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.
On Friday 2 February Maureen and I will be departing England in a beat up old Mitsubishi to drive the Plymouth-Dakar. You read that right, ‘Plymouth’ not Paris. So it doesn’t start in Paris, and to be honest it doesn’t end in Dakar in Senegal either, it continues on...
The Hippie Trail When Maureen and I stopped in Marrakech on our little England to Africa drive in February 2007 I spent some time with German film-maker Maren Niemeyer. There will be a documentary on German and French television later this year on the ‘hippie trail’ ...
I ended 2006 and started 2007 on Australia’s iconic bushwalk, a 60 to 80km (depending where you finish up) stroll through central Tasmania with fantastic scenery and a smorgasbord selection of lakes, rivers, forests, plains, waterfalls and mountains peaks. There are s...
I’ve got a new book coming out in April 2007 to be titled Bad Lands and I’ll be talking more about it in forthcoming updates to this blog. My trips to Afghanistan, Albania and Iraq – all featured in the ‘Travel Blogs’ part of my site – contributed to that book. When i...
Grey, gloomy, pouring rain. It was good English walking weather when Maureen and I along with three other friends set out from St Bees to cross England. I try to make at least one long walk every year and this year’s stroll was the Wainwright Way, crossing England fro...
I’m certainly not going to say that visiting Afghanistan is safe and the south of the country (ie Kandahar) is definitely unsafe, although nothing like Iraq. In my two weeks in the country (late May 2006) I travelled very widely, had a great time and had no safety pro...
I’ve been back on the hippy trail, revisiting those places Maureen and I travelled through on the very first Lonely Planet trip. Except no way did I plan to go to Kandahar in the south of Afghanistan, I stuck strictly to the safer regions. But this time I did get to B...
My visit to Afghanistan has been such smooth sailing it’s almost inevitable that things should go astray right at the end. On my final full day I’d planned to visit two museums, drop in at the British Embassy and go up to one of the hills overlooking the town for the ...
My third and final excursion from Kabul is up to Mazar-i-Sharif, the northern centre close to the border with the northern ‘stans’ which were once part of the USSR. Back in 1972 Maureen and I drove through Afghanistan via Herat, Kandahar and Kabul so we never went to ...
Day 6 was used up getting back to Kabul, flying in Afghanistan is not exactly straightforward, there’s a lot of uncertainty and messing around before you get in the air. Once you’re flying the views are fantastic and for the first 20 minutes we followed the road to Ja...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013