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.
Some governments have two departments, one which spends money and energy and effort to attract tourists. And one which spends even more money and energy and effort to discourage them. India is a fine example of this tradition, the Indian Tourist Office tries to attr...
▲internet cafe in Hanoi, Vietnam Poste restantes, those old fashioned gathering places where travellers congregated to collect their mail, may have had their charm, but their modern replacement, the internet café, also have...
This slim volume theorises that there’s no longer just a small rich world (the ‘north’) and a big poor one (the ‘south’). The small rich world is still there, but now there’s also a big middle one which has escaped from ‘poor’ and is heading towards ‘rich.’ Down at th...
It’s me, age 4 or 5, when I was living in Karachi and clearly showing an early interest in aviation and travel. I’ve returned to Pakistan a number of times over the years and always found it interesting. My most recent visit was a March 2006 visit to the scene of the ...
It’s easy to think of the French architect Gustave Eiffel (born 1832, died 1923) as a one-hit wonder, we can all immediately name the Eiffel Tower as his great achievement, but a second or third Eiffel construction? In fact Eiffel architecture is found in many count...
Car One I’ve joined the environmentally sensitive cars group and bought a Toyota Prius. The last 300km, all of it ‘around town’, I’ve been averaging 5.0 litres per 100km. That’s 56 mpg (in Britain) or 47 mpg (in the US). Car Two And I’m driving my computer with...
Unleashing movie monsters on cities is a sure fire crowd pleaser (think New York City and King Kong), but no monster has destroyed as many cities to as much general acclaim as the great Japanese movie monster Godzilla. In fact having your city destroyed by Godzilla is...
‘It is a great guide book, but it should not be the basis of an occupation.’ That’s a quote from former American ambassador Barbara Bodine, who was given the job of helping to reconstruct Iraq, about the role our Middle East guidebook played in the US occupation. ...
To the west of Georgia is the Black Sea, head east and you come to Azerbaijan and then the Caspian Sea, head south and you arrive in Turkey to the south-east or Armenia to the south-west. Or head north and you’ve got Russia. We won’t talk about that, the Georgians sti...
Free bikes have been a city dream from way back. ‘White bicycles’ were tried in England in the hippy ‘60s, but they were all soon stolen. A few years ago I tried a more modern incarnation in Copenhagen (make them ugly, instantly recognisable and equip them with strong...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013