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.
From the dirt poor little village of Al Khateem we'd descended into Wadi Ghul and followed a trail inside the canyon wall. The wadi has been described as Oman's 'Grand Canyon' and the 1000-metre drop, sometimes little more than an arm-span from the edge of our trail, ...
'A day that begins with goat's testicles in your hand can't be bad,' surmised Tad. We'd started the day with a visit to the Nizwa souq where, in the goat souq, a steady procession of goats circle between an inner and outer ring of potential purchasers. When a buyer...
The sultan's new mega-dhow was under construction at the Sur dhow yards. He already seemed to have plenty of ships... the harbour at Muscat featured vessels ranging from the royal dhow to what looked like the royal cargo/passenger vessel. So perhaps this new bigger an...
See it soon... the old rough-and-ready coast road to Sur, almost at the south-eastern end of the Arabian Peninsula, is disappearing. Already long stretches have been replaced by smooth tarmac and there's lots of construction underway. Meanwhile the villages and towns ...
Muscat is a spectacularly sprawling town. To the west the Hajar Mountains drop down to the Batinah Plains before they reach the sea. From Muscat and further east the mountains tumble straight into the sea. As a result Muscat is a series of enclaves dotted amongst the ...
The coast road is dual-lane highway, almost continually built up and with moderately heavy traffic, some of it moving way faster than the 120 kmph speed limit. Pull off the highway into a town and suddenly the calendar winds back to markets and a seemingly inexhaustib...
Before dinner on Saturday night we'd gone down to the beach in the centre of town where an energetic football game was being fought out on the narrow strip of sand between sea and road. Dinner had been notable for the almost 100% female occupancy of the hotel restaura...
'No this is not Omani immigration,' the young man at the roadside office announced, 'that's a few km further down the road. But has your passport been stamped for leaving the UAE?' 'No,' I replied, 'we haven't seen any place for that.' 'That's at the Hatta Fort ...
I'm on the road in the United Arab Emirates and Oman on the south-east corner of the Arabian Peninsula. Maureen's riding shotgun and American writer Tad Friend, who is putting together a story about Lonely Planet for an April issue of New Yorker magazine, is coming al...
Carney Brothers, an auto-repair shop just round the corner from our motel, immediately inspires confidence. Monday to Friday they fix cars and Saturday-Sunday they prepare dragsters so they obviously know what they’re about. Our misfiring is quickly diagnosed as bu...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013