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.
Thursday 17 November Day 13 – Cotonou to Elmina, Gold Coast, Ghana Ganvie, just outside Cotonou, is remarkably like Inle Lake in Burma, with its houses, fields, life all out on the water. The big difference is that Ganvie is very touristy, particularly when you’re i...
Monday 7 November Day 3 – Cape Town to Etosha National Park, Namibia Our aircraft rolled out of the Convair factory in the USA back in 1953 with twin piston engines. It’s clearly been well looked after over the years and along the way the piston engines have been ch...
Saturday 5 November Day 1 – Melbourne, Australia to Cape Town, South Africa ‘We’re going to try to get out of here before that thunderstorm arrives at the airport,’ the pilot announces. It was easy to tell which thunderstorm he was talking about, jagged spears of...
Many years ago someone said that the photos in Lonely Planet guides ‘looked like they’d been taken by the author with his mother’s Instamatic.’ Back then a lot of the photos may have been mine, but I certainly didn’t use my mom’s camera. Nobody makes jokes about ou...
I put together four playlists for The Rough Guide Book of Playlists and this is the Lonely Planet one. See Books for Other Publishers for more about the book. Lots of businesses seem to have a soundtrack, this is Lonely Planet’s, including the Joe Cocker number whi...
1. While your father is alive, make as many friends as you can; while your horse is alive, visit as many lands as you can. Mongolian proverb 2. You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline – it helps if you have a football team, or some nuclear...
In November I’m joining a trip organised by Zegrahm Expeditions using a charted aircraft to hop up the west coast of Africa from Cape Town to Casablanca. I’m not big on groups but this looks like an intriguing way to cover some territory where I’m a total beginner. It...
At last count I’ve written or contributed substantially to more than 30 Lonely Planet books. Of course with some of them I may have only been one of a team of writers while others may have been all mine once upon a time (Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Burma, Papua...
I've contributed to a number of books for other publishers as well as Once While Travelling, the recently published 'Lonely Planet Story' with Penguin/Viking Australia: Once While Travelling – the Lonely Planet Story Buy this book So why didn’t Lonely Planet publ...
I sleep in a lot of hotels, there were about 90 different ones in the last year – as well as some nights in tents, a few nights in trains and boats and rather too many nights on aircraft. I kicked off this hotel list with 14 hotels I found particularly interesting ove...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013