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.
The active Nyiragongo Volcano overlooking the town of Goma, close to the border of Congo DRC and Rwanda has been erupting. I climbed the volcano back in 2011 and visited the gorillas in the nearby Virunga National Park. ▲ The eruption reports indicated that the ...
▲ I took Queensland Rail’s Spirit of the Outback train from Brisbane to Longreach. It’s 600km north along the coast from Brisbane to Rockhampton then 700km due west inland and into the outback. That’s 1325km in total, which takes almost 26 hours. That means an average...
My travels north from Melbourne took me through Brisbane three times. ▲ The first time as we descended into Brisbane there were wonderfully clear views of Surfers Paradise and the Gold Coast off to the east. I’d fortuitously chosen the appropriate side of the plane...
My recent Australian travels started with the ascent of Mt Kosciuszko (Australia’s highest peak) and continued north to Canberra (the nation’s capital), Sydney and the Hawkesbury River. Before venturing in to the northern state of Queensland there was an unexpected vi...
The Hawkesbury River flows into the Pacific just north of Sydney, driving between Sydney and Newcastle the highway crosses the river close to its mouth. It’s a popular Sydney getaway for bushwalking, boating on the river and dining at restaurants like Peats Bite or th...
It’s Australia’s capital city, strategically sited between the two big cities – Sydney and Melbourne – so it doesn’t upset either of them. Like Washington DC and assorted other capitals it was planned that way, it’s not a city like Paris or London where its role as a ...
Since I’m currently obeying the rules which ban departures from Australia there’s been no international travel in my diary for the past 12 months. I have been travelling around Australia, however, and I covered a little walk up Mt Kosciuszko – Climbing Mt Kosciuszko t...
I’d only been to Thredbo, the popular NSW ski resort once before. When Maureen and I lived in Sydney back in 1973, so almost 50 years ago, we drove to Thredbo, via Melbourne, to go skiing. And I’d never climbed Mt Kosciuszko, the highest mountain in Australia, so it w...
The pandemic in the west is generally accepted to have started on 11 March 2020 – it’s when the USA lowered the boom on international visitors and a few days before I had to scurry home from Socotra in Yemen. So today we’re well over a year into this damned thing and ...
Geoff Crowther (15 March 1944-13 April 2021) died last week. Geoff played a key role in the early years of Lonely Planet, he wrote the first editions of Africa on a Shoestring (originally Africa on the Cheap), South America on a Shoestring and with Prakash A Raj and m...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013