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.
I have really not gone places for over a year now – 16 March 2020 I was on the island of Socotra in Yemen. Then I flew via Aden in Yemen to Cairo, spent a night there and continued via Abu Dhabi in the UAE to Melbourne. Where I had to go into ‘self isolation’ f...
Melbourne-based photographer Tess Rice’s expansive photographic book perfectly captures that amazing Indian city and the city’s presiding deity, Kali, the Goddess of Death and Destruction who also represents energy, fertility and creativity. I’ve been back to Kolka...
Locked down – trapped even – in Australia during the pandemic I have been travelling in words at least. I’ve written one whole – little – book for the Spanish publisher GeoPlaneta about why we travel and what travel might be like after the pandemic. No I didn’t write ...
A review in The Economist alerted me to Gavin Francis’s wonderful Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession and then I remembered I’d met Gavin when we were both judges on the Warwick Prize for Writing from Warwick University back in 2015. His book drops in on a wide ass...
I’ve been involved in various pandemic projects including contributing to BWB Texts in New Zealand’s 100% Pure Future – New Zealand Tourism Renewed. The publisher’s summary: • Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on New Zealand tourism, but the industry was alre...
So when did you last fly in a Boeing 707 Simon Calder asked me last month, since 3 January 2021 was the 40th anniversary of Pan Am retiring their last 707. They placed the first order for that pioneering aircraft back in 1955, so almost 70 years ago. ▲ A Boeing 707...
We’re currently having another virus scare in Australia. On 23 December I looked at the Northern Beaches outbreak in Sydney, possibly arriving via US airline crew. That’s prompted a border closure between New South Wales (Sydney) and Victoria (Melbourne). One of th...
I’ve been to Zanzibar – the island just off the coast of Tanzania – twice. Once before I joined a group of friends to climb Mt Kilimanjaro (Africa’s highest mountain) and once when I spent two week on my bicycle riding from Iringa in Tanzania to Lilongwe in Malawi. Th...
▲ Robert Powell in Kathmandu in 1999 with a painting of a house front in Mustang. The Australian architect-artist died just before Christmas – on 16 December. The Nepali Times underlined his importance to the Himalayan region in a lengthy obituary written by Linda Ke...
Australia has sailed through the coronavirus pandemic remarkably well despite a short and sharp outbreak in Melbourne (where I live) and the state of Victoria. I looked at just how bad the Melbourne figures were back on 22 August 2020 and then I looked at what it was ...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013