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.
The village of Nong Khiaw on the Nam Ou River Tourism in Laos is still so new that exciting new destinations and activities are still to be found. Our Laos guidebook is going to featuring new additions and suggestions for many future editions. I’m in Laos workin...
I’m travelling around Laos working on a program for the new LPTV series ‘Lonely Planet’s Roads Less Travelled’. After kicking off in Luang Prabang I took a bus south to Sainyaburi to catch the annual Elephant Festival. ‘Well he was hopeless, wasn’t he?’ she complai...
Thirty Five years ago Maureen and I made a brief trip through Laos working on the very first edition of Southeast Asia on a Shoestring. Soon after the country disappeared from view as the American supported Royalists crumbled and the Pathet Lao took over. Laos disappe...
The Planet Wheeler website is up and running. Maureen and I sold a majority interest in Lonely Planet to BBC-Worldwide in late 2007, we’re still travelling a lot, we’re still working with Lonely Planet (I’ll be working on some new LP-TV documentaries in 2009), but we ...
I’m about to head off to Laos to work on a new Lonely Planet TV program in our forthcoming ‘Lonely Planet’s Roads Less Travelled’ series. So, naturally, I’m reading up on Laos books and, surprisingly, there isn’t a great deal. If you can find a copy of Murray Laurence...
Yes it’s a shoe statue in Tikrit (Saddam Hussein’s hometown) to honour shoe tossing Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zeidi. And yes, that is a Bush growing out of the shoe, click here for the full BBC story on the statue which was unveiled on Thursday 29 January. &...
Winding down a road to the north coast of Kangaroo Island a few weeks ago I came across this house name, the title of a favourite book. Arthur Ransome’s Swallows & Amazons was the last book my parents ever read to me and by the end I was becoming thoroughly fed ...
I’ve got three bicycles and only one of them is coming with me to Africa for my leg of the Tour d’Afrique in March. That’s my Wheeler 5900 ZX mountain bike. I bought it in 1997, it was made in Taiwan, 24 speed and I’m running it on road tyres, although I may ta...
Christophe Rochus, en route to losing to Rafael Nadal January in Melbourne, the one month of the year when the city’s famously changeable weather settles down for two weeks of absolute uniformity. It’s always hot-hot-hot for tennis at the Australian Open. The ten...
J Maarten Troost’s recently published book on China, Lost on Planet China, seems to follow the Paul Theroux school of travel writing, the grumpier I am the better the experience. By the end I was a little fed up with his constant complaints about pollution, greedy ta...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013