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.
Before I visited Haiti earlier this year I did some reading about the country. The first discovery was that there’s not much on the shelves, we cover Haiti in our Caribbean Islands book and you can also download the Haiti chapter as a Pick & Mix PDF. In 1999...
We are meeting friends in Tuscany to spend a week walking, so how to get there from London? EasyJet would be cheap but dull, the Orient Express sounded much more interesting. The original Orient Express made its first run from Paris to Constantinople (the city ...
Maureen and I have recently acquired a house in London which we’re using as a base for the European side (as opposed to the Australian side) of the world. Maureen farewells my London ambulance On Saturday afternoon I managed to trip over a chair, fall full lengt...
Bogota I started and ended my Colombian travels in Bogota, the country’s capital, and on my last morning climbed up to the top of Cerro de Monserrate, the hilltop viewpoint overlooking the sprawling city. Bogota’s a lofty place, at 2600 metres (8500 feet) it’s at t...
Safeway Not sure if the supermarket company would approve, but what a great name for a condom brand! It was thoughtfully provided in the bedside table of the Confucius Hotel in Tainan, Taiwan. Is there a Confucian saying about it being wise to take precautions? &n...
Close to the equator the climate doesn’t change much with the seasons in Colombia, but it sure does with the altitude. I’ve always thought of Kathmandu, at 1300 metres, 4300 feet, as a useful rule of thumb for city heights. So between the hot and steamy Caribbean coas...
I’m travelling around Colombia, a country which travellers are starting to discover, now that the drug guys are keeping their heads down and the rebels have retreated into the jungle. In the rest of the country the main danger, the Colombian tourist board suggests, is...
Cap Haïtien on the north coast of Haiti is the second largest city in the country and although it’s surrounded by the usual Haitian chaos the city centre is remarkably tidy and orderly. It’s got an almost Mexican or Central American feel, particularly in the spacious ...
I've been travelling Haiti and Jacmel was my second stop. The town is regularly cited as the most popular in Haiti and has lots of fine old houses with a distinct New Orleans flavour, even if many of them are crumbling. Right by the town square the Hotel Manoir Alexan...
Art for sale on the street in Pétionville Remember Haiti? The half-a-Caribbean island where the first ever slave revolt ended with the defeat of the French colonialists? Despite the black leader of the slaves, the wonderfully named Toussaint Louverture, being dou...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013