddafi was the Michael Jackson of dictators, always keen on appearing in fancy dress. He has just reinforced his whacky reputation by declaring a jihad on Switzerland and suggesting that Muslim nations should ban ...
Flights that get diverted and end up somewhere unintended are always a pain in the neck. I’ve had a few over the years including one last year – it was my very first flight on a double-decker Airbus A380 and Qantas managed to take me from Los Angeles to Sydney instead...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013