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.
▲ On the Deleisha sand dune on the Indian Ocean island of Socotra, part of the country of Yemen. It feels like half a lifetime ago, but in fact that was 11 March 2020, only 5 months ago. It was my most recent overseas trip and it looks like it may be the last for a...
Earlier today – Sunday 2 August – Daniel Andrews, the State Premier of the Australian State of Victoria (that covers where I live in Melbourne), announced that Victoria was a ‘State of Disaster’ and as a result our Covid-19 lockdown has been amplified. Apart from wear...
Trump, the world’s favourite president, announces that Australia has ‘tremendous problems,’ here’s the story in the Sydney Morning Herald. "This resurgence in cases is occurring throughout large portions of our planet — in Japan, China, Australia, Belgium, Spain, F...
In the 1920s J R Ackerley – who later enjoyed two decades as the literary editor of the BBC magazine The Listener – took a Hindoo Holiday in Chhokrapur in central India as personal secretary to the Maharajah. The publisher’s synopsis notes that he ‘recorded the Mahara...
The New York Times had a story on Arizona’s Covid-19 story, which is effectively ‘a large-scale version of a clinical trial.’ Like assorted other states Arizona opened up too early, the cases, the hospitalisations and the deaths have shot through the roof, but now the...
Fairly early on in the pandemic it became clear that something weird was going on in the Arab Gulf State. And in Singapore. ▲ Singapore old and new, the Merlion and Marina Bay Sands with its ‘swimming pool across three towers.’ These countries have large ‘guestw...
Like many people these days I spend far too much time analyzing the Covid-19 figures and reading articles on the pandemic. Despite all the learned analysis I keep thinking ‘why haven’t I read anything about this’ so for a week I’m going to note my thoughts about some ...
There are a dozen countries where Covid-19 has yet to arrive, places where there have been zero Covid-19 cases and, therefore, zero Covid-19 deaths? Really? ◄ Given how much bad press the island group gets I was surprised how much I enjoyed my visit to Kiribati. It...
Like many people these days I spend far too much time analyzing the Covid-19 figures and reading articles on the pandemic. Despite all the learned analysis I keep thinking ‘why haven’t I read anything about this’ so for a week I’m going to note my thoughts about some ...
I spend lots of time – like lots of other people – looking at the coronavirus numbers, graphs, projections and analyses. Of course we pay most attention to our own backyard – what’s happening in Europe, in North America or, for me, in Australia and then looking jealou...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013