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.
1956 Thunderbird and the Ocean Drive scene OK, I’ve got 18 hours between flying in to Miami (from LA) and flying out (that’ll be the next travel blog). Grab some sleep at an airport hotel or head in to a hotel on Ocean Drive, South Beach, Miami’s art deco central...
Bligh’s Third Mutiny I’ve had a long interest in William Bligh, the good ship HMS Bounty and the most famous mutiny in naval history. It’s partly because of the many places I’ve been to which have a connection with Bligh, the Bounty, chief mutineer Fletcher Christian...
Subtitled ‘Travels in the Deep Tropics,’ Frater wanders from his New Hebrides birthplace (today it’s Vanuatu) north to the Tropic of Cancer and south to the Tropic of Capricorn, ie his peregrinations are entirely within the tropics. Although there ar...
Chiang Kai-shek Memorial statue in Taipei, Taiwan What do you do with an unwanted statue? Or a whole bunch of them? Erecting statues of your wonderful self is a time honoured pursuit of unloved dictators and merciless despots. You can judge how horribly unpopu...
After a week at the TIBE (Taipei International Book Exhibition) I’m doing a quick circuit of the island of Taiwan, down the west coast (heavily populated, flatland down towards the sea) and then back up the east coast (the mountainous side and Taiwan’s big attraction ...
I start the morning in Tainan with photographing some rush hour scooter jams, Taiwan sure does have an awful lot of motor scooters. Then it’s off to the east coast, a long drive over a torturously winding road which climbs up to 2722 metres (8928 feet) before des...
It’s the Year of the Rat and ‘the courteous rat brings good fortune.’ This rat is 18 metres (60 feet high) and has 40,000 lights. I like Tainan. I spend most of the day walking around the city’s assorted temples and tourist attractions. They include Lady Linshu...
I can’t ride the narrow gauge Forest Train up to Alishan this morning so instead I take an early morning bus and come back down on the train in the afternoon. Forest Train ticket &nb...
Longshan Temple in Lugang Day 1 was a train ride south to Changhua and then a bus to Lugang, a smaller town noted for the ‘best preserved Qing-dynasty temple in Taiwan.’ Unfortunately the Longshan Temple still has a lot of restoration to be completed, meanwhile i...
Most of the travelling is around Martha’s Vineyard, the extremely affluent ‘summer escape’ island just south of Cape Cod. But the background to the story ranges much further afield in this very contemporary political thriller. Yes it’s back to ...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013