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.
My recent Africa travels to Uganda, Somaliland and Djibouti was really straightforward tourism, three interesting countries I had never been to before. But I also squeezed in several days of ‘project,’ visiting projects the Planet Wheeler Foundation had supported, or ...
Travel almost always brings up some sort of money stories and my recent journey through Uganda, Somaliland and Djibouti certainly did. Somaliland Money Troubles The problem with money and Somaliland is it gets confused with Somalia and for all the standard banking...
Somaliland to Djibouti So how do you get from Somaliland to Djibouti? Check Travel Scanner or Google Flights and you will be told the only way is via Ethiopia with Ethiopian Airlines. In fact you can fly direct in about 40 minutes with Air Djibouti – the Red Sea Airl...
If chaotic Somalia is Italian Somalia and reasonably together Somaliland is British Somalia then Djibouti is French Somalia. It was known as French Somaliland, but between 1967 and 1977, when it became independent and joined the UN, it became the French Territory of t...
My Somaliland travels started in the capital Hargeisa and I returned there between excursions which started with Las Geel, easily the country’s major tourist attraction. If Somaliland had more than a handful of tourists that is. ◄ The Las Geel turn-off is about 50k...
Don’t confuse Somaliland with Somalia. Once upon a time the horn of Africa, that sharp elbow pointing east below the Arabian Peninsula, was all Somalia with France, Britain and Italy maintaining colonies. The French bit to the north was French Somaliland and now is th...
Gorillas may be the big Uganda wildlife, the creatures everybody wants to meet, but there was certainly lots more to be seen. Plus I ticked off the African Big 5 – lions, leopards, rhinos, elephants and African buffaloes – during my visit. ▲ chimpanzee Riupwe not s...
Funny how you can go in half a dozen short steps from the Booker Prize to Zimbabwe to Cecil Rhodes to Joshua Nkomo to Robert Mugabe to North Korea to Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan. Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo’s new novel Glory has been longlisted for the 2022 Book...
Uganda may not have the big name attraction – ie really well known wildlife parks – that you find in other African countries, South Africa, Botswana, Kenya or Tanzania for example. But it does have gorillas. The other big name gorilla country is Rwanda, but when it co...
2022 has already been my year of Africa, I was amazed by Chad in February and in July I visited Uganda, Somaliland and Djibouti. Let’s start with Uganda, I’ve been to Kenya and Tanzania – the other two countries which formed the British colonial era East African tr...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013