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.
Phnom Penh's exotic-looking Central Market is the place to change money; the jewellery shops around the market square and the jewellery stands actually under the market dome also handle currency transactions. Thai baht, US dollars and Cambodian riel are all equally ac...
My cheapest night so far (US$4 at the Chhaya Hotel) and I sleep like a baby. Battambang is early to bed (everything shuts down by 10pm) and early to rise (passing cars are beeping at 6.30am). Soka, a cheerful and unfailingly polite moto (motorcycle taxi) rider, tak...
My alarm's set for 5.30am in order to get to Cambodia before dark. It's pissing down with rain (and this is the dry season and in a drought) as I ride the Skytrain, Bangok's elevated 'subway' system, to the bus terminal. An hour out of Bangkok I'm regretting my backpa...
What a comfortable train! Apart from the odd wake-up at the odd stop I sleep right through, waking just in time for a lousy breakfast. We pass through more villages and small towns, some with remarkably neat railway stations, before rolling into Bangkok slightly ahead...
I start the day with a morning stroll of Georgetown's remarkably unchanged streets. I've been coming here since 1974 and much of it has not altered at all. Penang Island has become a centre for computer equipment manufacturing, but that hasn't altered the shophouses o...
A morning stroll over to the Petronas Towers, for a while the highest building in the world. Who knows, it still may be. But you can only go up to the connecting bridge a third of the way up, and for that you have to get a ticket and come back hours later. So instead ...
'You'll really see the Singapore-Malaysia contrast if you take the train,' I was told. 'Everything in Singapore is constantly being rebuilt and improved but the old train station is totally unchanged, it's probably even more run down than when you last saw it.' 'Yo...
Something's wrong when Singapore goes 15 minutes without something new popping up. The MRT, Singapore's state-of-the-art underground system, now runs all the way out to Changi Airport. It whisks me in to the city to my room at the new (but not quite so new) riverside ...
I'm on my way to a travel conference in Macau. I could just fly there, but where's the adventure in that? I've decided to don my backpack and travel overland from Singapore to Macau, and then head on to Shanghai after the conference. This trip will be not too fast,...
In February 2005 we made a short circuit of the Gulf State of Oman, starting and finishing in Dubai in the neighbouring United Arab Emirates. We brought a writer from the New Yorker along for the ride. This is our last day, heading back to the UAE: . About 100 km ...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013