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 Georgian town of Gori, not far west of the capital Tbilisi, has been heavily in the news these last few days after the Russian attacks on the breakaway province of South Ossetia also targeted Gori. I spent a day in Gori last September. The town’s grey Soviet-era a...
Favourite Souvenirs The Trash or Treasure – Souvenirs of Travel exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Sydney, Australia runs until 17 May 2009. I spoke at the museum in late July about my own souvenir collection. Of course wherever you go the perfect tacky so...
Last month Maureen and I travelled up to Liverpool (European Capital of Culture for 2008) for a little culture. We stayed at the Hard Day’s Night Hotel, visited the Beatles Story Museum, took the National Trust tour to John Lennon’s and Paul McCartney’s childhood ho...
A couple of weeks ago in London I saw the play (a solo performance by Vanessa Redgrave) of Joan Didion’s magical book The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she notes ‘the most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes.’ Less than two weeks ...
The British National Trust owns the homes just outside Liverpool where John Lennon and Paul McCartney lived when the Beatles first took off. Mendips was John Lennon’s home from 1945 (when he was 5 years old) right up to 1963 (when Please Please Me topped the British...
I love the imaginative variations hotels dream up for ‘do not disturb’ and ‘clean my room’ door hangers. Here are the ones from the new Hard Day’s Night Hotel in Liverpool. It’s right beside Mathew St, site of the Cavern Club where the Beatles performed 292 tim...
Nice definition? I’ve always enjoyed travelling to unusual places, like North Korea which I wrote about in my book Bad Lands. Recently I’ve been to Haiti and Colombia and you can read an essay I wrote on those sort of destinations in GOOD Magazine and check their sele...
The Science Museum in London has an exhibit running until 25 October called Dan Dare & the Birth of High-Tech Britain. In the 1950s Dan Dare was a space travel comic strip hero who had a lot of British schoolboys of the era enthralled – I certainly was and so, acc...
I’ve done a few walking trips in Italy – through the mountains in the Dolomites, down the stunning stretch of coast at Cinque Terre, around the southern side of Mt Blanc (Monte Bianco in Italian) on the circuit of that famous mountain – and in May 2008 through souther...
The engineers of Victorian-era Britain were inclined to churn out inventions in all sorts of fields. Some of them are well known, in particular the heroically named Isambard Kingdom Brunel who turned his hand to everything from massive ocean liners to railway tunnel...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013