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.
Why has it taken me until 2009 to finally visit Costa Rica? It’s been our best selling guidebook in the Americas for years and yet for some reason I’ve never been here. Never mind, I’m sitting watching a full moon over the sea at Montezuma and contemplating that I was...
It’s subtitled ‘A History of Fifty Years of Independence’ and what a depressing history it is. There are a handful of positive moments – like the switch from apartheid to majority rule in South Africa – but over and over again the story is the same. Independence arriv...
Spent a weekend in Rome shooting two commercials for the One World airline alliance – LP travel writers and TV presenters giving their suggestions for business travellers. In 48 hectic hours we seemed to find ourselves in all sorts of corners of Rome, but for me the h...
Cycling through Malawi on the Tour d’Afrique bicycle ride in March I kept on bumping in to a gentleman who took a serious dislike to Lonely Planet in the early 1980s – Dr Hastings Banda, Malawi’s ‘President for Life.’ Early editions of our Africa guide (and our pionee...
I love the signs you see when you’re travelling anywhere in the world and my bicycle ride through Africa last month turned up plenty of them. I rode the Iringa (Tanzania) to Lilongwe (Malawi) stage of the Tour d’Afrique cycle ride and here are a few of my favourites a...
Chitimba Beach to Lilongwe I’ve just ridden stage 5 of the Tour d’Afrique, a Cairo to Cape Town, four month, 12,000km bicycle ride the length of Africa. Two Lonely Planet teams are making the ride relay fashion. The first half of my ride took me 572 km from Iringa ...
Iringa to Chitimba Beach The Lonely Planet team before the Iringa start - me, Fiona Siseman, Rana Freedman and Martin Heng. Rana and Martin rode the last stage and decided to continue on this one as well. I’m half way through my Iringa (Tanzania) to Lilongwe (Ma...
I’m in Africa and about to start my stage of the Cairo to Cape Town Tour d’Afrique. I’ll be riding from Iringa in Tanzania to Lilongwe in Malawi. My Tour d’Afrique training came to a sudden stop when I headed off to Laos for the month of February, although I did a ...
Laos are on the 100 Waterfalls, the amazing Chom Ong Caves, the Sainyaburi Elephant Festival and Back to Luang Prabang. My final Laotian excursion was a three day walk into the Nam Ha NPA (National Protected Area) with the TV crew from Lonely Planet’s Roads Less ...
My other blogs from Laos are on the 100 Waterfalls, the Sainyaburi Elephant Festival and Back to Luang Prabang. It’s always exciting visiting somewhere that’s not yet on tourist itineraries, particularly somewhere that hasn’t even made it into a Lonely Planet guide...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013