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.
Having pedalled my bicycle around the London Monopoly board I set out on another Sunday ride with The Fridays cycling group to check out the cats of London. A ‘Purrfect’ ride as they described it. Home to home (including the 10km to Russell Square at the start and bac...
The Australian state of Victoria has suffered an awful lot of lockdowns since the coronavirus pandemic kicked off. I’ve managed to miss the most recent batch, I escaped the state just before Lockdown 5 kicked off and Lockdown 6 is ongoing. One of the things you sho...
So why did I never hear about this book before? Peter Pinney set out to travel after WW II, he’d spent the last spell of the war in Bougainville, that island off to the south-east corner of Papua New Guinea heading towards the Solomon Islands, where it really belongs....
On 17 August I posted about what was currently happening in the skies over Afghanistan. Nothing civil I said, airlines – which often used to fly over Afghanistan between Europe and further east in Asia – were all diverting. The activity was purely military. It’s the s...
Officially Qantas is flying pretty much nowhere. Domestic flights had got back almost to normal until current outbreaks and lockdowns emptied the departure and arrival boards. The Sydney-Melbourne route was one of the busiest in the world, it certainly isn’t at the mo...
The Fridays are a UK bicycle riding ‘club’ who organize bike rides, short and long, often riding at night. Back in 2010 I joined their signature Friday night ride from London to Brighton – midnight at Sloane Square in Chelsea, breakfast at dawn 100km (63 miles) away a...
It’s been a year for climbing peaks. Back in April I finally got around to climbing Mt Kosciuszko, Australia’s highest peak. And now I’ve climbed Mt Marble Arch. Someone had the clever idea that building an artificial 25metre high ‘peak’ beside Marble Arch – at the ju...
I can’t remember what led me to The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay – it might have been a mention in The New York Review of Books. Indeed they published a reprint of the book in 2003 and although, like all the other editions, it seems to be out of print you can ...
Despite the pandemic’s restrictions on my travels – I’ve made a few trips around Australia, but I haven’t been overseas for over a year – I have been busy travelling on paper (and digitally) at least. Most recently that’s been by writing a foreword for Why Travel? – U...
Struggletown, Janet McCalman’s award winning classic study of ‘Public & Private Life in Richmond 1900–1965’ has recently come out in a new edition from Melbourne University Press: • 'The old Struggletowners, if they could see it now, would not believe their...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013