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.
There’s a fascination about abandoned places and I’ve certainly visited a few of them over the years. Henk Van Rensbergen has made a life out of seeking out some of the world’s stranger – and more photogenic – abandoned places. When he’s not flying 787s for the Dutch ...
Those bloody Iranians. They’ve currently got three Australians imprisoned – two of them (like me) British-Australian dual nationals. Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert – a Middle East politics specialist at Melbourne University – was arrested in 2018 and has been held in Tehran’s...
I’ve just posted on my recent travels across Armenia – part 1 and part 2. My trip, however, started and finished in Yerevan, the country’s busy and bright capital city. ◄ Any understanding of modern Armenia has to start with a visit to the Armenian Genocide Memoria...
From Noravank I drove a long way east to Goris where I spent the night and then backtracked and made the winding ascent to Tatev. You can also get up there by the Wings of Tatev Cablecar which gets its place in the records books as ‘the world’s longest non-stop revers...
In the west we tend to forget that after its birth in Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jerusalem and those other Holy Land sites in what is today Israel and Palestine, Christianity moved east long before it moved west into Europe. The wonderful churches and monasteries of Armenia...
I certainly know a lot more about pigeons after reading Jon Day’s Homing – on pigeons, dwellings & why we return. First of all that the feral versions are not just ‘rats with wings’ and the homing version which Jon writes about are quite amazing. They’re synanthro...
▲ The Herschel House in Bath Lonely Planet have a new book coming up on trail blazing women and particular places associated with their stories. Like Caroline Herschel I suggested and took the train from London to Bath to visit the Herschel Museum of Astronomy at 1...
◄ Back in 1955, so 64 years ago, two Land-Rovers from Oxford and Cambridge Universities set out from The Grenadier pub in London’s Belgravia district, not too far from Harrods and Harvey Nicks, to drive to Singapore. That turned into a TV programme and a classic trave...
▲ The 'capital' city of Norway's far northern island group of Svalbard takes its colourful name from John Munro Longyear, the American pioneer of Svalbard coal mining in 1906. ▲ Visitors come to Svalbard in search of polar bears and the first one confronts you befo...
▲ The wonderful old trams in Milan, this one rolling in to the Piazza della Scala. ▲ And some much more modern Italian transport, the high speed Frecciarossa (Red Arrow) about to zip off from Milan to Bologna. ▲ You can't get away from him, an Ed Sheeran concer...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013